Inseminoid (1981, Larry Miller)

 

I have a history with Larry Miller's novelization of the Norman J. Warren film Inseminoid that dates back to the 1980s, despite having only got round to reading the book in the last couple of years. As a child my family would regularly visit Pendlebury market (now long since demolished to make way for an Asda), a cheap and cheerful indoor market that had the obligatory second hand bookstall. I wasn't much of a reader back then, but being into the horror genre, I had a tendency to browse through the horror section, mainly just to look at the covers. For years this stall had a copy of the Inseminoid novel and I always remember that the back cover featured a still from the movie of a dead man on the floor with his stomach exposed. Which back then, I considered the most disgusting sight I'd ever laid eyes on. Even so, every time I was there I'd go through the horror books, knowing I'd encounter the dreaded Inseminoid and dare myself to look at the back cover in order to gross myself out. I know it's now fashionable to claim that growing up in the 1980s was a traumatizing experience, what with the threat of AIDS, the IRA, rabies and nuclear war, but to be honest all that went over my young head. The only things that unsettled me as a child was Margaret Thatcher, Judge Death and the back cover of Inseminoid. I suppose it gives an idea of how little value or little love there was for pulp horror back then if that copy of Inseminoid stayed put at that stall for years. Of course if I could live my life over I would have gotten into collecting books in the 1980s, knowing how much they are worth now. The online prices people are asking for the Inseminoid book these days would have probably bought you every book on that stall back then. Saying that if I had, it would have probably diverted me from collecting pre-cert videos, which were similarly going for next to nothing at Pendlebury market in the late 80s. I didn't actually catch up with the Inseminoid movie till 1992 when the Vipco label re-released on VHS and I have to admit to being pretty underwhelmed by it. Too little alien, too much of people running around caves, and a few seconds of someone cutting off their own ankle being the only memorable gore scene. Vipco had come back strongly during their second VHS incarnation in the 1990s, with the likes of The Deadly Spawn, Shogun Assassin and Zombie Flesh Eaters... against which Inseminoid felt like a disappointing, low energy experience. I have to say that Norman J Warren is one of those filmmakers whose work I find myself admiring rather than really enjoying. I like that Warren had to get up and go to make independent movies that pushed the boundaries and took away the safety net of the likes of Hammer and Amicus. Yet, his movies just tend to leave me cold, there is something impersonal and mechanical about Terror, Bloody New Year and Inseminoid. They all tend to suffer from having too many characters, none of whom ever leave much of an impression, meaning there's little emotional impact when they all predictably come to an unpleasant end. At best the likes of Terror and Bloody New Year achieve a kind of ghost train approach where you're shunted from one horror movie incident to another, yet rarely do you give a damn about a character in a Norman J. Warren film.

 

The Inseminoid book and the film roughly share the same premise...on a remote planet, a team of archaeologists excavate the ruins of an ancient alien civilization in the hope of learning about the origins of man. During the exploration, crew member Sandy is overpowered and artificially inseminated by an alien. Thereafter Sandy begins turning against her fellow archaeologists, brutally murdering them in an attempt to protect the twin fetuses growing inside her.

In book form Inseminoid feels accidentally ahead of it's time, and closer to what people expect from movie novelizations now. Back in the 1980s the name of the game for novelizations was to reproduce the movie as accurately as possible. Today, when movie novelizations appear they tend to be aimed at long time fans of these movies who don't need a blow by blow account of a plot they know like the back of their hand. Instead modern day movie novelizations tend to justify their existence by pursuing avenues that the source movies did not, offer an alternate spin on storylines or significantly adding something to them. This is what you get with the Inseminoid novelization, seeming on account of author Larry Miller being a man on a mission to up the sex and violence content of the film, and the fact that Miller was basing the book on an earlier draft of the film's screenplay, which was presumably penned with a much more ambitious, much more bigger budgeted production in mind. The script was written by special effects artist Nick Maley and his wife Gloria, as a showcase for what Maley was capable of when it came to F/X. However, I’m inclined to believe that we shouldn't take this book as an exact representation of the couple's script. Rumour is that Nick Maley isn't fond of the direction that the novelization went in, leading you to suspect that the pornographic content of the book was Miller's contribution. What's heartbreaking about this version of Inseminoid is that you get an idea of the special effects bonanza that the Maleys envisioned before the reality of low budget filmmaking brought Inseminoid crashing back down to earth. In the book we have a character having their ear, part of their arm and one of their eyeballs melt away, which the film forgoes in favour of simply killing the character off in an explosion. Then there is the discovery of hundreds of tablets containing alien hieroglyphics, which the film couldn't afford to visualize, the alien being discovered in a crystal like coffin, also beyond the film's budget, a character using a hi-tech laser to sever their foot, which the film had to substitute for them severing their leg with a chainsaw instead. Basically what we get here is a catalog of ideas that were too expensive to film, and Maley would have to wait till he became involved in big budget movies like Krull and Lifeforce to really prove what he was capable of.

