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Inseminoid
Man had landed on the planet before: a fruitless, expensive fiasco of an expedition. Then, fifty years later a smaller but disastrous landing had left two men horribly and unexplainedly dead.
Now a third attempt had so far found nothing but a silent, lifeless world. Until they broke open the underground chamber and discovered in the most vile way imaginable that the planet was not quite dead. That a sleeping life had been waiting for millennia, needing only a chance to breed before escaping to spread like a foul, devouring disease into the lifeblood of the universe.
And to breed it needed the bodies of those who had disturbed it.
Now a third attempt had so far found nothing but a silent, lifeless world. Until they broke open the underground chamber and discovered in the most vile way imaginable that the planet was not quite dead. That a sleeping life had been waiting for millennia, needing only a chance to breed before escaping to spread like a foul, devouring disease into the lifeblood of the universe.
And to breed it needed the bodies of those who had disturbed it.
- GenresHorrorScience Fiction
160 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 5, 2022
I was a fan of Alien when it came out, but I was more intrigued by the mass of rip-offs that flooded the theaters and video stores. Titles like "Creature." "Galaxy Of Terror." And of course, "Inseminoid." I watched it countless times over the years and loved it. Finally, I picked up the novelization and loved it the same.
This is pretty much blow for blow of the movie, although, reading all the gross-out bloodshed and impregnating by alien makes the skin crawl a touch more.
A group of archaeologists put down on a planet that has had a couple of bad explorations throughout the past century. They find hieroglyphic tablets and an alien along with some crystals. They bring them all back to study and that's when the fun starts. Think Alien meets Friday The 13th.
This is pretty much blow for blow of the movie, although, reading all the gross-out bloodshed and impregnating by alien makes the skin crawl a touch more.
A group of archaeologists put down on a planet that has had a couple of bad explorations throughout the past century. They find hieroglyphic tablets and an alien along with some crystals. They bring them all back to study and that's when the fun starts. Think Alien meets Friday The 13th.
July 20, 2022
A spaceship with 10 personnel touch down on a rocky, desolate, uninviting planet for 6 months. A century before people had been here and nothing was found, nothing existed. In a glass case was the body of a Being which was found, the specimen undisturbed for 1000s of years. The Being was 7 foot tall, lizard-like skin, lobster claws, webbed feet, covered with warts and between its legs two foot long rods. One of the crew will come in contact with the Being and go crazy, another crew will shoot a hook into his skull. An autopsy will show his brain had disappeared. The Being will escape, ejaculate into a women crew, put its claws into a stomach, slice through eye sockets spurting blood from the gaping holes. The creature will continue to eat the crew, ripping off arms, gouging on flesh and blood. It will claw into another set of eye sockets and fling the head like a bowling ball. Sandy impregnated by the Being has a violent sexual lust, rides a guy to death, his skin ripped from his dick. She will give birth to twin Beings that will eat the rest of the crew, the mother who gave birth to them, kill the rescue team and fly the spaceship away.
November 26, 2023
Ik zou dit boek ook kunnen schrijven als ik een weekje vrij en buitengewoon smerige seksuele gedachten zou hebben
January 25, 2026
Full review at:
https://gavcrimson.blogspot.com/2026/...
I have a history with Larry Miller's novelisation 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 layed 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 foot 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 predicability 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 sthunted 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 novelisations now. Back in the 1980s the name of the game for novelisations was to reproduce the movie as accurately as possible. Today, when movie novelisations 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 novelisations 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 novelisation, 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 novelisation 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 persuation. 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 arch 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 defence 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 masterclass 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 an New English Library hack. The two most likely candidates there then would be Leo Callan, who wrote a reportedly bare bones novelisation of Piranha for NEL as well as a few slave plantation books for them, which would explain the Inseminoid novelisation's detour into inter-racial love and the dehumanising, 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 novelisation 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. Tantalising 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 novelisation, a plot detour that feels very 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.
https://gavcrimson.blogspot.com/2026/...
I have a history with Larry Miller's novelisation 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 layed 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 foot 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 predicability 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 sthunted 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 novelisations now. Back in the 1980s the name of the game for novelisations was to reproduce the movie as accurately as possible. Today, when movie novelisations 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 novelisations 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 novelisation, 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 novelisation 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 persuation. 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 arch 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 defence 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 masterclass 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 an New English Library hack. The two most likely candidates there then would be Leo Callan, who wrote a reportedly bare bones novelisation of Piranha for NEL as well as a few slave plantation books for them, which would explain the Inseminoid novelisation's detour into inter-racial love and the dehumanising, 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 novelisation 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. Tantalising 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 novelisation, a plot detour that feels very 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.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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