Where would we be without Bruno?
I think I've talked before about how my life hasn't exactly been...normal, as far as movies go. I hate self-exceptionalism and all who believe in it, but ever since my aunt and uncle showed me I Eat Your Skin at the tender age of ten, I have had an issue with prioritizing "good" movies over trash flicks. Off the top of my head, some of the classic movies I have not seen are: The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, Saturday Night Fever, GoldenEye, Mean Girls, Breakfast at Tiffany's, American Psycho, Superman III, and last but not least, Aliens. It's worth pointing out that I have seen Terminator and Terminator 2. And now, I have also seen Terminator II. Except Terminator II is not Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei's attempt at sequelizing James Cameron's robot-action tour-de-force, though Cameron is certainly present here. No, today it is Cameron's Aliens that falls under the auspices of Bruno Mattei and Claudio "Troll 2" Fragasso. At some point in my life, I know I will become a non-loser and watch Aliens, but because of my experiences today, I will have the inverse view of most folks: to me, Aliens will be the pale shadow of Terminator II, the one I saw first. And I think there's a little validity in my point. After all, James Cameron is no Mattei, nor is he any Fragasso--he is too anchored, too straightforward. Let's let the maestro work.
In the not-too-distant future, at a point where Venice has sunk into the sea, a group of Marines is sent into an underground tunnel network/genetics lab. They are joined by one of the mercenaries employed by the owner of the lab, the astonishingly-named Tubular Corporation. Shortly after learning that something with that name exists in this universe, we find out these Marines are called "Megaforce"! After many wonderful lines of dialogue, they learn that the lab was wiped out by a not-Xenomorph created by Tubular to spread some sort of genetic virus that rewrites an organism like computer code. This is also confusingly tied to pollution, a theme that also appears in Rats: Night of Terror ("You mangy beasts! That's how the water gets...POLLUTED!") and Zombi 3. Of course, the Tubular mercenary is revealed to secretly be an evil android, which I know happens in at least one of the Alien movies. And, naturally, once he is revealed to be an android, he starts doing an Ahnold impression, right down to ripping part of his face off a la the eye-removal scene in the first Terminator. There is a happy ending to this one, for both not-Ripley, and the obligatory child-played-by-a-30-year-old.
The typical Mattei/Fragasso nuttiness is all present here. Even outside of casting moms as ten-year-olds, and all of the flimsy rip-offs of other films, and the presumably-stolen soundtrack, there is wave after wave of beautiful scripting that ties it all together. "Alright, you bunch of pussies," says Koster, one of the three women in this film. "I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!" This is the first thing she ever says to us in the movie, so we don't know what she's "back" from. Terminator II's script also echoes Hell of the Living Dead with a scene where people are dying/screaming for help, and everyone around them just sits around and stares at them grimly as they die. In fact, it's even worse than when it happens in Hell, because at least in that movie, the bystanders at least seemed concerned for the people being horribly killed by monsters. I may have mentioned how Zombi 3 seems to be a "lazy" movie--people move, talk, and live slowly, and don't really seem to enjoy putting effort into doing things like "keeping themselves and their friends alive." Perhaps it shows that Bruno himself was slowing down as he aged. Who knows? Who cares? It's entertaining!
I considered writing a big long paragraph about how the second half of it is dull. Guess what, the second half of every Mattei film is dull. It is an unfortunate truth. This is one is duller than the others, probably because it's a pretty chromatically dark film. And because I'm not above cheap shots, I suppose I can say that you'll like this movie if you're a fan of Man of Steel. Zing-o!
As a side-note/conclusion: this is the second bootleg Alien sequel I've seen. I have also watched the obnoxiously boring Alien 2: On Earth, a movie that's apparently received some acclaim recently, enough for it to get a snazzy Blu-Ray release. My copy is a bootleg pulling together two separate bootlegs to ensure the entire thing is in English. I'll probably only be able to get an HD version of Terminator II when all our brains are resurrected in a supercomputer in the future. That's okay. I'll take slime over substance any day, when Bruno is at the helm.
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