Endangered Species

Even by our usual rock-bottom standards, the detective work by Eric Roberts and company in this film is atrocious. His big break in the serial killer case is arresting that parkour guy for talking to a witness in the hospital, at which point he immediately congratulates himself on catching the killer and accepts a goddamn award for his great police work. Seriously, they have no hard evidence, the guy they caught hasn't said a single word, but they declare the case solved and just start handing out plaques. What a goddamn shock it is when the serial killer strikes again hours later.

Fortunately, that random guy they unlawfully arrested turns out to be The Warden, who is also an alien. Sadly, despite his fancy title The Warden doesn't seem to have the power to stop the poacher, or even write him a ticket or give a verbal warning to stop killing dozens of people and carting them off to the tannery, please. The one thing The Warden can do is help Det. Roberts to be slightly less of a dumbass, so they quickly become best friends and go on a magical exploding joyride:

We know there are super-advanced alien death ray cannons in play, but those two police cars barely tapped each other and they still go up in a cloud of pyrotechnics. Maybe the metro PD had a huge budget surplus and decided to upgrade to the luxury patrol cars with TNT paneling and faux-Corinthian Semtex trim.

By the way, did you notice how after getting his arm blown off, the alien menace just runs away and nobody even tries to chase him? Yeah, the movie just completely resets at that point, with a completely gratuitous police-station massacre and some more crappy detective work finally returning Eric Roberts and his new space-buddy Warden to the exact same spot to fight the exact same guy, 20 solid minutes later. Only now, the bad guy has his arm back and they've lost the element of surprise. It's such a pointless, time-killing detour that it gave us a strong sense of bad-movie deja vu.

So that's Endangered Species: a mildly interesting premise (which is pretty much just a lousier version of Predator 2, come to think of it) gets completely derailed by gregariously stupid references to stegosaurus-leather jackets and the eternal battle between Mighty Mouse and Superman's anus (yes, really.) And what the hell is John Rhys-Davies' character supposed to be, anyway? He swerves wildly back and forth between bumbling comic relief and mildly racist, uptight asshole, whose hilariously ineffective bad cop routine revolves around threatening to murder the suspect with "a 9mm enema." Still, none of this seems bad enough to merit his self-coup-de-grace, in which he shoots himself in the fucking head to prove that the magic heat-seeking space gun sure looks like a regular gun to him, boy howdy. Anything to escape this movie, we suppose.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)