Inseminoid

Alien changed the horror movie game so much that it was the only movie anybody made for years. Alien… but it’s a robot. Alien but underwater. Alien but multiple aliens (that one was pretty good). Alien but Canadian. The problem is that Alien was intelligently made, and that’s a high bar for the kind of lazy idiot that wants to rip off Alien. The rape and pregnancy themes of Alien exploited a sort of psychological terror loophole in our brains. The British rip-off saw all those disturbing metaphors and thought “okay… but why metaphors?”

They called it:

Hahaha, holy shit! They’re totally serious about that title, but that’s probably the hardest laugh you’ll get today. I’ll do my best to beat it, but I know Inseminoid and friend: I’m no Inseminoid.

The rest of the credits blast at you from a shot of stars made to look like cum, or a shot of cum made to look like stars. And through that grossly Milky Way drifts…

Sir Run Run Shaw, the infamous British Rap Baron? The callous aristocrat who single-handedly monopolized the rap game of Victorian England, and worked thousands to death on his cruel colonial rap farms? How could he possibly still be — oh, oh it’s the Chinese philanthropist. Okay. That makes more sense. Little disappointing, but that’s on me for assuming.

Hey, here’s the cast of our movie, coming straight from a 1985 Bon Jovi concert, bloody comatose friend and all. 

Inseminoid saw that Alien was kind of about the working class of the future, and they just left out the future part. We got a solid bunch of blokes and dames here, featuring such thrilling characters as Ricky, Dean, Sharon, Kate, Mitch, Sandy, and yes, even Gary. We’ve got a Space Gary, folks. It finally happened.

Inseminoid rips off Alien very quickly and expediently, with neither competence nor shame. That 3PM pub crowd up there is just hanging out on an alien planet when they stumble across an ancient civilization and unearth an egg which, unbeknownst to them, impregnates a male crew member who finds his way back to the ship. All they know at this point is that there was some kind of minor explosion on one of their excursions, and they have absolutely no faith in their own ability to handle even the smallest problem.

Again, there’s no alien yet. Somebody got hurt in a normal workplace accident, and he’s currently seeing the doctor, and now they all want to go home. That lady is not the naysayer of the crew — the lone Bill Paxton here to discuss the state of the game. Here’s the chief of their… expedition? Lab? Secluded rehab facility for incompetent space pussies? I don’t know what they’re doing here. I only know that they know they shouldn’t be doing it.

“This team can’t do shit, we all know it! Why did we come to space — the hardest place to do stuff!”

Here’s our main character, Mark — a sort of Aldi-brand Steve McQueen — receiving a work order and then asking the dispatcher to do him a solid and send Sandy down as well.

Sandy is not backup. Well, she gonn do some backin’ up YOU KNOW.

So at least Mark has some balls: Asking the work dispatcher to set up a booty call for him on his way to, remember, the work they called to dispatch him on.

The Inseminoid twist is that their alien first possesses its host, so prepare to be space-threatened by a guy named Ricky, who’s too low confidence to even attempt an ambush.

Look at that little pouty run. That’s the “you bullies can HAVE this bike, I’m going home to make a fort and cry in it!” run. It’s a solid move: everyone knows tears don’t count against you in Fort Big Boy.

Are you ready for the first big emergency of the movie? Gail, whose job must be taste-testing mysterious paint samples, gets her foot trapped outside the airlock. Like four feet outside the airlock. Everyone can just see her. It’s not a dire situation. But oh no! Her heat regulator is busted:

Ah, that’s nothing to worry about! Gary jumps on comms to explain how to fix it quickly and easily:

There are two exposed wires she has to touch together. It’s the simplest possible job. Nobody is even all that worried when they mention it to Gail. Here’s Gail’s first reaction:

She pokes uselessly at her wrist-thing and then sighs and slouches over, calling for help like a 1989 grandpa stuck on the depth gauge of his new Casio. Gary, still being quite reasonable:

The airlock is stuck. She knows nobody can get out to help her, so Gail musters up the will to tackle this, again, very simple task that one would normally assign a chimp in a study on which chimps like better: Doing very simple tasks or getting their dicks electrocuted.

Nope, she won’t even try. This scene is ten solid minutes of Gail gesturing at her wrist and the impossible two things she might have to touch there, and then crying. Until finally and for no reason, she gives up, opens her helmet, sticks her oxygen tube in her mouth…

And tries to cut her foot off. 

Pay attention to her wrist. Those are the two wires. They’re not even small! If that was a busted cage control panel in a chimp lab you would have to put mittens on the chimps to keep them from freeing themselves and turning their righteous fury on mankind for all the chimp-dick electrocution. But Gail has decided the best thing to do is gnaw her foot off like a trapped coyote — but only after sticking her face into space for no fathomable reason aside from suicidal uselessness.

It is amazing that she had to lose a foot to something this stupid, the rest of the crew will make fun of her for-

And that’s how Gail died. I don’t know why the movie showed us this. The alien was not really involved — it pushed her a little and she got her foot stuck between two things, then Gail basically ate her own shit until she died from it. If you put Inseminoid on trial for this, the judge would rule that you have to pay the alien’s legal fees plus reimburse it for any missed inseminating hours because it was such a frivolous claim.

