You know what it’s like. What should I watch? What should I watch? And then you notice the Species Box Set and you think fuck it, right? Well, that’s what happened anyway and I decided I’d watch Species IV: The Awakening.
It stars Helena Mattsson as Miranda, a smoking-hot hybrid of human and alien raised in complete ignorance of her predicament by her uncle, Tom, played by Ben Cross. Miranda begins to ‘awaken’, developing various alien powers like psychic reading (?) and killing people along the way and meets another sexy alien called Azura played by Marlene Favela (I sense a Sil, that’s the alien, version of Mortal Kombat is on the cards. Yep, I was right).
It’s basically chewing gum for the eyes. The CGI isn’t great but it’s OK if you don’t mind a bit of dodgy CGI and to be honest most of the special effects are good enough to make it enjoyable if you just wind your neck in and stop expecting everything to be Avatar. I thought it was paced OK and the actors didn’t annoy me; how could any red-bloodied male find Helena Mattsson annoying? She even gets the dairy out so I tip my hat to her for that.
Not just that though, Ben Cross added an air of legitimacy as her uncle. He’s no Ben Kingsley from the first film but he’s easy to take serious in a film that for the most part can’t be taken seriously, a good actor.
The script falls short in places, “Not so good, you humans.” Sorry, but aliens calling humans humans in that growly disdainful way kinda shows a lack of imagination in my opinion; in a classic episode of Doctor Who it’d be forgiveable but in a movie made in 2007, not so much.
Anyway, it’s not the end of the world (?), hot alien, reasonable film if your expectations aren’t too high; it is the fourth so it could’ve been a lot worse I suppose.
