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.
Over 1000! Woot–I was away all afternoon (driving to airport, returning from airport, letting partner have computer to get into Second Life, taking a nap), but WOW, did this thread grow.
Must now catch up….
Oh no, they sold the pool table…he said “come on, that is the most interesting thing about me” to his parents when he found out. Since then there are more interesting things.
Katz – To be honest, I always saw you as a talking seal or sea lion. But I guess I wasn’t looking closely enough.
Wo0t! Over 1,000!
I had a dream last night where my friend was serenading me with Johnathon Coulton songs while I played Magic the Gathering.
Yay!
We shoudl ttlly talk about MTG 😀 Or play on Magic Workstation or Lackey CCG (i’m having trouble connecting to the servers on this laptop tho 🙁 i think it has to do with the firewalls)
@Skyal “DO NOT EVER talk so casually about suicide. EVER. A friend’s 13 year old killed himself last weekend. Everyone who knew him is completely devastated.”
Yus THANK YOU. I tried telling him that earlier too but I have no idea if he paid attn -_-;;
Also I think he said before to Kirbywarp that being TOO tall was bad… that if you were above 6’4″ you lost heightism privilege and you should be 6’2″-6’4″ to have height privilege… xD >_>;;;
Also yay Western Canada! 😀 Are you cheering for the Canucks? Or happy about the return of the Jets? :3
w00t, we aced the 1000 mark! :3
By far! 😀
I wonder if MRAL would allow me to have a voice about circumcision? Or is the entire thing strictly gender divided? o_O;;;
Recently I dreamed that Andrew Fletcher from Depeche Mode and I had just broken up and he was following me around telling me that I was a bad person. It was an oddly disturbing dream.
Ami, I’m not much of a hockey fan (I know, I know, I need to renounce my citizenship) but I am thrilled the Jets are coming back. I know losing them really hit Winnipeg’s economy for awhile.
Frickin overachievers.
I hope everyone imagines me as a fat, talking cartoon bee. God I hope so.
lol Hockey. The only time I care about hockey is Canada woops the US’s ass (sorry all cool USians).
Skyal, thanks actually, for the information. Learning about all that, circumcision does sound pretty horrifying…I think it will still be my boyfriend’s final decision, but I will definitely make sure he knows this shit. And as you say, we’ve a looong time to talk about it.
so everybody thinks I am a big, green hand?
OK, accurate; but I still wish I could remember my Gravatar sign in so I could change it.
Katz, I thought you were some sort of laughing sea lion. But hey, sea lion, non-sea lion, what’s the difference, really?
I had a dream last night in which I was in some weird underground world in which everyone was very, very stupid. I found a secret group of people who weren’t so stupid, but we were being hunted down and had to escape into another even deeper underground world.
We nonetheless were able to communicate with people in Brazil, who lowered down some Orangina for us.
Glad to help Alex. A lot of circumcised men are really defensive about it, understandably, because to decide not to have it done to their own children is to admit that having it done to them was unnecessary. It’s hard to cope with knowing your parents did something so awful to you, even though they either didn’t have a choice (depending on the time/location, some parents were just told it had to be done and that was it) or truly believed it was a good thing. For a lot of men, it’s just easier to believe that it really is a good thing.
And hey, if anyone really thinks that sons and fathers should have “matching” penises, there’s always foreskin restoration for dad. 🙂 http://norm.org/
I feel sorry for all theater janitorial staff who will have to scrub down all the seat-backs after each showing.
Holly: on the internet, everyone knows you’re a dog.
David, that’s the basic plot of every one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels.
Spectator, as much as I love dM, I’ve never dreamed about them. BTW, a retroactively creepy dM video shows them playing “Enjoy the Silence” on top of the World Trade Center.
@Skyal,
I have read somewhere that men who have been circumcised tend to want their sons circumcised, which is why I was kind of surprised about all this MRA talk about mothers being the ones to want their sons circumcised. I’m sure that’s the case sometimes, but to pretend it’s solely mothers making that decision is really inaccurate. I think what nearly does it for me, though, is the idea of the baby having an open wound in a dirty diaper. I know there’s ways around that, but something about that is…so unsanitary and I wonder why I didn’t think of that before. That may even be the thing that sways my boyfriend. The chance of permanent damage really doesn’t sound good either.
I would, however, like to know MRA opinions on when the father wants to circumcise, but the mother doesn’t. Just out of curiosity, how does that fall into “female privilege”? She’s asking the father not to have their son mutilated, which most MRAs seem to agree is mutilation, but they say mothers should let fathers decide. Which is it? Are mothers unfairly circumcising their sons in high numbers where fathers wouldn’t, and thus women should stay out of it? If so, they’re wrong since many fathers are the ones who want to circumcise. Or should mothers protect their sons from circumcision even if the father wants it done? I doubt I’ll get a coherent answer from any MRAs, though, considering this essentially proves yet again that their logic fails. Oh well. As always, I get the best answers from feminists, who generally actually do care about men, just not about maintaining male power (which, you know, is kind of what feminists have been saying all along).
@Johnny Pez–you know, astonishingly this was my first dream about DM and I’m rather miffed it didn’t involve Dave Gahan and the setting for “Strangelove.” I haven’t seen that WTC video, sheesh…
@David: your dream sounds kind of like that Hungarian (?) movie Kontrol. Which is awesome but does not involve orangina;)
Video is here.
MRAL: Well Poster, I think the statistics and the many fymynyst assholes who love to talk about how getting an abortion is like getting a checkup, proves my point for me.
Which statistics? What “many”? Citations please: Show your work.
As to your analogy re war/pregnancy… so much is wrong with that. 1: There is nothing which makes it impossible for women to be soldiers. 2: Soldiers are not the only people who participate in wars; not only do wars kill women who are non-combatants, but non-soldiers often take part in hostile actions.
But women are soldiers, so your analogy fails there. I’ve served with women, in combat zones. A fair number of women, of my personal acquaintance (I refer you to my comments about personal hardship for some examples) have been wounded in combat.
Moreover (as if the previous errors weren’t enough to prove that you aren’t thinking about what you are saying, just trying to be clever), pregnancy doesn’t threaten a single man’s life, while it does kill a significant number of women.
I can’t even begin to try to understand how you think prison rape only affects men. Also I think there is a substantive difference between trying to strip one group of liberties/freedom, and trying to see to it that abuses against a group are reduced. If there was a group out there advocating for prison rape how would you react if feminists said, “well that’s just men, it’s none of our business,”?
I suspect (from previous posts) you’d be out explaining what man-hating asswipes feminists are.
The exact numbers are less clear for women, but women and men suffer prison rape and sexual abuse at about the same rates; the reason there are far more men raped in prison than women is because there are far more men in prison. The people who suffer the highest rates of abuse, by far, are LGBT.
@david-sea lions vs seals http://www.dolphinencounters.com/education-sealionvsseal.php
Sea lions are the betas of pinnipeds, Seals are the omegas (Walruses are totally the alphas, right?)
Seals and sea lions both look like kitties (their faces, anyway), and I love them all equally.
It’s actually Chimaera of Arezzo, but I really don’t expect anyone to guess that.
And yes, everyone thinks it’s a seal.