“It seemed like a mineral! Then it suddenly came alive! Poor Jill!”

Justin’s rating: This is the last surviving member of my hidey hole, signing off

Justin’s review: While there were plenty — plenty — of Alien knock-offs following the success of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, only one had the shameless guts to appropriate the name and poise itself as a sequel, even though it wasn’t. What’s kind of funny is that Italian producer Ciro Ippolito survived a lawsuit against the movie’s name only to sue The Descent a quarter-century later for allegedly stealing his plot.

Suffice to say, Alien 2: On Earth has nothing to do with Ripley, the Nostromo, or the Xenomorph. So what’s it about? Honestly, it’s kind of The Descent just with aliens instead of cave dwellers.

A spacecraft returns to modern-day earth without its crew but with some fancy space rocks(tm) that are completely innocent. Some spelunkers — including a psychic girl who’s there to harsh everyone’s buzz — head down into a cavern system, with one of them taking a space rock down with her. Naturally, it turns into a face-ripping alien, and the special effects artists in Italy are paid enough to put food on their table for a month.

There’s a lot of cat-and-mouse horror in the caves, but what’s actually kind of interesting is when the survivors return to the surface, almost everyone is missing. It turns out that they weren’t the only ones having an extraterrestrial encounter, and humanity apparently loses the game faster than they did in A Quiet Place.

I’m not going to be kind to this movie in the next paragraph, so let me be fair with a couple of compliments. Alien 2 does some cool camera work in an actual cave system, which makes for some authentic backdrop eye candy and exploration that’s cool to follow (when you can see it). It does feel authentically claustrophobic, thanks to filming in Italy’s Castellana Caves. And there are brief, oh-so-brief moments of interesting alien encounters that hint at some creativity.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough. Alien 2 majored in procrastination in film school, so it’s perpetually dragging its feet in getting to anything that we, the viewers, want to see. One gets the feeling that they had the budget for about 25 seconds of monster mayhem and had to pad like crazy to fill in the rest of the runtime. Cue long, long scenes of no consequence, like people rowing a boat, riding in cars, and slowly rappelling in near darkness.

Trust me, you will feel every minute of this movie in the same way that you feel time pass in the waiting room of a dentist when your phone’s battery is at 1%. Scenes will drag and drag while the soundtrack drones in a way that I think was supposed to unsettle the audience but simply becomes an audible metaphor for the meaninglessness of Alien 2.

It’s a shame that the lawsuit didn’t smack this film to the ground, because not only is Alien 2 a terrible movie, it has absolutely no business calling itself an Alien clone. I’ve seen plenty of these clones, and there’s a formula to them that usually involves a spaceship, an unstoppable alien, and people getting knocked off with cheesy gore effects. Not an unbearable cave crawl with occasional intermissions of gore.

Friends, you want a good Alien clone, go see Galaxy of Terror or Forbidden World. You want substandard toilet paper, there’s Alien 2: On Earth.

Intermission!

• Nothing screams “quality movie incoming!” like tons of stock footage over your opening credits
• “Mychael” is the worst way I’ve ever seen Michael spelled
• During a TV interview is the best possible time to have a psychic breakdown
• Rowboats! Just what you expect in an alien horror movie!
• Not to mention bowling!
• They liked drinking pineapple juice in the ’70s
• The pope drove up the cost of candles
• Getting your face ripped off only hurts a little I guess?
• “Find a fire hydrant!” And then he pees on the side of a building. And picks up deadly space rocks.
• All the best in late ’70s spelunking gear!
• When you want to write underground, you haul a typewriter and stick two candles on it
• The girl saying “far out!” is so ’70s it hurts
• Oh man, an old school Polaroid camera
• Aliens are considerate to clean up the blood from their victims so that everyone else will doubt that she’s been attacked
• I think this spelunking rescue goes on for five full hours of screentime
• Your reward for watching a camera pan over the girl’s prone body for 120 seconds is a head-exploder and a decapitation. Thanks?
• Aaaaand we’re back at the bowling alley. Yipee.