Progeny

(1998)

Jillian McWhirter film clips. Samples below.

Scoop's brief notes on Jillian:

This film came near the end of Jillian McWhirter's career as a Queen B. After a string of roles in genre films in the nineties, Jillian virtually disappeared from the business about ten years ago. IMDb has little info about her, and she has no Wikipedia page. She does have a Facebook page, under the name Jill McWhirter, but it makes no mention of her acting career!

Since she graduated from high school in 1980, so she would be about 48 now.

Scoop's notes on the film:

A doctor and his wife both black out one night for two hours, immediately after they had seen a flash of blue light in their bedroom. The wife soon reveals that she is pregnant and she thinks she conceived on blackout night. The husband is worried for two reasons:

• under hypnosis, he has revealed that his wife was abducted by aliens that night
• his sperm count shows that he cannot father a child

Oops!

The baby starts kicking at two months, and soon seems to be controlling the mother's actions. Wilford Brimley, her gyno, puts her on an all-oatmeal diet because it's the right thing to do. The oatmeal doesn't do much, but he also gives her an ultrasound, which reveals that the baby looks like a cross between Bruce the Shark and one of those wide-eyed kids in the Walter Keane paintings. The parent aliens are always vigilant, and need to protect their vile spawn, so they short out the ultrasound and give Wilford a heart attack. Without Wilfy's testimony, nobody will believe the father when he says what he saw on that screen.

Brad Dourif shows up as some kind of UFO expert, with evidence that the exact same sort of impregnation has happened in Russia. The doc decides that he better to give his wife a c-section to save her - oh, and by the way, to save the world. Dourif is also present in the operating room, filming the operation to prove that they are not mad. Needless to say, the two of them had greatly underestimated the vigilance and power of the aliens. During the operation the blue light appears again, and the doc blacks out again. When he comes to, his wife is stone dead, he's being arrested for her murder, Dourif and his camera have disappeared, and the alien fetus is nowhere to be found.

We see the father in prison. He sees a blue light. Then - a guard walks by, and his cell is empty.

The End ????

The basic idea was to make a high grade horror flick, ala Poltergeist, shooting it with a rich palette on good film stock, and hiring real actors, etc. Looked good on paper. Sounded like a good idea. Didn't work out. Wrong script, and the aliens look downright silly, like those plastic worms that little boys use to make girls scream.

The script revealed almost immediately that there really were aliens, and the director showed us that they looked exactly like gummi worms. The film would have worked much better from a psychological approach where the parents (and the audience) were never quite sure whether the aliens were delusional. Toss out the low sperm count factor, toss out the hypnosis, and let them wonder why there were so many abnormalities in her pregnancy. That approach would have heightened the drama. When he gave his wife a c-section, for example, the doc would be wondering whether the whole thing might be in his head, and thinking that he might be destroying his own human daughter. Such an approach would have eliminated the problem inherent in showing the silly latex monsters, because the unknown is always scarier than any monsters which can be portrayed on screen, especially when the monsters are shown in clear and lingering shots.

Interestingly, the script was based on some "actual" documented cases of alien abduction, and some of that documentation is included in the extra DVD features. Sadly enough, that was the most interesting thing about the film.