Monday, August 29, 2005






Bank Holiday Monday Viewing

Alien 2: Sulla Terra (Alien 2: On Earth, aka Alien Terror; Ciro Ippolito, 1980)

Cheeky! In Italy, where George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) was released as Zombi, Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (aka Zombie and Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1979) was promoted as an unofficial sequel-of-sorts to Romero's movie. (Incidentally, Zombi 2 had its own unofficial 'sequel' when Andrea Bianchi's 1980 trash meisterwork La notti del terrore--or The Nights of Terror--was released as Zombi 3: La notti del terrore, which caused no end of confusion for me whilst, in my callow youth, I attempted to track down Fulci's own Zombi 3, made in 1987.) And when Michael Cimino's The Deerhunter was released as Il Cacciatore, Antonio Margheriti's peculiar Spaghetti War epic The Last Hunter was released as Cacciatore 2: L'Ultimo Cacciatore. (However, at least The Last Hunter doesn't disappear up its own bum! Just kidding, folks--I still prefer Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, though.)

So it's unsurprising that the success of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) led to the production in Italy of Alien 2: Sulla Terra, more than two whole years before the release of James Cameron's official sequel to Alien, the imaginatively titled Aliens (known during its production by the even more imaginative moniker of Alien 2. Who'd'a thunk it?)

I'm not a big fan of Cameron's overblown soap operas, but I have a fondness for Aliens. There's something far more ineffably cool about Alien 2: Sulla Terra, though. Maybe it's the use of all that stock footage. Whatever it is, although it's no classic, Alien 2 does share strange similarities with the 2005 US movie The Cave, which just goes to show that it isn't only the Italians who steal the ideas for their movies: Hollywood just makes sure that the movies whose plots it steals are obscure enough that not many people will notice. (This method has, however, backfired on the producers of the recent Michael Bay movie The Island, whose narrative appears to be lifted wholesale from the 1979 film Clonus.)

Nevertheless, putting aside any question of the film's relationship with Ridley Scott's SF classic, Alien 2 does something interesting: whereas Scott's film turned to 50s US sci-fi for its inspiration, Alien 2: Sulla Terra seems to draw upon the more mystical, primeval horrors at the heart of British sci-fi, principally the work of Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Experiment). As in Kneale's work, in Alien 2 there's the suggestion of a relationship between the alien race and humans. As in Kneale's Quatermass serials, Alien 2's attempts at building suspense are based on the deployment of the uncanny, as opposed to the fear of the other that permeates the US SF films from which Ridley Scott's film drew inspiration.

So what's the film about? It focuses on a female caver named Thelma (played by Belinda Mayne; Thelma also happens to be psychic) has a funny turn during a television interview that is interspliced with obvious stock footage. The stock footage is used to illustrate the fact that as Thelma is being interviewed, the world is awaiting the return of two astronauts who have been on a mission into deep space. Their empty space capsule crash lands in the ocean, and later a young girl on a beach has her face melted by an overzealous unidentifiable mollusc that may have been brought to earth on or in the astronauts' space capsule. Yes, it's true: strange things happen on the coastline, folks. And if you're walking on the beach and you see a strange breathing 'lump' that may have arrived on a stray space capsule, don't let your kids approach it.

Thelma and some of her pals go spelunking, and one night they take time out to frolic, which gives the filmmakers an excuse to allow Belinda Mayne to have a completely gratuitous topless scene.

In the caves, the troupe encounter aliens who seem to thrill at sucking people's faces off. As in many of the late 1970s and early 1980s Italian fantasy movies, this film has a high gore quotient, which is most spectacularly realised in a scene in which one of the group appears to become possessed by the alien life form and approaches the remaining members of the troupe, only for his head to explode and a giant red tendril jump out of his neck. There are definite shades of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) in this sequence, and it'd be interesting to know if either Carpenter or Bill Lancaster (who wrote The Thing) had seen this movie.

Eventually, the group decimated, Thelma and another survivor escape the cave system and find themselves at a deserted bowling alley, where Thelma's remaining pal is 'offed' by the aliens. Thelma runs away, heading into the city, which is similarly deserted. But everything is red (an effect achieved by the use of a nifty red lens filter): the question of how the aliens managed to turn everything red is never answered, as the film ands at this point with a title card stating something along the lines of 'You could be next...' And just when the film was becoming interesting.

This attempt at an enigmatic ending just feels cheap, as if the filmmakers had run out of money and simply decided to end the narrative at the first opportunity.

The movie has strong shades of The Quatermass Experiment (or The Quatermass Xperiment, if you prefer), the Nigel Kneale-scripted movie and TV series in which an astronaut returns to Earth as a flesh-eating blob. As Italian fantasy movies of this period go, it's a bundle of atmospheric fun, with some excessive (and occasionally silly) gore scenes. But it's not on par with, say, Fulci's rambunctious Conquest (1982). Luigi Cozzi's more widely-seen Contamination is a worthy substitute for this movie; but if you can get hold of both I would recommend having a marathon movie session, watching Alien, Alien 2: Sulla Terra, Contamination and finally Carpenter's The Thing.
Original text: ©Paul A J Lewis, 2005

Recommended Link: A Filmography of Italian Sci-Fi & Post-Apocalyptic Movies


posted by Paul A J Lewis at 11:02 pm

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