Event

INSEMINOID

(aka HORROR PLANET)
Dir. Norman J. Warren, 1981
United Kingdom/Hong Kong. 91 min.

"A silent, lifeless world. Until they broke open the underground chamber and discovered in the most vile way imaginable that the planet was not truly dead. That a sleeping life form had been waiting for millennia, needing only a chance to breed before escaping to spread like a foul, devouring disease into the lifeblood of the universe. And to breed it needs the bodies of those who had disturbed it."

Many minutes watching Norman J. Warren and Run Run Shaw's space hell gorefest INSEMINOID are spent on the film's outside, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the breathtaking scope and variety of its (inevitably low-budget) production design and premonitory choices of lens flare. A crack squad of space archaeologists touch down on a hellish planet of red rock; a member of their crew named Sandy (Judy Geeson) is raped and impregnated by an alien, which overtakes her personality and results in a slasher-style killing spree among the remaining crew. With its agonizingly redundant screenplay and extensive ensemble cast, INSEMINOID is like a sooty cardboard cutout of ALIEN (perhaps by way of ROSEMARY'S BABY): bland, hoary and post-dystopian in its misogyny, Warren's film is perhaps a misbegotten filmic premonition of the Sex Colony coda of Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR...