Inseminoid (1981)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2020) While it would be easy to dismiss Inseminoid as a cheap and nauseating Alien rip-off (which is true), it’s more interesting to open the hood and see why the film leads to such sentiments of revulsion. I’m hardly breaking new ground in pointing out that the quality of execution directly influences what we can accept in matters of plot and themes. Alien gets away with terrible matters such as forcible alien impregnation by being exceptionally well crafted; by taking its topic seriously; by not associating gestation with gender; and by having its protagonist fight back and achieve victory. Inseminoid, on the other hand, does it all wrong. It’s cheaply made; it barely respects its material (the distasteful splash of exploitation is never far away); it strongly associates the rape and pregnancy of a character with her gender, and it delivers a nihilistic conclusion. When bad movies tackle primal topics, they expose themselves to far harsher assessments than if they had played with less transgressive material. Inseminoid’s execution is bad enough that it compounds the film’s thematic failings—there is a sense that it doesn’t deserve to play with such topics and that it’s far too juvenile to even attempt transgression. Now, the film does have its fans—the film’s Wikipedia page features far too many gender-based critiques of the film’s theme to be casually dismissed, but the results on-screen are more painful than interesting unless you take a cerebral approach to analyzing its failure.