Alien 2 - Sulla Terra |
  • Italy • 1980 • 92m •    • Directed by: Ciro Ippolito, Biagio Proietti. • Starring: Belinda Mayne, Mark Bodin, Roberto Barrese, Benedetta Fantoli, Michele Soavi, Judy Perrin, Danilo Micheli, Claudio Falanga, Fabrizia Castagnoli, Luigi Diberti, Vincenzo Falanga, Donald Hodson, Ciro Ippolito. • Music by: Guido De Angelis, Maurizio De Angelis.      A space module lands back to Earth after a failed mission, but the astronauts have been replaced by hideous creatures that can penetrate into people's bodies and make them explode. A group of speleologists are attacked by the monsters inside an underground cave, but the survivors are in for a surprise when they finally manage to escape the trap.
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Review:
Boy was I in for a shock. First of all, the aliens are practically non-existent. The only similarity I could see was that the creatures burst from a rock (instead of an egg) and made for the victim's face. What happens at this point is anybody's guess. One character's face is ripped off in one of these attacks. Another attack suggests that the same thing happened, but later the face has reappeared, only for a monster to burst out of it. At another point a whole person appears to have been duplicated. Even if it's silly, some clues about the creature's life cycle would have made it more interesting.
The plot involves a group of friends who go on a cave-diving expedition together, just as a strange meteor shower hits the Earth. A space shuttle has just returned to Earth with all of its astronauts missing, hmmmmm. By an unfortunate coincidence, one of the cave divers picks up one of the glittering purple meteor rocks and takes it with them down into the cave. They are then appropriately isolated when the rock gives birth to an unfriendly alien.
When we finally get a glimpse of the monsters, they look like pipe cleaners dipped in red jello. The movie has an amusing way of setting up the shots so that they don't have to actually show the creatures. The ending of the film has our heroine cornered by a monster all alone in a bowling alley (because bowling alleys are inherently frightening places). We instinctively know that the monster is after her, but we don't see it, we only see a shot of her from the point of view of an alien mouth, or at least it seems like a mouth. In some films, less is more, but in "Alien 2: Sulla Terra", less is everything. I don't think even the producers had an inkling of what the creatures were supposed to look like.
There are some good points to the movie too. The atmosphere is very weird. It's a contrivance to get the characters down into a cave so they can be stalked by the monsters, but it is creepy, and a heck of a lot cheaper than setting the story in outer space. The lead actress is kind of appealing, in a ditzy sort of way. And the dubbing is atrociously awful. My favorite voice is the stereotypical, jive-talking black guy at the beginning of the film. I don't know ANYBODY who talks like that, let alone the man depicted in the film.
Gore fans will be a little disappointed with this, since nothing looks realistic at all. Perhaps it's a problem with the available home-video sources for "Alien 2", but the blood looks orange. A few of the other effects are truly unconvincing. As I mentioned, there aren't any clear shots of the creatures, so we have no idea what our protagonists are up against. One amusing reference to the original film is how they try to mimic the "radar" sequence from "ALIEN" (where Dallas goes into the vent to try and flush out the monster with a flamethrower). In this film, they have no elaborate tracking device, so instead we get a scene where the heroine uses her "telepathic link with the aliens" to help one character being stalked by the monster. Yeah, it's like that. I did enjoy watching this film to a certain degree, but only because home video allows us the luxury of a fast-forward button.
Review by GroovyDoom from the Internet Movie Database.
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