species is a forehead-knockingly bad movie . you know what i'm talking about : that's when you sit there , slack-jawed , staring at the screen , and then just pound your first into your forehead in total disbelief at what you're witnessing . it's so awful it's downright charming ; it's about as bad and as * loud * as stargate . here's the " plot " : scientists recieve a transmission from space that seems to consist of a genetic code . after synthesizing it and crossbreeding it with human dna , they develop sil : an innocent-looking , wide-eyed girl-thing who , for reasons too protracted to list here , has to be destroyed . only trouble is , they can't simply put a gun to the back of her head and turn her into dog food -- like a bond movie , they have to kill her * elaborately * , which gives her a chance to escape . the government corralls together a team of " experts " -- mostly at screwing up , from the look of it : an assassin ( michael madsen , looking even dopier than he did in resevoir dogs ) , an empath ( forest whitaker , looking like the pillsbury doughboy ) , another scientist , and the creator of sil ( ben kingsley , the best thing in the movie ) . most of them will of course be murdered in various creative ways , but not before they get to show their various " skills " . smithson , the empath , for instance , has the uncanny ability to just spit out where sil is and what she's doing . thanks to the fact that his skill doesn't have any explicit rules , it leaves us scratching our heads as to why he doesn't just produce a map and draw an x on it . sil , as it turns out , is growing and developing at a furious rate -- which , of course , requires that she murder several people to feed herself . which is nothing compared to the vigor she exhibits when trying to find a mate . the adult sil ( played by natasha henstridge ) looks like she just walked off the runway of a fashion show and has no trouble finding nookie in california , and the movie gets some good laughs out of everyone reacting to her total guilelessness . there is also one moment -- maybe salvaged from an earlier , better draft of the script -- where she tries to to explain who she is , and can't . but the main purpose of the movie is never in doubt : violence , gratuitous nudity , ear-hammering sound effects . the last one is really ticking me off in a lot of movies lately : why , for instance , do we alwasy have swooshing sound effects to accompany the image of a flashlight playing across the camera lens ? light beams didn't disturb the air much the last time i checked . 
