Showing posts with label stephanie beacham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stephanie beacham. Show all posts

Wednesday, 9 October 2019

Prime Time: Inseminoid (1981)

There's a crew of people working in space. Exploring unknown terrains. Taking notes on their findings. It's a familiar scenario. Unfortunately, one of the crew members (Sandy, played by Judy Geeson) is raped by an alien, becoming pregnant very quickly, and also then setting out to kill all of the people around her in a fit of alien-induced-hormonal-bloodlust.

Director Norman J. Warren made some fun, and even interesting, movies over the course of his career. Many of them were peculiarly ambitious despite remaining essentially British. Inseminoid is not one of them. It is, instead, a bit of an Alien rip-off that throws in a bit of gore and nudity to try and make up for the lack of any logic, or even any shred of interest in the main characters. Which isn't to say that I hate it. Thanks to the fact that Warren at least tries to push things as far as he can in a number of scenes this is hard to truly dislike. It's just a shame that it ends up being a lot more boring than it should be.

I put the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of the writers. Nick and Gloria Maley had worked for a number of years as makeup artists, involved in movies as big as Superman and The Empire Strikes Back, but this was the only script that they ever wrote, and we can count that as a blessing. It's not all their fault though, I'll grudgingly admit. Warren said that, due to the finances potentially being available already, he needed a script in four days. I guess this is what happens when you ask a pair of married makeup artists to give you a workable sci-fi horror script in four days.

The fact that it's most notable for scenes in which Geeson lies naked on a table, understandably distressed, while an alien tries to live up to the title should tell you all you need to know. And Geeson is, for better or worse, the only cast member you'll remember for her onscreen performance once the end credits roll. You will remember that Stephanie Beacham is also in the movie, and it's always novel to see Victoria Tennant in roles that she had before I knew of her, but nobody else gets to make much of an impression (with the exception of Dominic Jephcott and the moment in which his corpse very obviously blinks). I could namecheck Jennifer Ashley, Robin Clarke, David Baxt, Trevor Thomas, and the others, but I'd be struggling to tell you who played which character in the film, and what they brought to their roles.

At least some of the design work is good, with the production making use of Chislehurst Caves as a location they could then create the space base sets in. And you get occasional servings of gore, as well as puppet aliens. So it's not all bad, even before you consider the bravery of Geeson putting herself through the discomforts that the role required of her.

Inseminoid is sci-fi horror trash, but it's trash of the highest (or should that be lowest?) order.

5/10

You NEED this set in your life.


Saturday, 16 March 2013

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

I don't know what the general consensus is on this Hammer horror movie but, for me, it's one of the worst of the lot featuring our favourite fanged count. Even if it is also amusingly groovy.
No, no, NO, don't look at the camera.

After Dracula (Christopher Lee) is yet again laid to rest by the brave Van Helsing we move forward to the Britain of the seventies where one of the Count's followers (Christopher Neame as Johnny Alucard) is doing his best to bring the master back to life, allowing him to exact his revenge on the descendants of Van Helsing (Peter Cushing is on board for this instalment and also has a granddaughter played by Stephanie Beacham).

No, no, NO, DON'T look at the camera.
Directed by Alan Gibson and written by Don Houghton, this vampire movie suffers from a number of distracting flaws. First of all, the updating of the ongoing battle between Dracula and Van Helsing to the 1970s makes the movie, ironically, appear much more dated than any other movie in Hammer's Dracula series. Then we have the terrible acting. Cushing and Lee are as good as ever but the support from the "hip youngsters" is cringeworthy. Beacham doesn't do well but even her poor performance is better than most of the others on screen, with the exception of the gorgeous and magnetic Caroline Munro - who is gorgeous and magnetic and I won't hear any different.
Ahhh Caroline, you can look at the camera if you want to. No? Okay.
Everything is flat and unexciting, from the painful script that strives to be down with the kids to the execution of the few set-pieces, and we get a distinct lack of any pleasing bloodletting or lusty behaviour to compensate for the many dull moments.

This photo highlights the complete lack of bloodletting or lusty behaviour.
Is there any way it could be made any worse? Maybe a gratuitous scene featuring a couple of ear-hurting musical numbers from "Stoneground" - who also get namecheked as if they were appearing on some Saturday kid's TV show - with one or two of the band members doing their best to stare at the camera whenever they get the chance (see the top pic as an example). It's a testament to their presence that Lee and Cushing manage to raise this movie to the tier of average. Without them, it would definitely rank even lower.

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dracula-D-1972-DVD-Christopher/dp/B000B7KXDG/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1354657613&sr=1-1