There was a very specific mini-boom in sci-fi horror after Alien landed. Suddenly every other film seemed to revolve around the same basic idea: a group of scientists, soldiers, or explorers stumble across a derelict ship, a dead civilisation, or some miserable rock in deep space… something gets inside one of them…and then they all die one by one.
Inseminoid sits squarely in that niche. Only instead of tightening things up into something tense and atmospheric, it sort of unravels into a sticky, chaotic mix of sci-fi, slasher, and exploitation cinema.
Also known as Horror Planet (which feels like the title they should’ve just stuck with) this is a low-budget British sci-fi horror directed by Norman J. Warren, a man who made a career out of slightly off-kilter genre films that never quite behave the way you expect them to.
The setup is pure post-Alien recycling. A team of twelve scientists working for something called the Xeno Project are stationed on a distant, freezing planet, excavating the ruins of a long-dead alien civilisation. They find cave systems, strange glowing crystals, and wall markings suggesting some kind of dualistic alien society
Naturally, they poke at it. Naturally, this goes badly. An explosion in the caves leaves one crew member dead and another…not quite right. Things continue to get worse for the crew with a series of accidents and incidents. This culminates when one of their number, Sandy (Judy Geeson), goes down into the caves where she has a (ahem) close encounter with an alien lifeform that leaves her knocked up and under the influence of whatever intelligence is lurking beneath the surface.
From there, the film doesn’t so much build tension as it just flips a switch. Sandy goes feral and starts killing people and drinking their blood. One by one, the crew get picked off as she protects whatever’s growing inside her. At that point, Inseminoid basically stops pretending to be sci-fi horror and turns into a slasher set in a space base. Which, to be fair, is where it’s at its most entertaining.
You get moments like Sandy smashing a guy’s head in with a rock in the caves, dragging bodies back through the tunnels like some kind of feral animal, or calmly siphoning blood from corpses like she’s just doing a bit of routine maintenance. There’s also something unintentionally funny about the way she just appears in corridors out of nowhere, covered in grime and blood, while the rest of the cast react like they’ve just seen someone nick the last biscuit.
Because for all its obvious borrowing, this isn’t really trying to replicate Alien’s atmosphere. It’s louder, messier, and far more interested in throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. There’s a lot of running around, a lot of shouting, and a general sense that nobody is entirely sure what’s supposed to be happening from one scene to the next.
And yet, for all that chaos, there’s something about the tone that works against it. There’s this really unpleasant, joyless atmosphere running through the whole thing that makes it hard to even enjoy as a cheesy slice of sci-fi horror. It’s not the premise itself – it’s the tone. Everything just feels so dour and flat, like the film isn’t having any fun and doesn’t particularly want you to either, it’s just going through the motions.
Visually, it’s exactly what you’d expect from that setup. Tight, grimy, industrial… and at times it genuinely feels like you’re watching a particularly bleak episode of Red Dwarf. The cave stuff works better – there’s at least some claustrophobia there – but most of the time it just looks like a set trying very hard not to look like a set.
Which makes sense, given how it was made. The film was shot largely in Chislehurst Caves in Kent, with some additional location work in Malta and studio shooting in London. You can feel that in every frame – those endless tunnels doing double duty as alien environments, and the base interiors looking like they’re one hard shove away from falling apart.
Performance-wise, things are a bit all over the place. The acting in the first half is pretty stiff, but it feels almost intentional, like they’re trying to present this crew as a more professional, slightly sterile, Star Trek-style outfit rather than Alien’s working-class space truckers.
There are actually a few recognisable names buried in here as well. Judy Geeson was already a fairly established British actress by this point, and she ends up doing most of the heavy lifting. You’ve also got Victoria Tennant and Stephanie Beacham popping up, both of whom would go on to have much bigger careers in film and television. Not that you’d necessarily know it from this.
When the chaos starts to hit the fan, however, the performances actually improve quite a bit. Judy Geeson, in particular, goes all in once Sandy starts to unravel. The shift is abrupt, but she commits to it. By the time she’s fully gone – dealing with psychosis, paranoia, and whatever’s happening inside her – she’s playing it exactly as the film needs: erratic, unstable, and properly distressed.
The rest of the cast exist mostly to die. I mean, it’s a bog standard example of it’s genre, what else is there to say. For a group of supposed professionals, they make some impressively bad choices. Instead of working together, they keep splitting off into smaller groups, wandering into obvious danger, and getting picked off one by one. It’s like, there’s half a dozen of you fucks and one of her. Maybe all go after her at once and rush her?
Mind you, if anyone thought logically in these films you wouldn’t have a story. A lot of these early-80s sci-fi horrors – usually orbiting the same low-budget ecosystem as Roger Corman productions – exist just to put a guy in a rubber suit and have the cast killed off in increasingly elaborate ways. Which of course, only exists so that there can be a scene where one of the female cast gets raped and nutted in by some alien monstrosity.
The most infamous example of this is Galaxy of Terror, where Taaffe O’Connell‘s character gets raped by a giant worm. I looked this up, as I didn’t think worms even have dicks, but apparently they do and they “duel” with them to determine which of the pairing gets to bear the load as it where. I guess she lost.
Inseminoid sits firmly in that same wheelhouse. It doesn’t dwell quite as long, thankfully, but the core idea is very much there. It’s done with far less titillation though. Yes, Sandy ends up completely naked for the “process”, but it’s not up there worm slavering all over Taaffe O’Connell’s tits. Hang on, why would a worm be interested in tits? Ah, who cares.
All in all, Inseminoid isn’t a good film in any traditional sense. It’s uneven, cheap, and about as subtle as a brick through a window. But if you’ve got a soft spot for that very specific post-Alien wave of sci-fi horror, there’s something here. Just don’t go into it actually expecting Alien.
Or any kind of sensible decision-making, for that matter. Especially when there’s a very obvious solution to the film’s central “problem” that nobody even considers.
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