Alien 2: On Earth
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- Release Date: April 11, 1980 (Italy)
- Directed by: Ciro Ippolito and Biagio Proietti
- Written by: Ciro Ippolito
- Runtime: 1 hour 24 minutes
- Series: Alien (Unofficial)
I love telling people about this movie because so many people have absolutely no idea that it exists. Alien 2: On Earth was one of the first examples of unofficial Italian sequels that I found when I was in school, along with Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. The idea of a different country making an entirely unrelated sequel to a famous movie fascinated me, so I did some digging. What I found out was that for some reason, copyright laws in Italy back in the day were more like guidelines than enforceable rules. Many Italian filmmakers understandably wanted to cash in on successful foreign films. Often times, these directors would make a movie with a similar premise, maybe even carry over a character name if they were feeling brave, then title the movie as a sequel to a much more well-known movie and hope to make a buck. There are dozens of examples of this, such as Zombi 2, Bruno Mattei's Terminator II, Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws, The Return of the Exorcist, Patrick Still Lives, and so many in-name-only sequels to Django and the Sartana films. This was the first one of these fake sequels that I saw, and it's nowhere near the best of them.
Alien 2: On Earth was released only a year after Alien, and focuses on an unnamed spacecraft that is returning to Earth after a mission. After it crash-lands, rock-like alien eggs begin to be found in various places around the crash site. A psychic woman and her friends decide to go caving in an area near the site, and eventually encounter the alien beings that are now loose on Earth. There are so many oddities with this movie, and I don't know how to properly begin. For starters, the movie desperately wants to convince us that it's a sequel to Alien by making such a big deal about this spacecraft that is returning to Earth. You may assume that this spacecraft is Ripley's escape pod, but not only is the ship never named, but all of the footage of it is stock footage of random astronauts on a test flight. Not a single character or location from Alien is ever mentioned by name. On top of this, while Alien took place in the 2100s, no effort was made at all to make this version of Earth look futuristic. It's just 1980 Earth, and it's hilarious thinking that this society somehow has interplanetary travel and megacorporations like Weyland-Yutani.
As for the aliens themselves, they're almost laughable. Like the Xenomorphs, these aliens also start out in eggs that open up on top, but these eggs resemble pulsating blue rocks instead of the classic leathery eggs. Aside from a couple of jump-scares with the eggs, we don't get a sight of the aliens themselves until almost 50 minutes into this 84-minute movie. Instead of bursting out of people's chests, these aliens emerge from people's faces, which is an admittedly cool idea. There's a great shot of one popping out of a woman's face and shrieking, complete with a fake eyeball that rolls off of it. These aliens don't look like the Xenomorphs at all, and instead resemble bloody snakes with a mouth at the end. They're able to launch themselves out of people, slice heads off by constricting them, and later "possess" people by inhabiting their bodies and puppeting them around. It's incredibly obvious that the filmmakers had no budget at all to show these things and didn't want the audience to see how bad the effects were. Aside from the facebursting scene and one shot of an alien emerging from someone's neck, we never once get a full reveal shot of them. Even a POV-shot from the alien is just a bloody, pulsating hole that was slapped onto the camera lens. All that being said though, every time I watch this movie, I like to just embrace it and pretend that these actually are Xenomorphs. It makes the movie much more entertaining than it actually is.
In the world of fake Italian sequels, Alien 2: On Earth is nowhere near the best, and is honestly a pretty mid to low-tier effort. While some of these movies are immensely entertaining and even good movies in their own right, this one just feels limp and lazy. It doesn't have the camp of something like Bruno Mattei's Terminator II, nor does it have the sleazy sex of ones such as Patrick Still Lives or The Return of the Exorcist. Its title makes you imagine a movie that we simply don't get, instead focusing on uninteresting cavers who occasionally run into bloody snakes for twenty minutes. It's worth checking out for pure curiosity's sake, but if you want a much better Italian Alien knock-off, watch Contamination instead.