Inseminoid (1981)

**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 

Demonwarp (1988)

A minister (John Durbin) reads the Bible to his horse whilst trekking along a trail (his extremely clean “Old West” costume is the only indication we get that this is set before the turn of the Twentieth Century [okay, and the fact that he’s reading the Bible], because a subtitle would have been too tricky to put on screen, I suppose) when he catches sight of a “meteor” which crashes to earth nearby.   Cut to: a bright, sunny day, at a cabin in Demon Wood (duh duh DUUUHHHH!), where Bill (bulletproof check casher George Kennedy) and his doting daughter Julie (Jill Marin) are playing a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit™ when a Bigfoot-ian creature bursts through the door, roughs Bill up, and kills his daughter before dragging her corpse off into the unknown.  Cut to: a van full of idiots, including Jack (David Michael O’Neill), nephew of the owner of the aforementioned cabin, wending its way through the woods to investigate (unbeknownst to all but Jack and his girlfriend Carrie [Pamela Gilbert]) the expanding circle of weird goings-on in the forest (including the disappearance of said uncle).  Horror wants to ensue!

And so we come to Emmett Alston’s Demonwarp, an interesting premise in search of a good execution.  It’s set up initially as a slasher film with an animal (even though we can call the Bigfoot an alien, considering the prologue, but it still acts like an animal) as its villain (most precisely, the one we see the most).  It has the group of horny young people going out to a remote location to be killed in gory fashion.  It has bare female breasts galore (including two belonging to the lovely [and wasted, unless you count her boobs, though it could also be argued that they are the long and the short of her, if one were inclined to be a bit mean about it] Michelle Bauer).  It has a crazy old coot, trying in vain to warn the youths away from the area.  It has POV shots from the monster’s perspective (and I’ll get back to this later) as it stalks its prey.  And this got me thinking.  In many ways, a creature feature isn’t all that different from a slasher movie.  Both have antagonists who pop up at the worst possible times to dispose of irritating characters.  Both have antagonists who represent unknown quantities.  Both have antagonists who are non-verbal in the main (characters like Freddy Krueger and the more charismatic baddies notwithstanding), and in this way are even more inscrutable.  After all, if you don’t know why bad things are happening to you, they seem more tragic (this being based on the notion that most people believe that they are, at heart, good people).  The thing that should separate them is the human psyche, yet the way characters like these are regularly portrayed, there is little indication that such exists outside of the impetus for their individual geneses.  The Bigfoot in this film is not going to answer questions and develop a relationship with Jack like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.  The Bigfoot is irrational, animal, primal.  So, the Bigfoot (or something like the bear from Grizzly, let’s say) are essentially the same as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and both types can then be viewed as universal/natural forces.  They do what they do, they do it very well, and they are inescapable because their victims exist in the villains’ world.  

Another aspect that the film plays with is the concept of fanaticism.  Jack is fanatical about solving the mystery of Demon Wood.  Bill is fanatical about killing the Bigfoot.  The two characters are identical in this way, but they don’t trust one another, fanatics tending to be a bit paranoid.  This fanaticism reduces Jack and Bill to the goal of their myopic quest, and it removes them from the normal world.  They become loners, and, distanced from humanity, they become a bit deranged.  Of course, Kennedy is about ten times (maybe more) the actor that O’Neill is, so it’s possible that Alston and company were trying to delineate the interior conflict between Jack’s crusade into the Bigfoot’s world and his desire to escape from it with his friends and return to the ordinary one.  It doesn’t work, because O’Neill plays Jack as so intense and unlikable (he snaps at Carrie and Cindy [Colleen McDermott] no matter what they say, no matter how much sense or nonsense they talk) that not only do you not want to follow him to the culmination of his journey, but you kind of wish the monster would just appear and rip his head off so that the film would just end.  There is also the fanaticism of the minister, but his fanaticism is purely religious in nature, though, like Jack and Bill, his narrow world view allows him to be lulled in by what he believes to be an angel, though the alien villain (hint: not the Bigfoot) is in actuality a “devil.”  The zealotry of his believer’s mind ultimately makes the minister do evil, because he has essentially met God (to his mind), and since he was devoted to this deity before it asked him to sacrifice human beings (and, of course, there is at least one story with sacrifice at its center in the Bible), it is just a short trip from faithfulness to maleficence (a theme which feels all too easy to believe in the face of what we know about and learn more of in our non-cinematic reality).  All this said, that Jack is allowed to live, even though he doesn’t come to any revelation about his shortcomings, makes no attempt to change himself, and is still a grade-A peckerwood by the time the film ends, makes the film less satisfying than it was already.  His arc is a flatline.  

