**SPOILERS**
Some random thoughts/quandaries/gripes
for you today. Why is there never a
poster or picture frame manufactured in the size that I need (you would think
they would understand that some prints are not “standard” size; of course, this also helps keep
framers in business, but still…)? Why
does Hollywood keep insisting on using CG for absolutely everything, even
though it certainly hasn’t driven production costs down and nine-out-of-ten
times looks like garbage? Are “goth”
kids the new preppies? I am horrible at
choosing gifts for people.
Horrible. The reason I don’t have
my dream job is because I have too many things I love, none of which I have
ever successfully monetized (you’re reading one of them now). I wonder what will happen to my collection of
comics and magazines after I’m dead?
Would they even be worth the price of the paper they’re printed on? Why couldn’t I have been born rich instead of
so good-looking? Why do people think
that walking directly out in front of my car will make it instantly stop? As a side note, are there more people out
there with bodies as dense and tough as steel than I thought? Are Wal-Marts nexuses of surreal freakishness
which are slowly expanding outward in concentric circles, like a rock chucked
into a sea of primordial soup (that some jerk dipped his nuts in)? Why do people enjoy watching “reality shows”
that have the same exact “story” and the same exact interactions every single
week (and this is coming from someone who has a close relationship with
formulaic storytelling)?
Why all this scattershot navel-gazing
in this week’s intro? Well, because Norman J Warren’s Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet)
is a film loaded to the gills with random idiocy. To wit: Dean (Dominic Jephcott) picks up some weird crystals by hand without
using tongs or anything. The love scene
between Mark (Robin Clarke) and Sandy
(Judy Geeson) involves them getting
naked and hugging while standing upright.
Documentation Officer, Kate (Stephanie
Beacham) interviews various crew members like she were a cub reporter
(microcassette recorder and all). She
also has no compunction about killing her colleagues when it’s deemed necessary
and then kicking back in her underwear while listening to her jams (maybe it’s
whale songs or somesuch; who knows?) on her large earphones. The most expedient way to deal with the major
problem at hand is determined to be killing Sandy with explosives. Doctor Karl (Barrie Houghton) doesn’t want to kill Sandy because she’s pregnant
(something about which Mark seemingly has no opinion whatsoever, even though he
has no clue whether he’s the father or not).
The crew watches Gail (Rosalind
Lloyd) kill herself by opening up her space suit helmet and trying to saw
off her leg rather than any of them donning a suit and going out to, you know,
help her or something. Holly (Jennifer Ashley) wields the
intimidating “touch burner” (basically a tack welder… in space!) right next to
Karl’s head as he wrestles with Sandy (surely, nothing could go wrong
here). You can accuse this film of being
dumb (and, let’s face it, it is), but it’s dumb in such arbitrary ways, it
creates a certain charm that makes it enjoyable.
The idea of monstrous
impregnation rears its head in Inseminoid,
and while this is a wholly unoriginal idea (see The Beast Within, Rosemary’s
Baby, Demon Seed, ad nauseum), it
clearly comes directly from Alien’s
face hugger concept. It does, however,
have a couple of twists to it that make it seem a little fresher than it
actually may be. The impregnation
process is both creepy and clinical in its depiction. Sandy is strapped naked to a glowing (metal?)
disco table. The alien inserts his
(glass?) penis-thing into her, and we watch as its eggs flow down the tube and
into Sandy. This plays simultaneously on
the fear of rape and the fear of medical procedures, which are equivocated here
as being invasive and assaultive. Further,
this pregnancy changes Sandy fundamentally, something that many films utilizing
this plot point don’t do (they usually deal more with the human angle of the
mother dealing melodramatically with the tragic circumstances in which she
finds herself, and in Ridley Scott’s
film, Kane [John Hurt] doesn’t even
know something is wrong until it suddenly, violently, is). She goes from being a mild-mannered
non-entity (in a film whose every character is a non-entity) to a murderous,
ghoulish non-entity (she eats a victim to feed her babies). This riffs on some of the old wives’ tales
that revolve around pregnancy, as well as amplifying some of the
actualities. For example, the changes in
hormones that come with being pregnant can cause mood swings and/or odd
cravings (entrails, for example).
Likewise, there is the myth that female infants steal their mother’s
looks (Geeson distorts her face and gurns constantly, and her bulging green
eyes are heavily emphasized). These
changes to Sandy can also be viewed as the intensification of a mother’s
protective instincts toward her unborn children as well as phobias about the “other”
growing in her womb. Sure, she goes
crazy and starts killing off cast members all willy-nilly, but she does it to
keep her spawn safe while being equally terrified of what’s transpiring to her
body.
One intriguing aspect of the film
which is almost entirely abandoned after being initially brought up is the idea
of twins and myths. The space crew are
archaeologists excavating an alien planet, and some of the space hieroglyphics discovered
tell, according to linguist (?) Mitch (Trevor
Thomas), of mythical twins who once ruled the planet. It’s postulated that this fixation may have
come from the planet’s dual suns. It’s
also speculated that the planet’s previous inhabitants were self-destructive
(of course, this is solely put out there to play into the film’s horror
narrative). But the idea of twins goes totally
unexplored, until the twin aliens are born in the film’s third act (you can
view their conception as occurring between a god and a mortal, a scenario with
which mythology is rife). There is no
depth given to what could have been a complex (without being complicated)
concept of duality. These two are not
Romulus and Remus. They are not
Cassandra and Helenus. Hell, they’re not
even Tomax and Xamot. Inseminoid’s xeno-babies are strictly
used like the infants from the It’s Alive
series (and please don’t ever confuse the Larry
Cohen film with the identically-titled Larry
Buchanan film in that regard, because they are worlds apart), but even in
the latter movies the creatures had a modicum of personality. Sandy’s children are gruesome, vicious hand
puppets that are in the film for exactly three reasons. One, they embody the fears of
motherhood. Two, they give the film an
un-shocking “shock” ending. And three,
they raise the body count by a couple of corpses. In a film which is simple to the point of
being simplistic, you really can’t expect much more, though, can you?
MVT: Inseminoid has a sleazy, eerie atmosphere about it that augments
its bleak outlook. It also looks damned slick
for a film made on a shoestring.
Make or Break: As obvious (and
mayhap just a bit crass) as it may be to name it, the Make on this one is the
alien rape/impregnation scene. It’s
visually striking while still being pretty freaky in its own right.
Score: 6.75/10
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