Written by: Nick Maley, Gloria Maley
Directed by: Norman J. Warren
Starring:
Robin Clarke as Mark
Stephanie Beacham as Kate
Judy Geeson as Sandy
In space, no one can hear you get raped
by a giant, phallus-headed bug monster! Well, at least that should
have been the tag line for tonight's movie. If you can think of a
better one I'll eat my hat. No I won't, it's old and full of sweat
and face oil. Just don't tell the Maleys or Mr. Warren, because
according to them, this is in no way meant to be a cash-in on a
certain space monster movie that was a massive critical and box
office success just the year before. Nope. Not at all. Purely a
coincidence. And corporations don't have human rights while we're at
it.
The Xeno Corporation's health care plan
is a hell of a lot better than Hobby Lobby's, as they provide
injections of prophylactic drugs on every offworld mission, but the
crew of the outpost on the distant planet we're about to visit never
gets to find out whether or not they cover space bug abortions.
Presumably they wouldn't, though, because if it's a legitimate space
monster rape, a woman's body has ways of shutting things down, so
clearly she was asking for it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
A team of archaeologists has set up
shop on this barren, inhospitable dump of a planet to figure out what
caused the extinction of the ancient and advanced civilization that
once populated it. Some kind of citadel or tomb covered in
hieroglyphics has been uncovered underneath a looming cliff face, and
no sooner is a cavern full of glowing crystals opened up by two of
the team – Dean and Ricky – than an explosion puts Dean in a coma
and badly injures Ricky.
The team manages to get their two
wounded members back to their makeshift base dug into a series of
caverns in the opposing cliff face across the valley, and discover
that Ricky has some of the strange crystals still clenched in his
fist. In a nice little bit of attention to detail, Ricky is
clutching the crystals so tight they've cut through his space suit
glove and into the flesh of his hand. Not relevant to the plot,
mind, just one of those unexpected signs of thought put into an
otherwise cheap sleazefest that throw you for a loop and stick with
you. It's too bad they couldn't given that much attention to what
happens in the next fifteen minutes or so of the movie, because I
have no fucking idea, but I'm game to take a crack at it.
Shortly after chemist Mitch and medical
officer Karl determine that the crystals give off some kind of
bio-electric radiation, Ricky wakes up and goes on a rampage. He
grabs a space suit and runs off into the caverns, and several of the
crew suit up to go after him and bring him back. He leads them a
merry chase around the cave system, during which a brief scuffle
knocks a woman named Gwen into some rubble in which her foot gets
trapped. Instead of calmly waiting for someone else from the base to
suit up and come help her out, she has a spaz attack and rips some of
the wiring out of her life support system. Now the situation is a
little more pressing, but not insurmountable. All she has to do is
listen to the instructions given to her over her radio explaining to
her how to hotwire the thing and keep it running until help arrives.
Instead of following the directions, she decides to chop her damn leg
off with some kind of outer space chainsaw thing, and dies of blood
loss and exposure. Eventually Ricky returns to base and traps team
reporter Kate in the airlock, where she has to shoot him dead before
he depressurizes the whole base.
I imagine what's going on here is that
the bio-electric field given off by the strange crystals are driving
people mad. It's a very selective madness, though. I would have
guessed at first that physical contact had something to do with it
since Ricky had the things dug into the palm of his hand, but Mitch
and Karl are both unaffected even though they're the ones who've been
handling the things, and Gwen hasn't had any contact with them at all
that we've seen, so it eventually just comes down to plot convenience
I guess. It's time for a gory death but we need Mitch and Karl for
the story a little longer so it's up to one of the disposable
characters. Still, it's a pretty tense and memorable scene. It's
certainly one of the things that stuck with me most in the
intervening years between the first time I saw this movie on the
Sci-Fi Channel and when I finally found my own copy.
During further exploration of the tomb
(which had in the previous scene been said to be off limits until
they could figure out what went wrong with Ricky and those crystals,
but since it would be a pretty dull movie if they all just sat around
safely in the break room until the evac ship arrived, just never you
mind about that), Mitch and Sandy are attacked by something. In a
sequence creatively edited to not require any special effects, Mitch
is torn limb from limb, and Sandy is carried off and raped by the
creature, which looks rather like a big, pink, slimy wiener with bug
eyes.