Inseminoid Ricky doesn’t care. It runs off to somehow impregnate Sandy, maybe through a dream? And while at first she’s freaked out by this sexy abduction scene…

She does start feeling it a little when the penis monster shows up:

Listen, I am not trying to body shame. Sandy is looking positively bangin’ for a 54 year-old heavy smoker, but we don’t need the implied alien sex scene here.

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Oh, sorry, did I say implied?

Yep, that’s the full alien fucktube egg-creampie — happy Fucking Day everybody! And as you can see, Sandy is super into it. That little eyebrow waggle at the end tells you this ain’t her first rodeo at the Inseminoid Corral. Sandy doesn’t even moisten unless you’re an Alf or greater.

It is at this point you come to the dreadful realization that we’ve already met our main villain, and it’s somebody’s “I’m too young to be a grandma” in yoga pants and a deep-V.

The penis monster is gone. Maybe it never existed. This is the antagonist for the rest of this movie. No, she does not mutate into something cool. She only grows increasingly pregnant throughout the film, but not like… to a monster degree. She doesn’t even change out of her lazy sunday outfit. She looks like a normal woman who is slightly too old to be pregnant, and if you’ve spotted the reason why that’s not a great design for a movie monster, you’re two steps ahead of Inseminoid:

The movie boldly decides that her one weakness is kicks to the belly — Sandy screams and collapses and clutches her stomach every single time like she’s worried about losing her little sunset miracle.

AND OUR HEROES JUST KEEP DOING IT.

It doesn’t matter how much you try to ratchet up the tension when the payoff of your big fight scene is one of our heroes straight blasting a miraculously pregnant nana right out of her Spanx.

Inseminoid actually seems to realize how this looks partway through, and the surviving crew members pause to just talk to each other about why it’s all right that they’re beating the shit out of a proud Kohl’s Klub Rewards Member on the regular…

“I know it looks like I’m uppercutting your kooky Aunt Joyce, but I swear there’s an alien inside her belly, and the only way to stop it is forced miscarriage!”

And they are losing! By god, how they are losing. Inseminoid makes it very clear that these people suck on every axis, and some are sucking through time just because there were no new physical directions left to suck. Here’s Holly: 

She’s the no-nonsense head officer of this entire expedition, and that’s the face she makes when you ask her to do a thing. In this scene, her one job is to hold the space-torch on the super-grandma while the doctor sedates her. Here’s how that basic task — hold this item in the general direction of a woman who looks like she’s the scourge of Starbucks — goes for Holly:

After first blinding the doctor, she then trips on nothing and accidentally welds his spine to his belt buckle. 

Again, the Inseminoid can’t even be held responsible for this. Any jury would call this gross space-negligence, but tell that to Gramma-blaster Gary and his Prenatal Pumas.

Somehow Sandy makes it through all of this, killing much of the surviving crew out of a combination of luck and the ability to stand out of the way of a hurtling dipshit suicide, and her pregnancy comes to fruition. You can hear her screams echo throughout the whole station, and it’s implied that the alien babies more or less claw their way out of her.

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I’m sorry I keep lying to you about the implicative nature of things.

She gives birth to alien babies, but they’re not threatening or anything. They just lay there, wet and useless like human babies. Mark strolls right in and hefts ‘em up like he forgot some groceries. 

He gives them to Sharon for disposal and Sharon immediately tosses them out the-

Hold on, hey Sharon?

Are you fucking snuggling the monster babies? Look, maybe you don’t want to kill them for science or ethics or some kind of space circus, but even as fetuses these things piloted a feisty grandma like a fleshmech to murder all your inept friends. At the very least, cuddle-wuddles are off the table.

Anyway, after stealing her babies with no resistance, our hero, a savage and filthy Mark, returns to choke the eyeballs out of our villain, Sandy, who looks like 2000s-era Martha Stewart and is visibly exhausted from giving birth moments ago.

I do not feel good about this resolution. Even if that was the point — that the audience not feel good about this resolution — it’s still a gross scene that could have been avoided with like four dollars of evil alien makeup. Or by simply casting a meaner looking lady, or even just giving her a less jaunty sweater — anything so I don’t feel like I watched a snuff film of an Eat Pray Love enthusiast getting strangled out in a sewer.

Hey real quick, let’s check in on Sharon:

I guess you’re supposed to feel horror at this gruesome tableau? The only thing I’m taking away from this scene is that Sharon was so useless she couldn’t take an actual baby.

That’s the last scene of the main story. We cut to an approaching ship a month later, piloted by a smooth-talking space cowboy:

And his crew of surly Russian backup dancers. 

WHAT! 

Why weren’t these our characters, Inseminoid?! Why did you save these hilarious dudes for the wrap-up, but told us every detail about the life of Abortionfoot Gary, the belly-stomping space accountant?

The only cool characters in this whole movie land to find all the carnage of the aftermath, but the space station empty. No babies, no Mark. They pack up and head home, only for the camera to pan back and reveal a space steamer-trunk(?) in their ship is actually hiding the lil’ Inseminoids.

And that’s how we learn that Mark also lost a fistfight to a baby.