Forbidden Zone: Alien Abduction (1996)

Posted on Sep 05, 2007 under Exploitation, Sci-fi |

aka Alien Abduction: Intimate Secrets

Directed by Lucian S. Diamonde
Written by Vernon Lumley
Starring
- Darcy DeMoss
- Meredyth Holmes
- Pia Reyes
- Dumitru Bogomaz
- Carmen Lacatus
Produced by Vlad and Oana Paunescu
Executive produced by Alan B. Bursteeen (and Charles Band, uncredited)

This movie was first released in the late ’90s via Charles Band’s “Cult Video” line, which was almost exclusively used to re-release older, Empire-era films such as The Day Time Ended (1980) and Parasite (1982). The inclusion of Forbidden Zone: Alien Abduction here seems to me to be the result of consternation over the finished product. Though possessing probably as much nudity as the average Surrender Cinema release (at least in their R-rated cuts), it nevertheless contrasted with the story content and general tenor of those releases. But it also didn’t have the camp factor of a “normal” Full Moon release, and still showed too obviously that, at one level, it had been crafted to show off breasts. So it went to Cult Video where, by dint of its being neither fish nor fowl, it could at least huddle under the “cult” umbrella.

“A sci-fi flick? Wait, I auditioned for a shampoo commercial!”

Structurally, the entire movie takes place inside a private steam room and pool, where five girlfriends have gathered to chitchat, with the memories and flashbacks from their conversations taking us out of the single set. Veronica (Meredyth Holmes), the shy New-Agey blonde, and two of the others had been on a road trip through Europe earlier in the year, and so once the topic turns to romantic experiences and fantasies (and one of the other two girls gives her account of an erotic massage that has absolutely nothing to so with the rest of the movie), these three — Veronica, Sheri (Darcy DeMoss) and Tedra (Pia Reyes) start discussing what happened to them one cold night when their rental car broke down on a Romanian backroad.

Except they each have different stories to tell, and take turns interrupting and telling sections of their own experiences. Sheri had hitched a ride with a veterinarian (Dumitru Bogomaz) on his way to an appointment, and ended up helping him in a procedure that became more and more surreal. After waiting for a couple of hours, Tedra had decided to jog back to the last town they passed, and ends up following a nocturnal jobber (Bogomaz, again) who leads her to an abandoned cottage. And Veronica…

She has few first-person memories of that night, but as her traveling companions recount the details of their own adventures — details which they admit they had completely forgotten before this telling — Veronica realizes that she can remember the details of the other two girls’ experiences as well, almost as if she had been there watching.

“HOOO! Nope, not drunk enough yet!”

Each of the other two girls’ memories seem to tie directly into their own fantasies and desires. Sheri plans to be a vet, and thus her excursion with the local veterinarian is more than a little fortuitous; her housecall with him gets even more bizarre, as they first strip naked and cleanse themselves of urban pollutants with an odd triangular bar of orange soap, then attend to not an animal, but a woman who believes she’s a horse, whom Sheri them rescues. (As luck would have it, she’s always had a sexual fantasy about rescuing someone. Just in case you were wondering how they would slip in the requisite lesbian scenario.)

Tedra, on the other hand, has always accepted her role as the “college slut,” a loser who keeps giving to everyone who wants to take; her adventure with the jogging man ends up on a strange arena where she bests him, and then, finding herself the winner for the first time, she gives up to him the trophy — a trophy built around a orange triangular gem.

“Now this won’t…um…”

Yeah, I know, surreal. And if you were to rent this movie solely for the nudity, you’d probably end up feeling vaguely cheated without knowing why. It’s certainly not a problem with quantity; each of the five girlfriends spends time topless, plus several other actresses. But while it is definitely a sexual movie, it’s not terribly sexy, because the nudity and sexual situations always take place during those most surreal scenes which highlight the mystery of what happened to those three girls that night. It’s hard to be engaged by the spectacle of skin while also puzzling over what’s really going on.

The surreal character of the film is heightened by the fact that it was pretty obviously written to take advantage of whatever standing sets were available for a day or two at the Castle Film studios. There’s even a short scene in the Western Village set (I’d recognize that diagonal saloon door anywhere!), to dispel any doubts on that account.

The Castel western set. It’s like my own personal Hotel California.

The performances are, on the whole, must better than one would expect from a softcore skin flick. Pia Reyes is especially surprising as Tedra; I’m not saying she’s one of the great undiscovered thespians of the last couple of decades, but after toiling through any number of “sexy Asian chick” roles in movies like Auntie Lee’s Meast Pies (1993) and a slew of Playboy videos, she probably found it a relief to be cast in a role in which an actress was expected to, you know, act.

I’ve remarked before that I try to judge movies by the standards to which they aspire, which means that my assessment of this movie is problematic. Whoever “Lucian S. Diamonde” is (and this movie’s status as sole credit for that name suggests to me that it’s a pseudonym), he and screenwriter Vernon Lumley attempted to make a more thought-provoking film than the standard Twilight Entertainment production. Unfortunately, hampered by budget and production requirements (”Here’s a half-dozen sets and twice that many breasts — make me a movie!”), the resulting feature is something deeper than it needed to be, but not as deep as it wanted to be.

“You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear you over the roar of the ocean in my hat.”

Oh, you want to know what it all means? In a nutshell, the man they all encountered was an alien, trying to perpetuate his genetic heritage (if you know what I mean, and I think you do). By reading the girls’ fantasies, he could present to each a scenario in which they could willingly give and receive gratification; because Veronica was already a bit of a space cadet, her ultimate fantasy of sex with spacemen was close enough to reality that the illusion couldn’t hold. There are themes here that we also see in Lolida 2000 (1997) and Femalien (1996), but here there was an honest effort to make the themes into more than an excuse for sci-fi-flavored nookie.