Michael Madsen’s Other Mercenary Role You Probably Forgot

When Hollywood’s hearse came calling on actor Michael Madsen earlier this month, the legendary cinephile probably knew his death notice would not mention his breakout role in Reservoir Dogs, nor would it memorialize his time in the Kill Bill or Donnie Brasco movies. He’s loved in film circles for playing scenes with a grizzled, profane charisma that made even low-rent hits memorable, but in the week since his passing, few observers have taken the time to reflect on one of his more unusual performances: that of a black ops goon turned mercenary on the trail of a sexy, half-alien creature of inhuman breeding and immense power. The film was Species, and this year marks the 30th anniversary of its initial release.

Species was a creature feature with a difference. Helmed by Roger Donaldson, an action maestro who’d cut his teeth on No Way Out and The Bounty, Species didn’t get tied up in a lot of extraneous horror tropes or gore; it was low on vomit and slime, but high on a patented ’90s alien paranoia. When the U.S. government receives two transmissions from outer space—a schematic for an entirely new, almost limitless fuel source, and a set of precise instructions for how to splice alien DNA into human DNA, respectively—they don’t hesitate. Dr. Xavier Fitch (played by Ben Kingsley) leads the charge in creating a hybrid of the two: Sil (in her early years, played by Michelle Williams). He and his team had planned to use Sil to create an entirely new strain of organic weapon that could be controlled, tracked, and weaponized as needed. Their gamble didn’t work. Instead, their hybrid organism turned out to be more intelligent, more unpredictable, and more lethal than anyone could have anticipated.

Sil grows with frightening rapidity, reaching the physical maturity of a 12-year-old in a matter of months. But she’s not normal. She’s filled with violent impulses, and though her handlers think they’ve created a perfect killing machine, certain indicators suggest that Sil might not be quite as “manageable” as they’d first hoped. When Fitch decides to put a stop to the experiment, injecting cyanide gas into her cell, Sil escapes. The action begins.

Pulling together a motley crew of some of Fitch’s former students and colleagues, he sets out to find Sil. Their team of specialists includes Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a craggy veteran of black ops operations with a sardonic wit; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist who worked with Fitch at the DOE; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist studying Sil; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a moody empath with a talent for reading Sil’s every move. Sil’s movements lead the team from city to city, and finally, to Los Angeles, where Sil is now grown, and played by Natasha Henstridge. Free to roam the streets of L.A., she’s fully grown and intelligent–and on a mission to find a mate and reproduce. Sil, in her final form, is a thinking, feeling alien woman who is ultimately still a monster at heart. She’s deadly. Hungry. And prey to some very primal instincts, including sex and reproduction. Before long, the team is hard on her tail, and a string of bodies begins to pile up, from a lonely train tramp to a nightclub victim to a doomed, willing lover.

A Creature Designed to Kill, and to Seduce

One of the most immediately striking elements of Species was its creature effects. Designed by surrealist artist H.R. Giger, the xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien was a favorite among ’80s audiences, and it’s easy to see why. Giger’s monstrosity was curvilinear and sharp, stylish in a way that too many horror films had previously neglected to be. For Species, Giger was set on being even more specific in his design: He told ICON magazine in 1995 that he wanted to make Sil “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” His finished design is otherworldly and elegant, described in a press release as a “glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger was initially set to design multiple phases of Sil’s alien maturation process, but production constraints (read: cost) forced him to scale back to just one stage (Sil’s cocoon), and a final alien maternal body for the big showdown at the end of the film.

Species was a commercial success; it cost about $45 million to make and took in over $120 million worldwide. But despite being visually striking, Giger was unhappy with the finished film. He was underwhelmed that it mirrored Alien so closely, from the creature’s prominent “punching tongue” to the film’s climactic birthing sequence (sound familiar? ), which Giger called an exercise in “nibbling around the chestburster of Alien.” Giger worked so closely with production that he intervened at one point, demanding that the film shoot his preferred ending, where Sil is killed not by flame throwers (too similar to Terminator 2 and Alien 3, he claimed) but rather by a bullet to the head.

Species wasn’t a runaway critical success, in part because so much of the dialogue was clunky and banal, and so many of the supporting characters were stereotypes or just flat-out uninteresting. Ben Kingsley’s Fitch was unconvincing and morally suspect; Whitaker’s empathy mostly lurks in the wings, providing monosyllabic truths. The themes are intriguing (bioethics, alien contact, and maternal instinct), but they never get fully cooked. And yet, there’s a perverse appeal to watching Species, the wonky mishmash of science fiction and sex-and-violence exploitation. Writer Peter Feldman was fascinated by an article he’d read in Scientific American that was penned by Arthur C. Clarke, a favorite among ’90s sci-fi enthusiasts, who made a case that aliens would never make contact with Earthlings because of the technical hurdles of faster-than-light travel. What if, Feldman wondered, extra-terrestrials made contact with Earth, but not with people? Instead, aliens beamed back a set of blueprints to craft a living, breathing, sentient species, but one that was designed with Earth’s genetic blueprint?

Feldman, Donaldson, and their crew created a near-perfect ’90s sci-fi B-movie: part human reproductive morality tale, part trashy ’80s vampire flick. It was gory and sexy and pulpy in the best ways. Species never really stacks up against Alien or The Terminator, but it was successful in its own right, and for good reason: Henstridge is an alien-ifying presence (pun intended), Madsen brings welcome gravitas to a film that needed it, and H.R. Giger’s monster is still stylish and, yes, sexy, 30 years later.

Species is available on VOD and DVD, and to rent or purchase on Amazon, iTunes, and YouTube.

Three decades later, Species serves as a time capsule of what science fiction looked like in the ’90s when style sometimes trumped substance–and of the enduring, weirdly unmemorable roles that can sometimes make or break actors like Michael Madsen throughout a long and storied career.