Sexmission

 Sexmission is a 1982 Polish Science Fiction film.  For several reasons, I would like to claim that this movie is an unheralded "cult" classic, a riotous and campy comedy along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (a movie that I don't much like myself but that others have acclaimed.  Alas, the film is a clunky, low-budget enterprise with lots of tits and ass but not much else to engage the imagination.  Further, as the film proceeds, it develops into a sub-literate and tedious political allegory, apparently scoring fatuous points against the collapsing and equally fatuous Polish Communist party.  It would also be fun to say that the movie is so bad that it's good.  But this would also be untrue. The movie is bad enough, and not really mean-spirited (some of its character have a goofy Slavic charm).  But the film is too self-aware, too intentional in its wrongness -- unintentional wrongness can have a certain naive charm as witness some of the films by Ed Wood; but this picture is designed to be bad in certain specific ways and there's nothing worse than high culture masquerading as inept low vulgarity:  the high cultural pretension remains while the contrived vulgarity is affected and false.

Sexmission involves an experiment in hibernation gone wrong. (It's plot is similar in outline to Woody Allen's Sleeper).  Two dimwitted and hapless "cosmonaut" types volunteer to be frozen for three years -- these being Polish military, they stash away some vodka and cigarettes for their awakening.  The experiment is conducted by a sinister-looking scientist in a wheel chair, a bit on the order of Dr. Strangelove.  He's previously frozen a chimp who appears at a press conference to grope the buxom lady newscaster..  The two cosmonauts wake up from their slumber not three years later, but in the year 2084,  They are imprisoned in a sterile suite by a group of women who periodically remove their tops and strut around half-naked.  As we come to learn, all men are extinct and these two anabiosis explorers (anabiosis = hibernation) find themselves the center of much interest and distrust by the gynocracy.  Ultimately, the dominatrix rulers of this terrible regiment of women decide to "naturalize" the heroes by castrating them.  (These elements of the plot seem derived from Planet of the Apes.)  The heroes escape from their cell with the help of comely blonde scientist who is, as you might say, "curious" about the attributes of the protagonists.  (The women all pop pills at intervals to quash their sexual instincts; they reproduce by in vitro or test-tube technology.)  A long and witless chase ensues through what looks like an east Silesian salt mine.  It turns out that the women's colony is far underground.  At last, after various adventures and perils, the two men find a silo with a periscope that shows the surface of the planet ravaged by fire and radiation.  This is the outcome of the war in which the sinister scientist in the wheelchair launched the "M-Bomb" and wiped out all the men on earth.  The heroes and the comely blonde scientist climb up a ladder to the hellish inferno on the surface.  But this turns out to simulated.  In fact, beyond the backdrop scanned by the periscope, there's a nice Polish forest with a villa and gardens.  The men go there to have sex with the girls -- the blonde having been joined by an attractive brunette guard who has followed them tot he surface.  The commissar from underground, a burly-looking middle-aged woman, turns out to be living "high on the hog" in this villa, profiting from the fraud perpetrated on the women underground.  (By this point, the film has devolved into a surly commentary on the Socialist regime in Poland -- the infernal surface an allegory for the State media's portrayal of the Western Democracies.)  The Commissar turns out to be a man disguised as a woman and, so, in fact, the gynocracy turns out to be just another iteration of the patriarchy.  The cosmonauts have seeded the in vitro cells with male chromosomes and to the dismay of the subterranean race of women, the new crop of babies are all male.  The movie ends with a big close-up of a male infant's penis -- so much for women's liberation.

The film is shot in ultra-cheesy, late seventies style -- huge camera flares disfigure the images (and are used to conceal the bargain basement sets).  The action scenes are staged like Three Stooges routine.  The cast of women routinely strip naked for no reason at all other than to get lots of nudity on screen.  The acting is cartoonish although the chubby little cosmonaut is winsome -- I think he later starred in a series of well-known art films by Krystof Kieslowski..)  There are some good gags in the film's first 15 minutes which promises a lot -- but the film can't sustain the energy.  The last funny shot occurs when the cosmonauts wake up, light their cigarettes, and, then, are attacked by a half-dozen women spraying fire extinguishers at them; they are drenched in white foam.  After that image, the film is just a slog though increasingly idiotic scenes until its end.  Midway, the film loses the courage of its comedic convictions and turns into political and social satire.  At points, the moviemakers don't know whether they're serious about this stuff or mocking it -- for instance, there are some shots of a hyper-modern geriatric rest home featuring an old woman who has nostalgia for the good old days.  This part of the movie seems sentimentally serious.  

I had hoped that the movie would be good, or, at least, amusingly bad.  My friend, Rick Herreid, apparently acquired the movie just before he was unexpectedly struck down by a fatal heart attack.  He was apparently planning to screen the movie at an annual event that we call the Afton Film Festival.  This is an all-male gathering at a cabin on the beautiful banks of the St. Croix River in Afton, Minnesota.  At the so-called Film Festival, participants drink and watch films that "their wives would not let them watch at home" -- that is, Westerns, horror movies, soft-core porn, and the like.  Rick didn't get to show Sexmission because of his death just before the Film Festival was to convene in 2019.  Later, his wife Karen found the movie, still wrapped in plastic and unopened, among Rick's things. And, so, we screened the movie at Afton on November 6, 2021 in honor of our departed friend.  The movie was a bust, but, of course, redeemed in some respect by fond memories of Rick, a person who was exemplary in all respects.