 

I remember when Vipco put the film out on tape they hyped it as 'the Sci-fi bunk up of all time', as if it was Porkies meets Alien. It's a quote that doesn't really suit the film, the sex and nudity in it hardly plays out within a side-splitting context, and the 'Sci-fi bunk up of all time' is actually a more accurate description of the book. Miller hypersexualises the film's plot to the extent that it comes across like a porn parody of Inseminoid rather than an official adaptation of it. In the film there is a few seconds of Sandy and a male co-worker making out, other than that the archeologists are a fairly asexual bunch. However in the book we basically get Plato's Retreat in outer space. It seems in this version of the future, becoming an archeologist is the career to pursue if you want to get your end away. Just ask randy young buck Ricky "If he’d been asked why he’d become a space archaeologist, sex would have come first on the list, adventure second and scientific motivation a lowly third. But then no one asked". No woman it seems can resist having a wandering eye when it comes to hunky Ricky "even Sandy found herself admiring his bulging forearms and solid thighs. Not to mention a certain other bulging part of his anatomy. As much as she tried to be professional, she was still very much a woman." Sandy herself has an admirer in Karl, who we learn is "a sucker for fair-skinned blondes, especially ones with big breasts. And that was Sandy."

Miller's most memorable contribution to Inseminoid lore in the book is the invention of the 'sexual rotation scheme' whereby all of the archaeologists have to change sexual partners, seemingly every couple of weeks. The thinking there being that this will discourage emotional attachments between co-workers. However there is contradictory evidence in the book over how successful this enforced sexual activity actually is. At one point a character cites the effectiveness of the scheme by pointing out that crew member Kate was able to kill Ricky, who has gone nuts, despite Kate and Ricky having currently been in a sexual relationship. However in the same chapter we also learn that Barbra has fallen for Mitch, the sole black male among the archaeologists, and is delighted that they've currently been assigned each other as sexual partners. Which even leads Barbra to hope she'll have a baby with Mitch 'she was sure the baby would be a beautiful shade of golden brown'. They say that Sci-fi often speaks more about the time it was written in than the future it was predicting. A statement that rings true of Inseminoid, for all of the sexual content Miller brings to the book, there is an underlining conservatism to his contributions to Inseminoid. One that reflects a cultural kickback against the sexual excess of the 1970s, and scaremongers over a future where romantic, monogamous relationships will be a thing of the past and sex will become a meaningless, recreational activity. A thinking that obviously didn't see AIDS coming. Time has also proved that Miller lacked the foresight to predict the growing social acceptance of homosexually. The futuristic sexual rota scheme here only paring couples off into straight relationships, and with gay relationships still seen as illicit, career destroying and the love that dare not speak it's name. When Holly and Kate decide to break the rules by getting it on together, Holly fears that "she'd lose her commission" if their love affair is ever discovered. Given the book's inclination towards sleaze though, such concerns doesn't prevent her from muff-diving Kate, which Miller characteristically describes in explicit detail. Further examples of the Inseminoid novel being a reaction against the attitudes of the 1970s include Miller's seeming disapproval over the easy availability of contraception in outer space and the indifference characters have towards abortion. When Sandy discovers she's accidentally become pregnant, the news is indelicately broken to her with "bad luck, don't worry we'll abort it" to which she shrugs off with "I'm ready if you are". In this respect it does feel like the book and the film end up having a bit of a parting of the ways. Whereas in the film, Sandy's violence towards her crew mates feels very random and senseless, the book places greater emphasis on the fact that she is lashing out against the people who are trying to abort her babies. The jury is out on whether that is because the book can get more inside of Sandy's head than the film can, or whether it's evidence of Miller being of the pro-life persuasion. When you hear that the book has an interracial romance that isn't in the movie, and turns one of the characters into a lesbian, you'd be inclined to think that the book was the more socially progressive of the book and the movie, and you'd be totally incorrect.

