Alien crossed with Lifeforce: a literally lethal lady, and frequently naked one, who metamorphoses into a long-headed crustacean for the purposes of propagation. The rapidly unspooling plotline is mildly misogynistic: the creature starts out as a barely pubescent nymphet (first stirrings of feminine power), injected at birth with some extraterrestrial DNA, who escapes from a top-secret lab in Utah, emerges from a train-compartment cocoon as a Verushska-like fashion model (Natasha Henstridge), and steps out into the streets of L.A. in search of a man, any man, many men. (Her idea of a French kiss bores a hole through the neck of the kissee.) No time is wasted in rounding up a posse of specialists for pursuit: the psychic, more precisely "empathic" one of Forest Whitaker ("I feel things deeply") is the most entertaining of them, though the nominal star of the group is the standard-issue man of action, Michael Madsen ("Nobody ever asked me to find anything they didn't want dead"), who as usual seems repeatedly on the brink of falling asleep (and dreaming he's Marlon Brando). The direction of Roger Donaldson is briskly, coldly efficient. And the man has no qualms about scraping the barrel-bottom for cheap thrills: in the midst of a tense stalking scene, a common tree squirrel decides to become the first of its kind to drop down from a lower branch onto the shoulder of a passing human. Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina, Marg Helgenberger. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd