Inseminoid was written by Nick and Gloria Maley, a married couple who had been part of the special effects team on Warren's earlier film Satan's Slave.
Deciphering the wall markings, exolinguist Mitch theorises that the civilisation was built on a concept of dualism: the planet orbits a binary star and seems to have been ruled by twins.
After exiting the base, leaving the airlock's outer door open, he throws Gail into a pile of twisted metal, damaging her environmental suit and trapping her foot.
Documentation officer Kate Carson shoots the returning Ricky with a harpoon gun before he opens the inner airlock door and evacuates all of the base's air.
With the base in ruins and all the occupants dead or missing, commandos Corin and Roy abandon the search for survivors and shuttle pilot Jeff radios Xeno for clearance to return.
[3] After this production collapsed without a finished script, Warren and producer Richard Gordon took on a story idea from the husband-and-wife duo of Nick and Gloria Maley, who had supplied the special effects on Satan's Slave.
[3] Beacham, who had two young children at the time, accepted the role of Kate to support her family, recalling in a 2003 interview: "I had to choose between a play that I really, really wanted to do, which would have paid me £65 a week, and this script for a film called Inseminoid.
In late June, the crew travelled to the island of Gozo in Malta for a location shoot lasting two days, during which they filmed the long shots set on the planet's surface.
[1][3] Warren said that given Inseminoid's low budget, filming the underground scenes in actual caves produced a more realistic result than any potential studio option.
[3] However, the cold, damp and airless conditions inside the caves, compounded by the uneven terrain, caused numerous minor injuries among the cast and crew as well as damage to filming equipment.
Gordon felt that these uncomfortable working conditions made the actors' performances more credible: "I think all this paid off in terms of what we got on the screen for the budget, but the circumstances were very difficult.
As filming started to fall behind schedule, Warren was forced to cut some of the scenes of Ricky's rampage inside the caves: "Three pages of script, which I had to condense into one shot.
According to Warren, Clarke often refused to follow instructions, opting instead to give his own interpretation of the script to a point where every scene featuring him became "an uphill struggle" to film.
Warren remembered that during preparations for a fight scene, he lost his temper with Clarke: "Robin kept on ranting and raving about his ideas to the point where I couldn't take it any more.
[3][9] The film's UK promotion included regional advertising mail comprising a flyer which showed a screaming Geeson as Sandy, with the tagline "Warning!
[1] Writing for Starburst magazine, Alan Jones expressed a preference for the British members of the cast, calling Geeson "absolutely first-rate" but criticising the "weak performances from the token Americans" Clarke and Ashley.
"[4] In the US, the Los Angeles Times described Inseminoid as "one of the most excruciatingly violent and nauseating space horror films within recent memory", with "imaginative set design and good production values, but none of that matters [...] The torture, inhumanity and exploitation are ferocious [...] This is dangerous and vile filmmaking.
"[1] Variety commented that "[d]espite a generally good cast, [the] absence of an interesting script, and corners-cutting on the special effects side, spell a quick payoff.
"[1] Edward Jones of Virginia's The Free Lance–Star praised the "novel touch" of casting an expectant mother as the villain, but added that "in what has to be a new low, even for extraterrestrial-horror films, all the men end up punching this pregnant woman in the stomach."
"[17] In a review for the Boca Raton News, Skip Sheffield branded the film "horrible" and "cheapo", advising readers to "imagine Alien without the fantastic sets, convincing special effects and literate dialogue, and you have a picture of Horror Planet."
Reviewer Cavett Binion calls Geeson's performance "more than a bit uncomfortable to watch", describes the rape scene as "surreal and truly disgusting" and considers the choice of title "sleazy".
In Alien, Ripley undresses at the end and displays herself as pleasurable to the audience; similarly, Inseminoid asserts the durability of established gender roles, despite the survival of the twins.
However, unlike Alien, Inseminoid retains its power to disturb, as Sandy's words to Mark resound long after the final frame [...] The generative mother has spoken, reinforced her eternal presence, and departed to haunt the dreams of men.
[10] Wright considers the Alien connection potentially "exploitative";[22] to Barry Langford of the University of London, it underlines UK cinema's dependence on its US counterpart.
[4] Edward Jones argues that the plot of Inseminoid also borrows from the novel Dracula (1897), the TV series The Bionic Woman (1976–78) and the films The Thing from Another World (1951) and Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Wright argues that Inseminoid is reminiscent of Demon Seed (1977), in which a woman is raped and impregnated by an artificially-intelligent computer: "in both films, women are framed as 'Other' by their sexual congress with more conventional iconic others: the machine and the alien."
Sandy's impregnation, conflicting with the suppression of fertilisation represented by Karl's hypodermic (and phallic) needle, reveals "coherent sexism": it "attacks the very notion of female sexual freedom, while suggesting, paradoxically, that contraception is the responsibility of women."
[10] Comparing the plot of Inseminoid to religious scripture, Christopher Partridge of Lancaster University refers to the twins as "essentially space Nephilim, technological demons with appetites and habits reminiscent of the mythic forebears.
The deaths of the archaeologists are attributed to an "internal disturbance of some kind", which Wright describes as "an ironic phrase which encapsulates the film's vision of pregnancy as an irruption of Otherness from within.
"[10] On the subject of Larry Miller's novelisation, which he calls "imaginative and misogynistic", Wright notes a number of scenes that are absent from the film and distort the female form, causing revulsion in the reader.