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.
Last night, I dreamed a giant marshmallow was eating me….
…when I woke up, my boyfriend had a very satisfied look on his face.
…and I was missing a kidney.
Sometimes I dream that I’m in college, but it’s not the college I actually went to; it’s an imaginary college that my dream-state has conjured up.
Only 25 to go, but I’ve got to go make dinner. Drat!
@ PfkaE
Island in the Sea of Time
I’ve had a bunch of terrifying dreams where I’d be at school, running late for some really important class. Or possibly have a massive homework assignment due that I didn’t know about until just then. I’d get dressed, stress out, run off to class, then wake up still in my room. It takes me ages to shake the “forgot something” feeling… bleugh….
In theory, I could now reach the Magic Number by posting the letters of the alphabet, one at a time.
But that would be wrong.
Indeed, conversation must flow naturally!! We must not artificially inflate our thread count! *looks shiftily around*
I have a lot of dreams about sharks. It’s different settings but always the same scenario: I’m standing on the edge of a pool (pond, lagoon, ocean crossing, etc.) that is absolutely full of enormous sharks. And I don’t fall in. I just walk around out of reach of the sharks, but still very afraid of how big they are and what would happen if I did fall in.
I suppose it’s symbolic or something?
Or it has something to do with how I grew up in a place that had something called the “Shark Pit.” No lie. They’d throw garbage and fish guts into the ocean in this one spot, and it really was full of sharks.
Hey, here’s a picture! http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kuOuTItec_w/Sp8vMM6k0cI/AAAAAAAAAWY/E2UwBwBq2vE/s1600-h/sm-IMG_895710.JPG
I think that might explain the dreams, now that I think about it.
I’m here with morale support.
We can make this happen, people! We’re almost there!
Moral support.
Normally I wouldn’t grammer Nazi, but every post counts in the clinch.
Wow, that’s really intense Holly…
I never had dreams about flying, (except that one time, but that was a really really bizarre one..). Instead, I dream I can breathe underwater, and I go swimming about. Its a really weird sensation, as if each breath is breathing in a bubble that’s full of just slightly less air than I need, yet somehow I don’t drown. Don’t really know what that would symbolize.. Sometimes a pool is just a pool.
Grammar Nazi, even. Hah.
I had a dream where my softball team had to play against a bunch of tornados. We were all wearing rollerblades and carrying stop signs.
Before I learned how to drive, I dreamt that driving was this amazing experience, like flying on a road, like riding a rollercoaster that you control yourself, like total gasoline-powered freedom in the world.
After I learned how to drive I didn’t have that dream any more.
Yeah, I actually was going to spell it moral, but for some reason I thought that was wrong. Over-correction, I guess.
Holly, clearly this dream indicates that you suffer from an irrational fear that sharks are trying to steal your kidneys. I am afraid we cannot begin treatment until we come up with a scientific name for your phobia.
So what should we do for the 1000th post? Just steamroll through it?
I also had a dream that my best friend’s dad robbed our house, and that made me late for work, so a character from a story I made up called me, and then it all derailed into a theme park based on Polly Pocket.
I have the occasional dream where I am not so much flying as drifting up off the ground. I always drift back down again, even though I would prefer to remain airborne.
I had a dream once where I was on all fours on a table as a small child staring up at a potted venus fly trap on the ceiling. It growled at me. I growled back. I have no idea why.
Grammar Nazi, even. Hah.
self-pwnage is the BEST pwnage.
I have dreams when I can breathe underwater. Those are always awesome, and make me want to scuba dive.
May some day be hazardous if i’m ever drunk around a pool, though.
I had a dream once where I was about to post the thousandth comment on a blog thread, but then I woke up and the thread was only four comments long.
When I was younger, a lot of my dreams would involve tornados. I guess it was symbolic or something.
I once, well before puberty, dreamed that I was a car, and going to the filling station was just like sex for cars. I, and a bunch of other people-cars, were getting pumped full of gasoline and we were ecstatic.