Fraulein Frankenstein turns heads! Terminator's sister is a man-eating alien!
Written: Jul 30 '08
Product Rating:
Pros: Stone-faced bimbo of Germanic type seems dumb, but gets her man, lots of laughs.
Cons: Slow-moving, rare glimpses of her real alien lizard-like self, men portrayed as nitwits
The Bottom Line: Low-level satire for the cynical on scientists' egotism, male predeliction for blonde bimbos, impossibility to stop aliens once in from corrupting native DNA
This movie is good for many laughs, whether intentional or not. I began to suspect it was written by a woman, to make fun of male scientists' stupidity. The line is ofttimes repeated in the film, "We made her a female so she's be easier to handle". Surely the whole audience is roaring!
This half-alien, half-human female, played by Natasha Hendridge, is an older scientist's (Ben Kingsley) dream of creating aliens on earth. In 1970's, supposedly, alien DNA was injected into a human zygote and kept as an experiment in a big glass cage. There the Aryan-type blonde beast/child, later tennis-star-with-boobies woman, grows with reptilian rapidity. Stunned by their work, the scientists realize that now they must destroy their Fraulein Frankenstein, simply gassing her is the goal. Whoops! Just like a Farside Cartoon, they cannot manage this simple idea without a mishap: she escapes, to be spotted later hundreds of miles away (by train) in LA!
Yes, a crack team is brought in, multi-gender and multi-racial, to find this potentially horrible menace and kill her. Yes, hired assassins are ready and able, bound to secrecy by the chagrined Ben Kingsley.
The part that will have women chuckling is that despite this alien's complete lack of socialization, after life in a glass cage, she can learn quickly from watching TV soaps in a motel room. She finds the "sexiest" type clothes she can get, mimics the exact words she hears from other women picking up men at hot dance club, and finally, after kissing (and killing) many bad frogs, she finds a willing prince. Yes, she kills him too, but at least she reproduces, her sweet reptilian underwater dream!
The movie overtly implicates the men of our species as dopes, suckers for anything blonde and busty. Hence our scientists are also insulted, as unable to create any female creature unless she is the epitome of earthly Western beauty; they never mention choosing a zygote of parents with intelligence, agility or strength.
SOmetimes I thought she was a take-off on the Terminator idea - a GErman-looking robot-type who kills without emotion. Perhaps this is a take-off on WWII films which have blonde hunks as stone-faced, heartless killers? There is something a little strange, in that mostly, killers in our films are shown as ugly and therefore "inherently evil".
Yes, that would be the usual visual clue, your killer is no handsome and charming dude. This movie turns it upside down, saying, "No, we want this half-human alien killer to be a woman, who kills men in order to reproduce, so we have to make her a blondie-type to get the men to sleep with her?"
Even her final hapless victim, with whom she succeeds to produce another blonde baby/alien (no resemblance to Greek-looking "father"), is considered a nitwit; is he not one of the hitmen hired to kill her? He cannot even recognize her when she dyes her hair? SHe gets it fast from the human TV commercials: blonde hair is a beacon, disguise yourself with dark hair and no one can tell it's the same bimbo! Ah well, perhaps the new generation needed some "dumb genes" from the Y side injected, too.
I enjoyed this late-night AMC creature feature for its obvious inanity, and you may well do so, too; but if you don't have a sense of irony as the writers did, then you'll think it's one of the stupidest films ever known. I thought the only intelligent bit, inserted as an ending, was the sewer rat's chewing on the burnt alien body's long, rope-like tongue. Sure enough, the next hybrid came in a few minutes later: half rat, half alien, ready to consume any other rat in the sewer. Yes, mankind, inject alien DNA into your world, and that species will take over.
Some might consider it an allegory on present immigration.
For myself, now recovering from an Achilles Tendon rupture, it was good laugh-brain candy, mainly poking fun at men.
Late nights, can't sleep? Can't walk well in a cast, can't drive, can't go out? Tired of reading Great Literature?
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