Three young women wake up, confused and terrified, in a room that looks like a cross between a normal hospital room and the creepy underground lair of some mad scientist from a horror movie. A video screen flickers on and a creepy older man, looking a bit like Academy-award-nominee Robert Loggia, appears on it, telling the women that he’s their “jailer.” The women, you see, had all been getting abortions when their jailer’s shadowy accomplices kidnapped them and brought them to this strange prison, where they will be forced to live for the next seven months until they gave birth. “You were all on the operating table, all ready to commit murder,” announces a mysterious doctor. “Your babies will be given life just as God planned.”
This is the premise of a new horror film called The Life Zone, which recently had its world premiere at the prestigious, er, Hoboken International Film Festival, a festival that was, perhaps not coincidentally, founded and chaired by the film’s writer and producer, Kenneth del Vecchio. In case you think I’m making all this up, here’s the film’s trailer, which makes The Life Zone look a bit like an equal-parts mixture of Saw, Human Centipede, and The Handmaid’s Tale, with Robert Loggia in the role of Jigsaw/Dr. Heiter/The Commander:
Now, if you thought that something seemed really … off about that trailer, well, you’re not alone. For the film is not, as you might have assumed from my description, a warning against the fanatical misogyny of many in the anti-abortion movement.
No, the film – produced by a pro-life former judge, crime thriller author, and Republican New Jersey state senate candidate – is meant as pro-life propaganda. As the offical press release for the film’s premiere put it:
The film, which appears to cut right down the middle [of the abortion debate], examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist. Del Vecchio and the cast invite pro-lifers to come to this historic event.
During the months the three women are held in captivity, you see, they are exposed to a barrage of films and books intended to, er, educate them about abortion –what their attending obstetrician Dr. Wise describes as “an abortion think tank.” Two of the captive women do indeed convert to the pro-life side; apparently we in the audience are supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome along with them. The third, as we see in the trailer, tries to induce a miscarriage, which doesn’t go quite as planned.
And this sets us up for the final twist, which I’m just going to go ahead and reveal: once all three women have given birth, Dr. Wise tells them she’s going to sew them all, mouth-to-vagina, into a Human Abortion-pede!
Actually no: the twist is that the “life zone” the three women in has actually been … purgatory! All three “captives,” you see, had died on the operating table while getting their abortions. (Apparently they went to the world’s worst abortion clinic, as first-trimester abortions don’t involve anything more surgically invasive than the insertion of a suction tube; the risk of death from a legal surgical abortion is 0.0006%, one in 160,000 cases, making the procedure many times safer than childbirth itself.) Their time in the “life zone” was a test: the two women who changed their minds were whisked up to heaven, while their miscarriage-attempting, stubbornly pro-choice companion is sent straight to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. Dr. Wise, despite being on the right side of the abortion question, also goes to hell for committing suicide. And, oh yeah, their jailer – Loggia – was Satan. Why Satan and a hell-bound doctor were the ones trying to convert the abortion ladies to the pro-life side I can’t tell you; del Vecchio’s theology is evidently more sophisticated than I am.
The real twist here? As Jersey Journal writer Alan Robb notes:
The Life Zone went viral across the internet [last] Friday after blogs The Frisky and Talking Points Memo picked up on the film’s trailer. … But despite garnering more than 20,000 hits on YouTube in the last four days, only fifty people – including the film’s cast and producers – attended this weekend’s screening, and even those who starred in the movie didn’t know how to interpret its twist ending.
It’s impossible to tell from the trailer if the film is bad in a so-bad-it’s-good way, or if it’s just plain awful. I will try to get hold of it when it hits video, and will report back with my results.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a good horror film set in a creepy hospital, try renting Infection, a Japanese film from 2005. Or, if you’ve got a longer attention span, try Lars Von Trier’s supernatural soap opera The Kingdom, a darkly comic miniseries which takes place in what one might call, paraphrasing Bill Murray’s character in Tootsie, “one nutty hospital.” Both are conveniently available on Netflix instant watch, so you don’t even have to leave your pregnancy dungeon to see them.
EDITED: Added some info on the minimal dangers of abortion procedures.
The most fascinating thing (ignores all the ICKY parts) here is the disparity between going VIRAL and attendance at actual film–given all the fond belief by corps that if you get enough people on the internet talking about your widge, prosperity will follow. That…actually is encouraging.
*firmly ignores the whole fuckfest that is the film itself*
Although I do love what could be done with idea of Satan being a pro-lifer……….(in fanfic I mean)
I read about this on The Frisky a few days ago, and agree with what a commenter there said: It’d make for a hell of an actual horror movie if it wasn’t propaganda. Because, holy fuck, is that a scary prospect. And I say that as a former patient of an abortionplex.
M. Night Shyamalan, paging M. Night Shyamalan…
Good lord, that was a dumber twist then the Village’s.
Also? What is with them dying on the “operating table”? It makes it sound like they cut you open in an abortion, when (especially first trimester), they absolutely do not. Also? Isn’t the number of fatalities from abortions really low? And really really low during the first trimester? Yeah, after googling. Guttmacher says:
The risk of abortion complications is minimal: Fewer than 0.3% of abortion patients experience a complication that requires hospitalization.[10]
• Abortions performed in the first trimester pose virtually no long-term risk of such problems as infertility, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) or birth defect, and little or no risk of preterm or low-birth-weight deliveries.[11] (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html)
Not that it seems like this movie was based on anything remotely factual, but this just makes it worse.
Not only creepy, but ridiculous. A woman’s chance of dying during a first-trimester abortion, if it’s at a legitimate clinic staffed by competent professionals, is quite low.
I also noticed that this film has a definite Catholic flavor to it. Interestingly, despite what the Pope and Rick Santorum have to say, American Catholics these days are slightly more likely than Protestants to support abortion rights.
Part of the so-called pro-life narrative is that abortion hurts women. It doesn’t really, but it’s a way for the forced-birth crowd to pretend they actually care about women. Of course, it’s also a scare tactic to dissuade women from having abortions. There’s even a “the Pill Kills” campaign to frighten women into not using birth control, which kind of gives the lie to their contention that they don’t really want to punish women for having sex and that it’s all about the baybeez.
Facts and figures? Based on the type of God that seems to be running things in this movie, It seems likely that the Alpha and Omega killed them to teach them a lesson.
I find it ironic that for all that’s wrong with the film, it still passes the Bechdel test.
So the moral is, if you get an abortion it will kill you. And if it doesn’t kill you, then you’d better be really sorry about it and try to love the clump of cells you had extracted because otherwise you’ll spend eternity being pregnant and giving birth?
Wow, they straight up make the claim that pregnancy and childbirth are punishments right out of hell. And they’re the pro-life side? I don’t even.
100 percent medically* inaccurate.**
*Also theologically and morally.
**I miss three days ago, when I had never heard of “The Human Centipede.”
Hmm. Kind of a theological mish-mash going on here. Definite Catholic flavor (Purgatory, the hellbound suicide), but in Catholic doctrine, Purgatory isn’t a place where you’re tested. It’s a place where your soul is purified before you enter Heaven (which is no longer in doubt; if you’ve made it to Purgatory, you’ve made it to Heaven). Essentially, it’s God’s shower room.
But okay, I’ve seen Purgatory portrayed as a place of “one last chance” testing in fiction before. Fine. Fair enough. But if the wimminz are allowed a chance at redemption, then why not the doctor? If we’re going by Catholic dogma, then his crime is exactly the same as the women’s – murder (of himself, in his case). They died before they could repent, so did he. Why do they get a chance and not him? Do we have a situation like in the Saw series where he already had his test, and part of his punishment for failing was to participate in the testing of later victims?
And Satan! Since when does Satan try to help redeem souls? Even the Old Testament, Book of Job Satan was God’s prosecuting attorney. If Satan was interfering at all, wouldn’t it be to “rescue” them, or maybe offer a means of inducing abortion some months into the process, after
Stockholm Syndrome has set inthey’ve been converted to Pro-Lifedom? You know, a final test?Or am I already putting more thought into this than the filmmaker did?
I think the fact that it is actually propaganda is what makes this film so terrifying. They’ve basically discarded any pretensions of benevolence, their rhetoric at this point boils down to “don’t get an abortion, OR ELSE.” The twist ending just serves to shunt responsibility for such a brutal mindset off to God instead of them. This is seriously making me feel ill.
Taking one for the team, eh?
Just remember when your eyes are bleeding, you were asking for it.
I don’t see what’s so weird about this. Pro-lifers are mostly religious people, because biologically a fetus is clearly not alive. Therefore, pro-lifers, almost by definition, have to believe in spiritualism and the soul and all that good stuff.
What’s this shit about “pretending” to care for women? Clearly, if women are saved from hell, that’s good for them. Thus, in the PL’s mind, they are indeed helping women. Not that I’m pro-life, I’m pro-choice, but I just like taking you arrogant and shame-happy fymynysts down a peg.
MRAL: Weren’t you going to go off for a month or two and um do stuff and then report back to us? What happened to that plan?
I realized that since I’m in a very quiet hometown for the next few weeks, there isn’t too much to do in that department. I’m trying to keep busy on my own and I’ll be around here a lot less. When I go back to Boston in July I’ll stop for good.
Pro-lifers, especially of the Catholic variety, don’t value the lives of pregnant women as much as they value the life of the fetus she’s carrying. This is what people mean when they say “pretend to care.” You can see this sentiment all over pro-life blogs and comments, but the best example I can think of just now is this: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/05/dwelling-in-the-possibilities-of-a-ldquowin-winrdquo
A woman with severe, life-threatening hypertension at 11 weeks. The nun administering the Catholic hospital where she was treated approved an abortion procedure which saved this woman’s life. She was already a mother twice-over, and it was a wanted pregnancy, but continuing it would have killed her. Setting aside the preposterous wishful thinking of the article itself, if you peruse the comments, you will find pro-lifers arguing the a “true mother” would have “given her life for her child’s”, i.e. refused the abortion and continued with the almost certainly fatal pregnancy. Thing is, the mother would have died well before 20 weeks, the earliest possible recorded time any fetus has been successfully delivered and survived. And even survival at 20 weeks is vanishingly rare, as in only 3 documented children born at 20 weeks are currently living, in the entire world. The sentiment is, if the choice is her life or the pregnancy, the mother should just resign herself to death. This is not caring about women.
I think caring about the fetus more is reasonable, if you think the fetus is alive. The mother has had a life, the (supposed) baby has had none. The choice is clear. If I was more religious and thought the fetus was alive I’d value its life more than the mother’s too.
No, that is not what you are doing. What are you doing is being illogical and rude again.
Go back to your meditation MRAL-and while you are there, remember the clump of cells in a woman’s uterus are alive but not human. Much like the zit on your nose is alive (with bacteria!) but not human.
The example you cite, okay, that’s pretty weird.
Or consider the story of St. Gianna Molla, who carried her fourth pregnancy to term even though she was told it would almost certainly kill her. It did, and she was canonized by the Catholic church. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianna_Molla
She is often cited as an example of a “good Catholic mother.”
The message being, your life, woman, is not as important as your (potential) child’s, in the eyes of God and the Church. This is not caring about women.
Please point me to a post in which I stated that the fetus was alive, because I don’t think it is. However, if you’re a spiritual person, I can reasonably understand how you could come to a different conclusion, and thus the mocking of “anti-choicers” (mature) in the fymynyst myvement shows the immaturity of the myvement. And this is DESPITE the fact that I’m pro-choice.
On the other side… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-Life_(Masters_of_Horror)
I have never seen this movie, just the cover for it in a movie store.
Also this is sort of a rip off of the Christopher Pike book “Whisper of Death” which is hilariously recapped here: http://likepike.blogspot.com/2008/10/whisper-of-death.html
… Back to lurking.
I don’t mock forced-birthers, I donate to Planned Parenthood to spite them.
I will say I do think that a lot of women get abortions at the drop of a hat. This is their right and I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong. But something- latent emotional response- to me suggests that abortion should be kind of a big deal. This is not the case, and I think it’s due to the pampering of women, the privileged class, by society. Thus, a good chunk, though not all, of them become so weak and arrogant they can barely stand any hardship.