Following the retirement of Anthony Hinds in 1969, the legendary Hammer
Film Productions entered a period of steep decline, leaving a vacuum in British horror.
Inspired by the growing success of independent filmmakers in America, the mid-seventies saw
the rise of a British New Wave, with its own fresh faces ready and willing to plant themselves behind
the camera with only a small handful of cash and their own ambitions to guide them. Among these was
Norman J. Warren, who had worked various jobs in the film industry before breaking out on his own.
His first truly independent film was Satan's Slave, a B-movie horror that
was made on a miniscule budget of only thirty five thousand pounds.
Though critics tended to dismiss his work as exploitative--a term I personally don't
understand since all art is, by its very nature, exploitative--his brand of gritty,
gory, and sexy low budget thrills was exactly what audiences were craving from horror,
both in Great Britain and elsewhere. Warren followed up the financial success of Satan's
Slave with Prey--a sci-fi horror in which an alien invades the life of a socially-ostracized
lesbian couple--and the Giallo-inspired Terror. However, Norman J. Warren wouldn't
earn a place among the pantheon of great independent British horror directors until
after the sci-fi boom of the late seventies and early eighties, when he would work with
the biggest budget he'd ever had and would wind up crafting his greatest cult classic.
The Xeno excavation project has discovered an alien archaeological site on a distant,
frozen planet. As the team digs deeper into a tomb-like complex of caves, they discover
evidence of crystalline intelligence within the very rocks. Injured by an inexplicable explosion,
one crewmember, Ricky Williams, is overcome by the intelligence and starts to go mad,
convinced he needs to return to the site of the accident, even at the risk of the entire team.
After he is killed in self-defense, two other crewmembers are attacked by a large
alien creature, and one of them, Sandy, is abducted and forcably impregnated.
She makes her way back to base, only to slowly succumb to her own madness, one that makes
her stalk her companions one by one and feed on their bodies as alien life gestates inside her.
Under the notable schlock producer Richard Gordon, who was approaching the end of his career,
Norman J. Warren's next film was supposed to be a movie called Gargoyles, which got far enough
into pre-production that they had already started location scouting and script polishing before the
heads of the production company ran off, never to be heard from again. Gordon and Warren were
still keen on making a movie, though, and so Warren began looking for a new project.
Meanwhile, Nick Maley--a make-up artist who had worked on Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and
the first two Superman films--and actress Gloria Walker--who met Maley while both were working
on Satan's Slave--invited Warren to a party to celebrate their first wedding anniversary in 1979,
during which Warren let it be known he was in search of a new movie to make. A few weeks later,
the couple gave him a loose script they had written together entitled Doomseeds,
which Warren and Gordon enthusiastically accepted as their new production.
With half of the projected one million pound budget supplied by none other than
Hong Kong's influential Shaw Brothers--a company I'm shocked hasn't been brought up
on my channel before now--Warren and the writers had only four days to complete the final script,
with principle photography slated to begin the following May. Even though they were working with
what was, for them, a big budget, they had to make significant changes to the story in
order to make it work, such as doing away with the militaristic aspects of the characters and
changing the setting from a spaceship to the underground caves of an alien planet.
Then, in order to keep the film from being confused with Demon Seed, another sci-fi
horror which also involves a problematic pregnancy, Doomseeds was renamed Inseminoid.
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that is available through Amazon. If all else fails, though, you can always check out my website
at emagill.com, where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and
literature. Now then, with all that shameless self-promotion out of the way, let's move on.
The ensemble cast of relative unknowns included two Americans, who were not chosen by the
director. Jennifer Ashley--who plays the mission commander, Holly McKay--was a Z-list acress whose
biggest claim to fame was having a small role in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise,
while Robin Clarke--another bit player without any notable credits to his name--plays Mark, the
closest thing the movie has to a lead. According to Warren, Clarke was especially difficult to
work with--in fact, Clarke was the only actor he ever publicly talked bad about--resulting
in eventual shouting matches between the two and thus predictable tension on set.
I don't typically like ragging on actors, even ones in low budget movies like this,
but both Ashley and Clarke are pretty bad--
"We have no idea what caused the explosion. Our photographer,
Ricky Williams, was there and narrowly escaped serious injury."
--easily outshined by some of the British cast, starting with the prolific Judy Geeson as Sandy.
Geeson reportedly took the job more seriously than most and gave it her all,
and given the dual nature of her character as both brutalized victim and overpowered slasher villain,
she had to show a decent amount of range, often jumping back and forth within the same scene. Even
the most vicious critics of the film acknowledged that Geeson's performance is clearly a highlight.
Other good performances worthy of attention are the Countess Regina Bartholemew--I mean,
Stephanie Beacham--who, as a new mother herself at the time of filming,
unashamedly took the job for a quick paycheck; a young Victoria Tennant,
who I will always remember for her lead role in L.A. Story a decade later--
"Bugger!"
--and future Game of Thrones alum Robert Pugh in one of his first screen performances.
Most of the film was shot on location in Chislehurst Caves, an enormous disused
chalk mine in Southeast London. While much cheaper than constructed sets would have been,
the caves proved tricky to work in. For one thing, the areas were a bit tight for cameras
and other equipment, and for another, it was damp and cold. On top of all that,
cast and crew were constantly hurting themselves on the rough terrain,
straining their backs and ankles, but thankfully there were no serious injuries.
The exterior planet terrain was filmed on the island of Gozo in Malta,
which was chosen for its more predictable weather patterns than any place in England,
and the rest was done on soundstages at Lee International Studios in Wembley Park.
Due to the time and money crunch, some scenes were drastically shortened and at least one overhead
shot was improvised due to the command center set being... let's generously call it lackluster.