I’ve said often that POV handheld camera shots do not work all that well when used for an extended period of time (Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake being the two notable exceptions that always spring to my mind).  In horror films, they tend to work even less, since we know that they are either going to be false (a cat jumps onto a character’s back or whatever) or exactly what they appear to be (yet still somehow unsatisfying in their predetermination).  The effectiveness of this technique varies by filmmaker, and I can confidently say that Emmett Alston is not a director who should employ POV very often, or even at all.  That’s the problem.  Just about every two minutes of Demonwarp, we get either shaky handheld POV shots or shaky handheld shots of legs running or walking (sometimes both).  You may think I’m exaggerating this.  I’m not.  In fact, I may be underestimating the frequency of these occurrences.  I’m guessing that the filmmakers thought this would keep pacing up and build some tension in the stalking scenes.  Instead, it becomes swiftly redundant to the point that I actually groaned every time I saw yet another of these shots (though it does give us Kennedy swinging an ax in direct address, so that’s one in the plus column).  This level of (what I can only surmise is) naiveté, which can be charming even in junk movies, is herein merely annoying, and worst of all, boring.  This is yet another example of a film that has everything I like (mashing up pulp horror and science fiction and revenge and survival genres, amongst other things), but is so breathtakingly dull, it’s a chore to sit through.

MVT:  The Bigfoot costume (and other creature effects), courtesy of John Carl Buechler, are solid fun.  Unfortunately, like a twig placed under a hunk of pig iron, it just can’t hold up enough of the picture to make any of it worth one’s time. 

Make or Break:  The scene where Tom (Billy Jayne of the late, lamented Parker Lewis Can’t Lose television series) goes full Jack Nicholson not only made the large vein in my forehead begin to throb, but it also made me want to grab my television and stomp it to death for showing me this travesty.  Thankfully, the latter never came to fruition.

Score:  3/10

Xtro (1982)

There seems to me to be some sort of debate in the realm of cryptids and it relates predominately to preference.  A great many people will believe in either Bigfoot (and other hirsute hominids) or in the Loch Ness Monster (and other aquatic beasties) but not in both (we’ll leave things like the Chupacabra and Mothman out of this for now).  The reasoning typically boils down to their thoughts on what sort of organism could exist in what sort of environment and still manage to elude capture all these years.  Personally, I’m open to the possibility that both exist, but I lean more toward the Bigfoot camp (which should come as no shock to anyone).  It’s also been a source of humor that the only photos ever taken of any of these creatures are always blurry, and I think that means something (the blurry photos, not that they’re a source of humor).  When the pictures are clear, they are instantly suspect, as if the photographer got the animals to stop and strike a pose for a moment (and since they’re supposedly not prepared for these encounters, all the more questionable).  Yet, when they are blurry or indistinct, we tend to be more inclined to accept the likelihood of their authenticity.  In the same way that something like the Zapruder Film is true in its grainy, low fi style (it’s true because it actually happened, and this presentation on film reinforces the reality of it) so is the Patterson Film (and there are folks who still believe it to be real almost half a century later, despite the allegations of it being a hoax down through the years).  