The film version of Inseminoid was one of a number of films that were targeted by British women's groups over violence against women in movies, in the wake of the Yorkshire Ripper killings. However if you compare the book to the movie, you do find yourself thinking that the feminists were beating up the wrong guy by going after the movie. The book has far greater issues with women, especially women in the workplace and is constantly arguing that their gender renders them ineffectual. Either because they are either too preoccupied by the idea of having babies, as in the case of Barbra, too distracted by male bulges, as in the case of Sandy, or too emotional and closet lesbians, as in the case of Holly. These are concerns that Miller addresses through the character of sub-commander Mark, an inoffensive non-entity in the movie, but who in the book has this whole character arc evolving around his resentment over being passed over for the commander job in favour of a woman and is constantly being proved right by the incompetence of Holly. It is true that Holly is as useless in the movie as she is the book, but the movie doesn't make that great a deal about it, or has same kind of resentment issues that the book has. All of which comes to a head in the book when Mark has enough of being a hen-pecked man, tells Holly she is the "full of shit" and punches her in the stomach. An act that Miller clearly envisioned as a crowd pleaser designed to get the audience on Mark's side. I tend to think that was something which Norman J. Warren wouldn't have been comfortable bringing to the film. Despite the feminist backlash against the Inseminoid movie, and some unpleasant male violence against women in Satan's Slave, I don't get a woman hating vibe from Warren, he's remembered as an authentic nice guy and a gentleman. It's telling that no actress who ever worked for Warren has ever had a bad word to say about the experience, quite the contrary. Warren wasn't was of those exploitation directors who split opinion among actresses, unlike Jose Larrez, Pete Walker or Stanley Long where some actresses will now sing their praises while others have ended up regretting working for them. Admittedly there are moments in the book where it looks like Miller is coming to the defense of women whose attractiveness is preventing them from being taking seriously in the workplace, but Larry Miller as a second wave feminist doesn't exactly convince. "She was a knockout, long silky blond hair, soft white skin, firm breasts and a shapely ass, but hell, it wasn't her fault. Was she supposed to get fat so people would take her seriously". I'd have to question why Miller changed so much of the dialogue in the script, which based on the movie was unexceptional but serviceable, to the master class in flat, unnatural dialogue we get here. Re-reading the book hasn't left me with a new founded appreciation of Miller's writing, but it has left me intrigued about the man himself. Miller is something of the mystery man in the Inseminoid saga. If Larry Miller was a real name that would suggest he was a one book and he was done author. On the other hand Miller could have been a pen name for a New English Library hack. The two most likely candidates there then would be Leo Callan, who wrote a reportedly bare bones novelization of Piranha for NEL as well as a few slave plantation books for them, which would explain the Inseminoid novelization’s detour into inter-racial love and the dehumanizing, plantation like sex rota system. The other man in the frame is James Moffatt, notorious for his NEL skinhead books written under the name Richard Allen. Moffatt also wrote the novelization of Queen Kong for NEL and his relationship with the company was ignominiously winding down in the early 1980s. Inseminoid does tick a few Moffatt boxes, it has his strong stomach for violence and brutal sex, the conservative rants about contraception and women in the workplace, as well as his jaded, workman like attitude towards writing. Tantalizing as the idea is of the Mr. Nice of British horror having one of his film's novelized by the Mr. Nasty of NEL, the spanner in the works which makes me question whether this is a hitherto unknown Moffatt book is the relationship between Barbara and Mitch. Given that Moffatt was extremely racist, in both on and off the page, I'm finding it hard to believe that he'd voluntarily introduce an inter-racial romance to the novelization, a plot detour that feels so unlike him. The very aspect that puts Callan in the frame for writing this would seem to exclude Moffatt from being the author here. So, without any clear answer to this whodunnit, Larry Miller will have to remain a subject that provokes many questions and so little answers.

