Word: alienate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...FLORIDA'S WALT DISNEY WORLD, the hot new "ride" is George Lucas' Alien Encounter. In this fond tribute to William Castle, sleaze showman extraordinaire of 13 Ghosts and The Tingler, visitors enter a circular room, are strapped into seats and see a huge hideous monster writhing in a plastic tube. Then the alien escapes--and the lights go out. Heavy footsteps approach, and your seat gets a violent rattle. You feel the creature's breath and reptilian tongue on the back of your neck. An icky liquid drenches you; is it someone's exploding guts or your own fear-sweat...
Until every mall theater seat can be juiced and goosed like the ones in Alien Encounter, movie directors will have to rely on mere sight and sound for their scare effects, and moviegoers will have to make do with spook shows like Species. Films, of course, can still do a thing or two that haunted houses can't: develop elaborate story lines, depict complex emotions, lift the audience by means other than hydraulics. Species, written by Dennis Feldman, does some of that, at least in its first hour. This sci-fi horror opus also has the summer's sexiest High...
...creature, hatched in the test-tube mating of an alien intelligence and a human ovum, is called Sil. As embodied by model Natasha Henstridge, Sil has a voluptuously thin form and a face--severe and curiously bland--that never reveals its secrets. That's perfect for Species, since the audience's sympathies are meant to shift uneasily between the determination of a crack search team to keep the creature from reproducing and the desire of Sil to increase and multiply, engulf and devour. So Sil goes cruising L.A. bars. A gorgeous blond who just wants sex shouldn't have trouble...
...lawyers and with Dr. Mack. Its mission is presumably to determine whether Dr. Mack's research and clinical activities satisfy certain unspecified academic criteria. But, at bottom, the committee will necessarily be asking whether a Harvard Medial School Professor ought to be lending his credibility to stories of space alien abductions. It is extremely unusual for great universities to second-guess the research or publications of their tenured faculty, except for allegations of fraud, plagiarism or violations of patients' or students' rights. For example, New York City College has never formally investigated in "research" and claims of Professor Leonard Jeffries...
...reported honestly; sources must be attributed properly; informed consent must be obtained; biases must be disclosed. But these are not the criticisms directed against Dr. Mack's research. What is on trial in his case are his ideas--his willingness to consider the possibility that the numerous accounts of alien abductions may not all be products of insane delusions. He has certainly not convinced me, but surely that cannot be the criteria...