Well, I say rape, I more mean
artificially inseminated. At least, I think so. It's a very oddly
handled sequence, which leaves us with some things to wonder about
that the movie never bothers to resolve beyond a couple of hints.
Sandy is lying on a table, with the wiener bug sitting between her
legs. Karl is present, too, giving her an injection of some kind
before the wiener bug shoves a tube into her vagina and starts
pumping wiener bug eggs into her. It's possible the whole thing with
Karl and the weird medical setting was just something her traumatized
brain cooked up to soften the horror of being railed by a six-foot
dick insect on the floor of a cave. It's also possible that Karl
really was in on the whole thing from the get-go. Once Sandy is
safely back with the crew, they do indeed discover a puncture on her
arm where Karl gave her a shot in the insemination sequence. When
they find out she's pregnant and everyone objects that it's
impossible because all the women were given birth control drugs
before the mission, we could take that to mean the drugs were simply
ineffective against alien biology, or we could take her vision for
reality and that Karl gave her some sort of counter-drug before the
wiener bug shot her full of space monster jizz. Did the Xeno
Corporation send Karl along with something like Special Order 937 to
bring back a wiener bug for study?
While we're asking questions, what is
the relationship between the crystals and the wiener bug? Is the
wiener bug what killed off the ancient civilization, or is it a final
surviving member trying to pass on its genetic material in a last
ditch attempt to restart its race? The movie doesn't care that you
want to know, because now that we've got the inseminating out of the
way, the movie switches gears to become a particularly claustrophobic
and unpleasant slasher for the remaining run time. Sandy's maternal
instinct kicks into murder mode as she starts picking off the
remaining crew, and it's a race for survival until the evacuation
team arrives. Of course, all there is to pick up when they arrive is
a couple of slimy sock puppet wiener bug babies.
Whether you take it for better or
worse, this flick is an odd duck in that it's a low-budget Alien
ripoff that shows the monster even less than Alien
did! In fact, I think the only Alien
ripoff with less monster than this is, oddly enough, the in-name-only
direct sequel Alien 2: Sulla Terra –
a flick so impoverished that not only do you see the monster almost
solely through a POV shot from inside its fucking mouth,
but that they couldn't even afford to shoot in an abandoned factory
so the climax takes place behind the pin setters at a
bowling alley! But that's a
review for another time. We're here to talk about Inseminoid,
after all. So does the lack of monster work like it did for its
inspiration? I think so. When there's no silly wiener bug to shake
your head at, this thing is a solid little horror flick that packs a
pretty nasty punch, especially for something that came out of England
right during the beginning of the censorial backlash that led to them
banning everything fun in movies for years to follow. It's gritty
and sleazy and gory where it can afford it, and the birthing sequence
which consists of nothing but Sandy screaming for what must be close
to 90 solid seconds somehow manages to start off unnerving, shoot
past annoying, slingshot around laughable and come right back around
to unnerving again by the time it's over.
What
little money they did have was spent very wisely. The movie was
originally set on a space ship (just to make it extra hard to deny
what they were ripping off), but there was so little money for FX
that the production moved to Chiselhurst Caves in Kent, England.
With pieces of the set build right into the real rock walls of the
caves, and with all those non-styrofoam corridors and caverns to run
around in, the movie gains hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of
production value at the cost of what a giant pain in the ass it is to
shoot a movie in a cave. This is also one of the few movies I've
seen where being drastically under-lit wound up being a strike in the
movie's favor, as it covers up a lot of the cheapness and adds to the
sense of claustrophobic horror.
If it weren't for Creature,
this would be hands-down my favorite Alien
ripoff. As it is, there's a two-way tie. Creature
is more fun and watchable overall, but Inseminoid
wins by an intergalactic mile in being unrelentingly vicious and
mean-spirited. If you want some wacky fun and Klaus Kinski being an
utter sleazeball, Creature
is your flick. If you want a movie whose only goal is to hurt your
feelings and make you squirm, Inseminoid
is where it's at.
Joining me in paying homage to some of our favorite cinematic plagiarism (but we didn't plagiarize the reviews, we promise), the usual suspects sailing these seas of cheese:
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