 

Where I'd jump to the defense of the Inseminoid movie is the continuous writing off of it as merely an Alien ripoff. Supposedly the script was mainly written prior to Alien being released, so at best I think you can only accuse the Maleys of trying to second guess what Alien would be like. On account of the foundations for Inseminoid having been cemented before the release of Alien, it doesn't follow the Ridley Scott movie as beat for beat as later, more blatant Alien copycats like Titan Find or Forbidden World. It's hard to imagine a movie that was intentionally chasing the Alien dollar would do something as radical as killing the alien off in the first act and then introducing a secondary, non-alien threat. In the hands of Larry Miller you sense that the book may have been a little more influenced by Alien than the movie, especially when it comes the Inseminoid's rape of Sandy. In the film this is subtly played out with a surreal 'is it or isn't it a dream' scene of Sandy being artificially impregnated by the creature under medical conditions. As there's no such word as subtle in the New English Library dictionary, in the book we get the creature raping her with it's two giant rod-like penises, playing out like an X-rated version of the Xenomorph's attack on Veronica Cartwright's character in Alien with it's phallic like tail. Miller also turns Inseminoid into a less original work by imitating The Exorcist in his depiction of the post-rape and now pregnant Sandy who is suddenly hurling insults at women and turning the air blue with dirty talk aimed at men. Whereas the film skips that part of her personality transformation and goes straight from her being normal to her being animalistic and aggressive...she is woman hear her roar. In that respect, the Inseminoid movie also belongs to a brief, very exclusive sub-genre of horror cinema whose message could be summed up as "women sure are high maintenance, especially when they give birth to disgusting, slimy things", other members of this club would include The Brood, Possession and possibly also Xtro. Upon rewatching it, I was also stuck by how much the movie anticipates the slasher genre that was just around the corner, even if it doesn't totally follow the rules for that genre by being set in space and by having the killer's identity and motivation known from the get go. The book also unintentionally flips the slasher genre on the head by making the victims rather than the killer the ones who are difficult to get rid of. Dean loses an ear, part of his arm and an eyeball, yet still survives that and gets cryogenically frozen in the hope they can put him back together on earth. Later on another victim of the Inseminoid has her intestines pulled out and her eyeballs extracted, but she also survives that and similarly gets put on ice. Space archaeologists sure are a resilient bunch.

 

The book followed closely on the heels of the movie, coming out in April 1981, a month after the movie's theatrical release, so NEL would have been courting an audience who'd enjoyed the film and wanted a keepsake of it. The film was issued as a VHS rental tape in November 1981, but wasn't available as a sell through release until late 1987, so there was this six year period where the novelization was pretty much the only way for your average person to permanently own Inseminoid. The book does feel like a school playground re-telling of the movie by a kid who wanted to increase his cool status among his classmates, whose parents wouldn't allow them to watch movies like this, by grossly exaggerating it's content. 'Oh yeah I watched this video, Inseminoid, and the alien in it had two big knobs and he pulled this woman's head off, stuck it's fingers in her eyes and used her head like a bowling ball, it was proper Video Nasty stuff'.

In recent years the status of a Video Nasty has been bestowed on the Inseminoid movie, but I have to cry historic revisionism here. I don't recall anyone throughout the 1980s and 90s ever considering Inseminoid a Video Nasty. Only in the last couple of years does it seem that the net of what constitutes a Video Nasty has been cast wide enough to include just about every video that was ever given a dirty look by a police officer. Such was the uncontroversial nature of Inseminoid that it was granted a fully uncut, 18 certificate video release in 1987, whereas the genuine Video Nasties tended to be out of UK video circulation for over a decade and then only returned to the shelves in heavily cut form. I'm sure it helps sell copies of old, semi forgotten films on physical media by labeling them former Video Nasties. Ultimately though I think such a description is a determent to the likes of Inseminoid, since it raises expectations that the film is going to struggle to live up to. Ironically the book is very much what someone going into the film expecting a banned, video nasty will imagine they are in for.

 

Having re-read the book recently and also re-watched the movie for the first time in many years, I have to say that for all it's 'issues' I found the book much more fun. It's not at all well written by any means, but you are getting a version of Inseminoid absolutely free of any budgetary or censorship concerns, offering up an idea of what the film could have been had it had a fortune to blow on the special effects and had a sexual deviant for a director. At one point Miller's writing takes Sandy to task for 'crossing over the fine demarcation into the area of bad taste', a case of the kettle calling the pot black if ever there was one. Some of Miller's writing does tiptoe into the area of unintentional comedy gold 'she could anticipate his emotional, sexual and professional needs. That's why it didn't bother her in the least that during sex, Mitch's mind might wander on to hieroglyphics'. Given how much that back cover has stuck in my mind over the years though, I shudder to imagine how badly this book would have messed me up if I'd actually read it in the eighties.