Endangered Species (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Surprisingly, there are intelligent and thought-provoking elements in the basic premise of this grade-B sci-fi film made in Lithuania.

Suppose you are a game warden or an anti-fur activist. You find a poacher about to kill a rare leopard for the pelt. Would you kill the poacher rather than let him fire that shot? Of course not. He's a human being. You would try to prevent his action, perhaps try to get him arrested, but not kill him.

Now suppose that there is a race of highly advanced beings. They prize the skin of earthlings. They have made earth a game preserve and have forbidden the hunting of humans. But there is still a big demand for human skins on their planet, so poachers come to earth to hunt us. Their game wardens will try to prevent them from poaching, but will not shoot the poachers. Why not? Go back and read the previous paragraph. You would not kill a member of your species to protect an inferior species. Neither will these guys.

Arnold Vosloo plays the game warden. Some enormous Lithuanian guy plays the poacher who murders dozens of humans for their pelts. Eric Roberts plays the human cop investigating the murdered humans. Eric doesn't have the firepower to defend against the powerful alien, so he keeps begging the alien game warden to use his own powerful technology to counter the bad guy's powerful technology, but the warden, although a good guy, will not take the life of a member of his own race just to defend mere human animals.

Not a bad premise at all. In the hands of James Cameron or somebody like that, it could make for a terrific movie, an exciting thriller which also has far-reaching social implications.

Unfortunately, Cameron and his peers were nowhere to be seen, and we are left with bad dialogue (much of it dubbed), laughably bad special effects, miscast actors (John Rhys-Davies as an American cop?), and production values only slightly worse than those on the vintage Dark Shadows soap opera.

Way to go, lads. Terrible movie from a great idea.

I did learn some interesting facts about making cheap movies in Eastern Europe. Here are some of the things I discovered:

(1) They use about a half dozen English speakers. (In this film, Roberts, Rhys-Davies, Vosloo, Tony Lo Bianco, the coroner, and the woman who played Roberts's wife.) The people in small parts simply speak their lines in Lithuanian and are dubbed over in post-production. The guy who played the poacher was on camera more than anyone else, but this presented no problem since the character did not speak any earth languages.

(2) They create the illusion that the film is made in an American town by using only a few signs. The police station is a local building with some inexpensive English language signs hung on it. Same with the local strip club and health club. A couple of cars are painted to look like American police cars from a generic city.

(3) They are not especially careful about where they film, because all traces of local culture and signage are blurred out in post-production. Here's the way it works. As they drive through the streets, the words on all the street signs are blurred out. The identifying signs on local gas stations and retail establishments are blurred out. This film actually has a long chase scene through the streets of Vilnius, and I watched it very closely. There is nothing to betray the location. It might have taken place in Akron or Syracuse, except that there is something vaguely unfamiliar about it. There are no oil companies in America that use that color combination, for example, so even though the brand names are blurred away, it is obviously a brand that does not really exist in Syracuse or anywhere else in the USA.

To tell you the truth, the whole process is quite ingenious, and I had a good time studying how they disguised Vilnius and its inhabitants to look like some generic small city in the rust belt.

The good news is that the nudity is plentiful, and the women are lovely. The final flesh count: frontal nudity from two identified actresses, breasts from eight or nine more, of which two are identified.

Since the alien poacher prizes the best human pelts, he does his hunting in strip clubs and health clubs. The film begins in the woman's locker room of a health club, where two completely naked women (Monika Verbutaite and Evgenija Zakarevieiute) have a long chat as they prepare to become victims. Later on, the poacher wreaks havoc on a strip club, where we see an unidentified topless waitress, several unidentified topless strippers, and a lovely topless bartender (Viktorija Soldatenko). The three identified actresses all speak with perfect American accents. Of course the words we hear don't even come close to matching their lip movements! Additional nudity is provided by the breasts of Sarah Kaite Coughlan in a sex scene with her cop husband (Eric Roberts).