Species II is the first sequel to Species, released in 1998 starring Michael Madsen, Natasha Henstridge, Marg Helgenberger, James Cromwell, Justin Lazard, George Dzundza, and Mykelti Williamson and directed by Peter Medak.
Several years after the events of the first film, a space mission to Mars runs into trouble when the crew becomes infected by an alien substance. However, the ship seems to safely return to Earth with no problems. At the same time, Dr. Laura Baker has created a clone of Sil, the female alien from the previous film, named Eve. When the returned astronauts start to exhibit strange traits, the military hires Press Lennox again to hunt down the threat before it can spread.
This film provides examples of:
- Ate His Gun: After killing his fiancée, Patrick realizes he is a monster and blows his own head off to put an end to his actions. However his head grows back and it's clear from that point on his human half is dead.
- Attempted Rape: When Patrick becomes controlled by the alien, he goes around impregnating various women with his alien sperm. Most of these encounters are either consensual or sex-for-pay, but he also drags one of his victims out of a grocery store in the middle of the day to rape her in his parked van. He only stops and lets her go when he realizes that there's a female hybrid out there as well after she links to his mind.
- Came Back Wrong: Patrick Ross is distressed by the weird urges he's been having and the horrific things he's done, the final straw being the murder of his fiancée. So he decides to commit suicide by eating a blast from a shotgun and blowing off most of his head. Which then grows back. Afterward, he's noticeable less distressed about the things he's done and more actively seeking out women. The implication being he only succeeded in killing off his humanity.
- Cardboard Prison: Eve's prison is ridiculously escapable. The glass isn't strong enough to stop her, just like the last film. The doors can't stop her, just like the last film. The walls can't stop her, just like the last film. The guards can't stop her, just like the last film. Objectively, they've learned nothing. This is especially bad because they've been extensively testing her and should know how to stop her. The only improvement, a poison capsule in her neck, can only be activated from a single console right outside her prison which she disables on the way out. To be fair, the guards this time did riddle her with enough bullets to at least take her down, they just didn't keep shooting when she went down to be sure.
- Celebrity Crush: Patrick the astronaut meets a female fan in a supermarket after he has returned from his journey to Mars. Too bad that he's possessed by an alien symbiote that spreads through sex, so he exploits her star-struck interest for an attempted rape.
- Chest Burster: Why some people ONLY watch this movie ONCE. It made what happened to John Hurt look pretty tame.
- Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: The alien villain is a male hybrid instead of a female one. Also, whereas Sil came across as emotionally immature and scared about being on a planet dominated by humans, Patrick's plan to feed the alien invasion is far more determined and calculating.
- Cut Apart: Infected astronaut Patrick Ross is about to have sex with his girlfriend as the government officers are heading to his house. However, it turns out that Patrick's house is empty and he and his girlfriend were in a cabin in the woods.
- Darwinist Desire: The aliens infect two members of the crew with a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong, but leave the third astronaut unharmed. It's later revealed why when the hybrid Eve (who would jump just about any willing male to hijack their sperm and create more offspring) sizes him up and recoils in disgust. It's because the astronaut (who's black) is a recessive carrier for sickle cell disease.
- Deadly Hug: Patrick kills his Senator father by hugging him, during which his body inadvertently sprouts alien tentacles that pierce the other person's flesh.
- Death by Childbirth: A rather literal and gruesome example, as the alien hybrid's offspring gestate in a matter of minutes before tearing their way free of the human mother's abdomen.
- Disability Immunity: Dennis's genes carry the potential for sickle-cell anemia to manifest in his children, which is the reason the alien organism did not infect him but just knocked him out. Later in the movie, after he is wounded, he covers a blade in his own blood, which seems to act like a poison on the alien hybrid.
- Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The mating of the two hybrids at the end appears to be equal parts French Kiss and forced mouth rape by his mouth tentacle. Previously, when attacking Laura, Patrick extrudes a tentacle tongue from his mouth with prongs to pry her mouth open, then another tentacle emerges from it to slide into her mouth. Fortunately, Press has excellent timing.
- Gangsta Style: For some reason, Preston holds his gun sideways when he arrests Patrick despite being both a supposed counter-terrorism expert with firearms training and fully aware that his target is a highly dangerous alien masquerading as a human.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: A disgraced former scientist speculates that the aliens operate like this, having wiped out all native life and destroyed the ecosystem on Mars billions of years ago and are now trying to do the same to Earth.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: Patrick has been infected with an alien parasite on his prior mission to Mars that spreads through sex, so he unwittingly ends up killing his fiancée after spending the night with her. He attempts to put an end to it by blowing his own head off with a shotgun, but it just grows back within minutes.
- I Know Mortal Kombat: An alien hybrid clone being experimented on escapes from a government research laboratory, stealing a military humvee in the process. When asked how she learned how to drive, one of the scientists working on her explains that they allowed her access to television, and her favorite show is The Dukes of Hazzard.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: After Eve and Patrick transform into their alien forms to mate, Dr. Laura Baker appeals to Eve's human side. It seems to work, as Eve turns against him who transforms into the second alien form but she is seemingly killed in the process by him.
- Ironic Echo: Not seen in the cinema release. The little sister of the bad guy's first babymomma says an unbelievably ironic, unbelievably cheesy line as she climbs into bed with him.Debutante's Sister: Forget safe sex. You're dangerous!
- Jive Turkey: Dennis has shades of this.
- Lady Land: Eve is raised in a female-only environment so that mating urges won't make her uncontrollable. It doesn't work. Nor should they have expected it to, considering they let her watch television and The Dukes of Hazzard is one of her favorite shows.
- More Deadly Than the Male: Subverted — it turns out that the Patrick hybrid is much more dangerous than Sil or Eve with his capacity to quickly spread his brood by having sex with multiple women, and transforming into two types of alien forms whose second form is a bigger and stronger shape that fatally curb-stomps Eve at the climax.
- Motherly Scientist: Dr. Laura Baker collects DNA samples after Sil's death in the first movie and clones another human-alien hybrid from her that she names Eve. She starts to care for Eve as a mother, always quick to remind everyone that Eve is part human when the military guys suggest using her as a weapon.
- Novelization: One that the author described as "how Species 2 was supposed to be", as it dedicates more time to develop the characters and study their personalities rather than just cut between bloody set pieces like the movie did.
- Oh, Crap!: The second lady to get pumped with alien juice in the threesome scene, as she realizes the guy boinking her has a bunch of weird tentacles growing out of his back.
- Once-Green Mars: A disgraced scientist claims that Mars was once a thriving planet a billion years ago before the antagonistic aliens wrecked the entire ecosystem and are now trying to do the same thing to Earth. He was locked up to keep him quiet.
- Raised in a Lab: While Sil's clone Eve was raised in a lab, much more care was taken to make her a relatively well-adjusted alien-human genetic hybrid, and it works out much better for the humans in the end (mostly).
- Red Right Hand: Colonel Carter has a nasty scar over one of his eyes, which is blind. While he is actually trying to stop the aliens from taking over the Earth, it does show him to be a morally dubious character.
- Refusal of the Call: Preston Lennox, having retired from freelance hunting to making a counter-terrorism security firm. He basically doesn't want to do anything if the government became idiots by making another Sil (though the writers didn't think he'd be affected by Fitch and Arden dying by Sil's hands and being nearly killed himself with Dan and Laura), and only gets talked into dealing with the new threat by being offered a million dollars.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Subtypes Distance and Velocity. Real-time radio communications between Earth and near-Mars orbit are not possible in real life, as the distance between Earth and Mars varies between 4 and 24 light-minutes (with an average of roughly 12.5 light-minutes).
- Sequel Escalation: While the budget was the same as the original, the movie clearly aims much higher, with more gore and alien effects.
- Sequel Hook: At the end of Species II, one of the infected astronaut's sons is shown to have survived and Eve is pregnant with the infected astronaut's baby with the implication that the baby will be female and they will mate. Eve's baby plays a prominent role in Species III, but the implied scenario doesn't happen because she deems the astronaut's offspring unfit for reproduction.
- Sex by Proxy: The two alien-human hybrids are mind-linked, and also desperately want to hook up with each other to create purer offspring than they could with human mates. There are several times when Patrick is having sex somewhere else, and Eve goes into heat and apparently orgasms at the same time.
- A Shared Suffering: The male and female hybrids (one each) sense each other and try to hook up. Eve (a clone of Sil) even goes into psychic heat when she senses him, despite the fact that she was raised in a female-only environment.
- Super Mode: When mating was interrupted, Patrick transformed to quadrupedal combat form. But his alien form for mating is the male version of Sil's or Eve's
- This Is Reality: When Colonel Carter dismisses Preston's suggestion on how to track the alien."This isn't The X-Files, goddammit! We're not gonna follow the word of a lunatic."
- Too Dumb to Live: Eve is kept in a Cardboard Prison because the plot calls for her to escape and the writers apparently either couldn't think of any better way to do it or didn't want to bother. The villain uses a house that his family owns as a hide-out, reasoning that the fact that it's owned in his mother's maiden name will surely stump the FBI, CIA, and whatever other agencies might have an interest in capturing a superstrong near-immortal evil alien that's going around impregnating women with lethal chestbuster rip-offs. He drags a random woman out of a supermarket to rape her in his van right in the parking lot in broad daylight (Though that leads to his capture, doesn't explain why he ignored several other women he walked past in the shop, of why he didn't wait for his seduction attempt — which was working — before resorting to rape). When the heroes find him instead of sending a team of trained professionals armed with weapons that worked fine in the first movie they send a scientist and an astronaut (granted, along with one trained professional) and take no weaponry that would be effective against the creatures besides something that requires you to all but shove it into the target's face.
- Tragic Monster: The infected astronaut Patrick Ross. It's unclear where his human and alien self truly begin and end but he does show genuine distress over the things he's doing, eventually opting to kill himself. However despite blowing most of his head clean off, it regenerates and it's strongly implied from that point on the alien side is firmly in control. One could even argue that the alien side influenced Patrick to shoot himself in the head, killing his human side; from when the head grew back onwards the alien side would call the shots.
- Twin Threesome Fantasy: Downplayed to averted. The first conquest Patrick has after coming home is a woman who invites him to her hotel room, where she introduces him to her sister. It's not really a threesome, just one after the other, and the novelization states they aren't really sisters, just old friends who are very adventurous and sometimes claim to be sisters for the kink factor.
- Window Love:
- A rather literal example when human-alien hybrids Eve and Patrick meet face to face for the first time in the lab, putting their hands against the glass wall of her containment unit while visualizing themselves having intercourse in their alien forms.
- Shortly after, Gamble and Eve are having a similar moment, moving hands across the glass and starting deeply into each others' eyes, only for Eve to suddenly walk away. This clues the team in to why Gamble wasn't infected, and that he could be the key to stopping the other hybrids.
- Womb Horror: The male astronaut infected with alien DNA impregnates human women with hybrid fetuses... which gestate and are born in just two minutes. The end result is rather like a Chest Burster, though lower on the torso and coupled with belly inflation.
