In space, no one can hear you scream, but in an underground facility on an unknown planet out in space, where oxygen is plentiful, everyone can hear you scream. And there’s lots of screams in this one, as a mining/science outfit runs into a bizarre occurrence while digging in an area of alien ruins outside where their base is set up. Several of the men get burned by these crystals they find and one of them goes catatonic. Through strange circumstances, one of the women scientists is trapped in the ruins by one of the affected men, who has gone homicidal. She gets kidnapped by an alien creature who uses a clear tube to insert a series of eggs inside of her. She wakes up later, unsure of what has happened to her. She is safe with her colleagues, but soon, her colleagues are not safe with her. She begins killing them, one by one, as her pregnant belly grows. She is soon to give birth, but to what is anyone’s guess. She destroys all communication equipment and methodically hunts down her remaining co-workers until just a few are left. And then, she gives birth…
Inseminoid is a movie that sounds like it’s going to be very salacious but turns out to be fairly classy. Yeah, that’s right. The “alien rape scene” is more clinical than the lurid description given in the summary blurb. While it’s still horrifying, it’s maybe even more terrifying that she’s not physically attacked in “that way.” But this is only a few moments of a film that starts off very much like a British Alien knock-off but then becomes a sort-of Slasher flick. All the parts are there: Alien, hurt crew members, eggs laid, stalking and killing. But in this case, it’s a human doing the killing, which is a brilliant way to get around spending money on an alien costume (although the aliens they do show are semi-decent, meaning they look fake as hell but a good kind of fake—don’t ask me to explain that). Most of the movie, in fact, is the deranged and suffering pregnant woman seeking out and killing her friends, and their attempts to at first capture, then kill her. It’s interesting watching the survivors change from concerned pals to “this bitch has got to go.” Most of the cast are British, with a few Americans sprinkled in, and there’s something about their accents that transforms pulpy dialogue into something that sounds classier. The filmmakers do a good job of creating a pretty decent horror thriller despite the obvious low-budget and cheap sets. What is best about the film is the bizarre little moments that pop up here and there, all pure 70s-Sci-Fi weirdness (and very Norman J. Warren, thank God). You’ll know what I mean when you see them; they are wonderfully surreal and very foreign in a very satisfying, unsettling kind of way. The violation scene is a prime example of this. It’s so peculiar and repulsive and yet so clinical. And let’s not forget that gruesome baby alien delivery scene…
This is a strange little movie that kind of gets forgotten, I think, in the more lurid Alien rip-offs that were common during this period. While it’s no classic, it has its charms and appeals, and it’s never once dull or disappointing. Think Roger Corman/New World Era mixed with a bit of British stateliness and you’ll get the picture. Don’t be fooled by its brash promises of taboo-breaking; Inseminoid turns out to be a fairly old-fashioned slasher flick, just one set on another world.
★★✮☆