All right, all right, I’ll admit it:
I do love cheesy, low-budget horror sci-fi films.
Even the ones which are obvious ripoffs of better movies.
Take Mutant Species, for example. You aren’t too far into the film before you guess that this was yet another copy of Predator.
But, I will point out, that it is one of the better low-budget ripoffs of Predator.
It was directed by David A. Prior, who wrote and/or directed an awful lot of these films, under the banner of his company Action Independent Pictures (or frequently “A.I.P.” in the hopes of confusing people with the real AIP which gave us the early work of Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon), many of which starred his brother, Ted. As someone once put it, they made their films so they could have a bare-chested guy with a machine gun on the VHS cover.
The Eighties and Nineties, right?
And it will probably come as no surprise that A.I.P. and the Prior brothers are no strangers to this site.
The story isn’t entirely like that of Predator, but close enough that you can’t miss its influence. When a top-secret rocket crashes moments after launch, the military sends in their elite commando team to secure the mysterious canister.
Only the canister has a leak, and infects the team’s leader with what was meant to be a super-soldier serum, based the DNA of a whole bunch of nasty creatures. This not only gives incredible new physical powers to anyone exposed to it but also makes him far more aggressive…
Let’s face it, the creature makeup here is just terrible. I mean, really, really awful. Appalling. Dreadful. Atrocious
Well, you get the idea.
It’s sort of dog-faced and blue, although, fortunately, the lighting in the scenes where it appears is bad enough that it’s hard to see just how bad.
All the better cheesy horror films use that trick.
I suspect that Denise Crosby — who once played Tasha Yar on Star Trek the Next Generation — was meant to be the big draw here, although it had been nearly eight years since her brief run on the show and she is looking quite old. After all, she was thirty by the time she got noticed on Star Trek. This does tend to happen with actresses. If memory serves, she left the show in the hope that she would build up her career before she got typecast.
Well, that didn’t work.
The other familiar faces are Wilford Brimley as the General, and Powers Boothe as the bad guy, who both give solid performances as heavily clichéd characters. But that’s what we expect of old pros like them.
For the most part, you know what to expect: horrible monster runs amuck, kills everyone in gruesome ways, the hero and his friends try desperately to stop it, while the government guys plan to firebomb everything to stop the spread of the disease.
I will give David A. Prior credit for one scene which threatens to turn into yet another ripoff of that famous scene from Predator where Arnie and the boys unload their weapons into the jungle…
Only this time the soldiers to stop shooting once it is obvious that it is futile.
Amazing. I didn’t see that one coming.
Mutant Species is done with a lot of B-movie level finesse, and looks quite good for direct to video film. It never lags, builds up a bit of suspense and is a lot of fun.
But it still would have been better had David got his dream cast for the film, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the team’s leader, Jean-Claude Van Damme as the hero, Michael Ironside as the villain, and Dee Wallace Stone instead of Denise Crosby.
Oh, well…
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