Alien 2 On Earth (1980)

In 1979 Ridley Scott gave us one of the greatest sci-fi horror films ever with Alien.  In 1980, the Italians decided to make a sequel.

In horror it's quite common when something becomes a hit that everyone tries to copy it, and the Italian film industry has always loved to rip off American hits.  The idea of creating fake sequels is not new, sometimes it was done with blessing of the studios since the film's naming was only for specific regions like the Zombi series.  But that wasn't the case here, there is rumor that Ridley Scott tried to sue the makers of this but wasn't able to verify.  Like most foreign fake sequels to popular films, the movies have next to nothing in common typically.

She's not enjoying this movie much either

Our movie opens with tons of stock footage of astronauts, coast guard, and other military operations which is nice and blurry and doesn't match the film stock used for the movie.  Always a good starting sign for a movie.  All the stock footage and news reporting dialogue seems to indicate that some astronauts are returning to Earth after an unspecified mission, so this is the vague origin of what is going on in the rest of the film.  Vague is the key word here, because there is very little explanation so this movie seems to feel like it's missing footage possibly.  Was the film edited to hell or they just were incompetent and didn't film some key scenes?  I would guess the later.

So how does this movie relate to the classic Alien?  It really doesn't have any connection to the original film, for one it's set in a modern setting ignoring the whole future aspect of the original film.  Xenomorphs?  Of course not, instead we got.... something.... not sure what....  You can't really clearly see the creatures in this movie.  From what I could tell, it's just masses of random bloody organ meat?  The movie being mostly in a dark cave also doesn't help at telling what I'm looking at.  You just see globs of pulsating bloody flesh and then lots of screaming as it flings itself at people.  The only connection one could say ripped off from Alien is the way the creature bursts out of human bodies.  Course in this movie the alien loves to pop out of peoples faces.  The aliens also seem to come from odd rock like objects that people just find laying around.  One of our characters finds one of these weird rocks outside a rest stop for example.

Stan Winston would be proud

The story somehow is confusing despite being so brain dead simple because of the lack of any explanation.  The lead actress of the movie who is some kind of scientist or something....I really don't know cause the movie doesn't really go into it, but she's being interviewed on TV about.... something.  Our lead during her interview suddenly has pains and doubles over, but we don't know why and it's not exactly important cause we find out later that we aren't gonna get an explanation either.  The movie moves onto our lead hooking up with her friends who love bowling and going spelunking in caves for reasons unknown to the audience.  So soon our cast of forgettable characters are exploring caves and then they start dying as our bloody flesh sack alien monsters kill em off.  The film is pretty gory, so it's got that going for it at least.  One kill is especially gnarly and kinda cool.

Does this look infected to you?

As the body count builds, we apparently learn that our lead character is psychic or something.  She even has the power to explode heads.  Neat.  Is there any reason why this is even in the movie?  Of course not, it just happens and seems to have no purpose.  Maybe they could have called this Scanners 2 instead.  The alien beings in this if anything are closer to The Thing in nature with how they assimilate people and then explode out of them in gooey masses of living gore.

Alien 2 despite it's unfortunate name, could have been a fun creature feature if it felt more cohesive.  The whole production feels really slapped together.  There is some ok tension filled moments in the film surprisingly but everything is just so sloppy in execution, and it's highly disjointed.  The run time of the film is very short so that also reinforces that this film was possibly edited to hell and back and then just has the Alien 2 name slapped on it to try and sell tickets.  James Cameron has nothing to fear from this "sequel".