Fridae

In even the darkest moments during my work as a reviewer, I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as a bad movie – you just have to tilt your head at a funny angle, squint hard at it with one eye closed, and presto – you’ll have a decent movie.

There’s plenty of brickbats to throw at The Back-up Plan, an alleged romcom that has the highest amount scatological jokes since the modern jock comedy was invented, and whose scriptwriter had to dig so hard for jokes, she even had to make an elderly character scream “Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!” several times in rapid succession.

But I sincerely believe that Alan Poul is a genius who must have been chemically inspired when he started thinking of The Back-up Plan. Now, imagine what would happen if MGM released Species and marketed it as a romantic comedy for Mother’s Day, fit to watch with your date or alternatively, the woman who gave birth to you. It’s so wrong, and yet it’s so right in a very twisted way.

Alan Poul casts Jennifer Lopez as the Natasha Henstridge of this horror comedy. Lopez, inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor (a horror movie no-no there!), becomes pregnant in double-quick time (ominous enough?) and develops to the numbed horror of her new boyfriend (Alex O’Loughlin, channelling the hapless protagonist and reluctant father from David Lynch’s Eraserhead), several disturbing habits that reference tropes from the body horror genre and Species: a voracious appetite for food, an insatiable sexual appetite, a new-found talent for projectile vomiting, and the development of an alien logic that renders her actions incomprehensible to thinking humans watching this film.

If Lopez’s character were to jump up and chomp off her love interest’s head in one bite, we wouldn’t have been surprised – given how she carries her role with the appropriate amount of menace and inhuman logic and how he seems to play a man haunted by the realisation that pregnancy is a very alien condition.

Kudos to director Alan Poul, with his unique horror comedy take on pregnancy and motherhood!