Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

You know a film is going to be a disappointment when it includes all of its main shock set pieces in its trailer.  Because that's exactly what Alien 2: On Earth (1980) does here.  That's right, the creature bursting out of a face, the exploding head and the decapitation are the main gore sequences and undoubtedly the best parts of the film.  Indeed, I'm tempted to say that you should just watch the trailer and skip the movie, thereby saving yourself eighty one minutes or so of your life.  All of these sequences come in the film's last twenty five minutes and the hour long build up to them is tortuously slow and uneventful.  Poor pacing and a poorly structured plot ultimately sink this Italian Alien (1979) cash in - on top of that, it can't even muster a decent monster, instead giving us a bloody glove puppet which turns into a rubber tentacle thing and finally poorly defined mass of pulsating tentacles.  Most of the action, such as it is, takes place in some pretty spectacular caverns - the best part of the film - but this is preceded by lots of wandering around beaches, bowling alleys and desert petrol stations.  

Problematically, the film never properly ties together its three main threads: the return to earth of a manned space capsule which, when recovered, is found to be empty; the sudden appearance on earth of the mysterious blue stones which turn out to be alien eggs; the heroine's (played by Belinda Mayne) psychic abilities which include visions of the future.  The latter feels a particularly pointless addition to the plot as her abilities are poorly defined, apart from the clairvoyance, (which is never acted upon), she also seems to have some sort of telepathic ability and is somehow able to see through the aliens' human disguises.  Again, neither of these latter two abilities are ever properly utilised in the course of the film.  While we're clearly supposed to assume that the missing astronauts are victims of the aliens and that the blue stones entered the atmosphere with the capsule, this is never made explicit, even though, at first, it seems as if the plot is going to be about the investigation into the missing spacemen, the film instead goes off on a tangent into the cave exploring plot.  Still, the recovery of the capsule does give the film makers an excuse to pad out the running time with lots of stock footage of US Navy aircraft carriers recovering Apollo capsules.  

While a lot of Italian exploitation rip offs of Hollywood blockbusters are a lot of fun, (often more so than the original), some, like Alien 2: On Earth are simply duds which an't even be said to be so bad that they are good.  If you want to see an entertaining Italian Alien rip off, I'd recommend Luigi Cozzi's Alien Contamination (aka Contamination) (1980), which simultaneously rips off Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), itself a cash in on Dawn of the Dead (1978), for many of its plot details,  Unlike Alien 2: On Earth, Cozzi's film, (which, coincidentally, I also re-watched this past weekend), paces its gory set pieces well, gives us a monster which is at least bizarrely amusing and never takes itself too seriously.