In a time when people somehow manage to whip out their phones and take photos and videos of horrifying accidents and acts of violence (you know, rather than helping or doing something useful, but that’s a whole different essay) that can hold up in a court of law, is it only a question of time until somebody posts a video of a Yeti jacking somebody’s car on Instagram or whatever?  Either way, there’s a scene in Harry Bromley Davenport’s Xtro in which a couple (played by Katherine Best and Robert Pereno) drive by a bizarre alien (played by special effects), and the way it’s filmed is reminiscent of the better cryptid photos (the monster is seen fleetingly in the corner of the screen), and it’s extraordinarily effective, even though it was most likely shot this way in order to not have the makeup look silly or bad.  Interestingly, this idea is mirrored (and I freely admit that I’m making this connection in my own head) in the character of Joe (Danny Brainin), who is a fashion photographer by trade and the ad hoc father figure to Tony (Simon Nash), whose actual dad, Sam (Philip Sayer) was allegedly abducted by a UFO three years ago and has apparently come back now very much a changed…person.  Joe deals in clarity and beauty for a living, and there’s a falseness associated with this (as there is with all businesses that trade in glamour/skin/et cetera) that marks Joe himself as false and unsuitable to ever truly be a father to Tony (and moreso since he is ineffective outside his professional expertise).  By contrast, Sam is sketchy, indistinct (he claims to not remember anything before the morning he appears on Rachel’s [Bernice Stegers] doorstep), especially in his first encounter with humans (mentioned above), and that, to my mind, marks him as authentic, though whether it means he is a positive force is another matter.  Joe is the fantasy of a normal life.  Sam is the fantasy of an extraordinary life.  The two can’t really coexist, and the latter is incredibly bizarre, but still, this is one of the movie’s more intriguing aspects.

In this same way, the film is centered on family in the face of trauma, absentee fathers, and replacement family members.  Tony spends a lot of the first few times he’s on screen sweating and having night terrors.  He even wakes up covered in blood (whose it is, we never find out).  The Phillips family has been decimated by the disappearance of Sam, though the only one who knows the truth of what happened is Tony, and this truth both links him to his father and wreaks a terrible price on the boy’s body.  In the wake of her original, normative family’s disintegration, Rachel has tried to rebuild it with disparate parts.  Joe is supposed to replace Sam, though Joe is never truly vested in that role, and he can’t handle it anyway when push comes to shove.  He cannot fill Sam’s shoes (except possibly in the bedroom).  Analise (Maryam d’Abo) is the live-in housekeeper.  She takes Tony where he needs to go, looks after the house, and so on.  In effect, she is Rachel’s choice to replace herself, since the family proper has been dismantled.  Still and all, Analise cares about Tony only as a job.  Her attention is almost solely on getting laid by her boyfriend, even to the point of doing it while she’s on duty.  That none of these replacement components totally fits and this new family never really works is unsurprising, since the underlying thought I got was that none of this was done out of love, merely out of necessity.  Rachel needed a man to satisfy her, and she needed a woman to maintain the household.  She abrogates her familial responsibility because Sam left, and she is, at heart, a selfish person.  When Sam returns, his focus is on Tony, not Rachel, nonetheless she is willing and able to leave her ad hoc family for the false chance at a new beginning with her old one.  Naturally, this is destined for failure on all fronts (and how; I should also mention that this film isn’t especially nice to women in general).  Sam is punishing Rachel for not carrying the weight that was dropped on her, and she accepts this punishment at every turn.         

Now, I can’t say I liked Xtro.  The plot is nonsensical, and what is there is so thin it only has one side.  The acting is acceptable at best (though, to get crass, d’Abo doesn’t really need to show her acting chops off since she’s happy to show off her more physical attributes).  The characters are all a bunch of jerks.  Even the central relationship of the film between Sam and Tony doesn’t completely work, since these two are self-involved in the extreme (another major theme of the film being adolescent wish fulfilment which applies to all the characters, age notwithstanding).  This film lives and dies on (and appears to have been produced solely to showcase) its practical special effects, and they work very well, all things considered.  If nothing else, Davenport and company know how to stage and shoot effects work.  But even the effects have no consistency.  Sam goes through several metamorphoses, none of which are explained, and none of which feel like organic extensions of one another.  These chunks of latex rubber and goop and fake blood look good, and they have impact in terms of being visually memorable in a “did you see that shit?!” fashion, but they don’t resonate with any sort of lasting meaning or play any role in the sense of narrative coherence.  Being a massive fan of effects, I give the film props for its accomplishments in that area.  Nevertheless, in every other area it fails while trying to say something worthwhile, in my opinion.

MVT:  The effects shine throughout.  They are appropriately weird and offbeat, gory and slimy, and wonderful to watch on screen.

Make or Break:  There’s a famous (nay, infamous) scene (once aptly described by Fangoria’s Dr. Cyclops [if memory serves] as a “white knuckler”) involving an unusual birth.  I won’t say more, since it must be seen for oneself to be believed.  But wow.

Score:  5/10