Also affected was Geeson's lengthy nude scene, which had to forego the closed
set and a lot of the usual easing in of such nude scenes in other movies.
Though surprised by the number of crew members--all men--who had to work on the
scene with her and by the speed with which she was told to disrobe, she would later
confess that not having enough time to really process it was more beneficial than harmful,
both for her state of mind and for her performance in the unpleasant sequence.
The film was deliberately shot to be dark and moody, but during post-production, the film was
brightened to make it an easier sell on the video market, a decision Warren later said he regretted,
even though it arguably did help the movie's home video performance. One thing he didn't regret,
though, was cutting out some of the more grisly aspects of both the insemination and birthing
scenes, which he did to avoid a dreaded X rating and which, in hindsight, helped the movie not
fall victim to the video nasty panic that was getting started around the time of its release.
Since they couldn't afford an orchestra, the music was scored electronically by John Scott. Despite
having been around for decades, electronic movie scores were still in their infancy,
and though Scott's music was lauded at the time as ground-breaking, it hasn't aged particularly well.
Inseminoid released throughout 1981, starting in late March, to very polarized critical reviews.
Many slammed it for its low budget, poor acting, and salacious overtones, while others praised it
for its suspenseful narrative, special effects (including creatures designed by the writer Nick
Maley), and its ability to utilize a small budget so effectively. Though hard numbers are
unavailable, the movie proved a box office success and was fast-tracked for the home video market
while it was still opening in various theaters. It quickly garnered a reputation for being a good
example of what independently-produced low budget horror was capable of, and it has gone on to be
considered a bonafide cult classic, especially among British sci-fi horror buffs. It also made
a big splash in the United States, where it was retitled "Horror Planet" and given VHS box art
that was tantalizing enough to get my attention when I was at the video store in my youth.
It sparked plenty of controversy, though, scolded in its day for its treatment of
female sexuality and reproduction. Newspapers ran letters to the editors denouncing the movie
in the strongest terms, but all that seemed to do was increase its market penetration. Today,
a handful of academics have torn into the movie for turning pregnancy into
an exercize in "abject Othering," and though I have tried to see their points
of view with an open and intellectually honest mind, I can only conclude that
these post-modern criticisms are incoherent at best and, well, let's just leave it at that.
Inseminoid's most lasting reputation, though, is as a cheap knock off of Ridley Scott's Alien,
a charge that everyone involved denies most vehemently. According to Warren,
the film was written months before Alien ever hit UK theaters,
and when 20th Century Fox executives learned of the similarities between the two movies,
Warren sent them a print so they could judge for themselves.
The Fox executives wrote back that they didn't think Inseminoid plagiarized their IP, adding
a surprisingly genuine personal note to Warren that they liked the film and wished him success.
Now, according to the writer Nick Maley--who was gracious enough to respond to my emails and who
has a YouTube channel of his own you can check out after finishing this video--he and his wife,
Gloria, were unhappy with the final film, believing that their story was lost in translation
and that the Alien parallels were entirely the result of the drastic changes to their work.
Maley says the experience was a painful one,
so much so that the pair tried to get their names taken off the film.
Of course, It is almost impossible to ignore the connections to Alien, especially during
Inseminoid's opening act, replete with a survivor of an alien attack getting queasy at dinner.
Also, the timeline between the writing of this movie and the UK release of Alien
is a little questionable. However, it's not outside the realm of possibility that this
is just an example of simultaneous invention, of two separate creations sharing similarities out
of sheer coincidence or some kind of collective unconscious. Beyond that, though, once you get
past the initial resemblance, Inseminoid does go in different directions. Besides, it's not
like Dan O'Bannon hadn't admitted to ripping off literally everything when coming up with Alien
in the first place, so even if Inseminoid is a shameless rip-off of Alien, so what?
I take issue with the other major intellectual criticism of the movie, too, that it's
misrepresenting pregnancy and misogynistically preying on the fears of a vulnerable population.
I don't buy this at all, and find it an odd way to read what seems to me to be a fairly
straight-forward horror movie about a woman being broken and corrupted by an alien force
into becoming a corpse-eating murderer. If you think this story is implying that all
pregnancy does this to women, I think that says more about you than it does the movie. But hey,
what do I know? I'm just a man who will never know what it's like to be pregnant.
Now then, with that off my chest, you may have noticed I'm dancing around the subject of what I
actually think of the movie, and that's because, if I'm being honest with you, I recognize that
Inseminoid isn't really a good film. I will happily praise the performances of some of the
British cast members, especially Judy Geeson, but on balance, the acting is pretty terrible.
"Is there much damage?"
"One sector is knocked out out there."
"Okay, you better get back there, too, and see what you can do."
"The voice communicators don't work in there."
Its low budget is also obvious on screen, with embarrasingly bad sets
and unintentionally hilarious fight scenes, and the script--though neither as derivative
or as offensive as its critics contend--isn't without flaws either, with a lot of elements
that don't make much sense, some cringey dialogue, and an unsatisfying final act.
That said, the movie is still compelling, with its offbeat combination of Alien and Rosemary's
Baby that turns into a straight-up slasher movie involving a killer who happens to be
a pregnant woman. I have no problems championing bad low-budget movies, and this movie demonstrates
why. For all its flaws, it was still made by people who put a lot of love and effort into it,
people who sometimes feel more earnest than the professionals who work with enormous budgets and
focus-tested storylines. There was and always should be a place for independent film makers
and cult movies, and therefore, there is always room on my shelf for things like Inseminoid.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. Are there any other low-budget sci-fi movies
you want me to cover? Let me know in the comments, and while you're there,
don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already. Thank you for watching,
and until next time, when we'll get a little lost, this is The Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Get your ass up here on the double."
"'Get your ass up here on the double.' I know what I'd like to do with her ass."