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MISBEGOTTEN
Rating:  ½
USA/Canada. 1997.
Director – Mark L. Lester, Screenplay – Larry Cohen, Based on the Novel by James Gabriel Berman, Producers – Mark L. Lester & Dana Dubovsky, Photography – Mark Irwin, Music – Paul J. Zaza, Special Effects Supervisor – Al Benjamin, Production Design – Paul Joyal. Production Company – American World Pictures/Cinepix Film Properties/Boarders Film Productions Inc.
Cast:
Kevin Dillon (William ‘Billy Crapshoot’ Costigan Jr), Lysette Anthony (Caitlin Bourke), Nick Mancuso (Paul Bourke), Matthew Walker (Dr Richard Dotterweigh), Stefan Arngrim (Conan Cornelius), Robert Lewis (Detective Cross), Jo Bates (Dr Rory Sorenson), Kate Luyben (Myrna Casey), Megan Leitch (Serena)
Plot: Petty hood William ‘Billy Crapshoot’ Costigan Jr shoots songwriter Conan Cornelius and then moves into his home and assumes Cornelius’s identity. Among Cornelius’s belongings, Billy finds acceptance papers as a sperm donor at a prestigious fertility clinic. And so he pretends to be Cornelius and makes a deposit. His genes are then selected by childless couple Paul and Caitlin Bourke. But Billy then kills a doctor at the clinic to find out who the recipients are and starts stalking Caitlin, determined to be a part of his child’s life.
The films of low-budget auteur Larry Cohen are almost always worth watching for the quirkiness of wit and daringness of ideas that Cohen brings to genre themes. Cohen has made such gems as It’s Alive (1974) and sequels, Demon/God Told Me To (1977), Q – The Winged Serpent (1982) and The Stuff (1985). In the 1990s however Larry Cohen has vanished from the director’s chair almost altogether, much to the genre’s loss. Nevertheless Cohen still continues to produce scripts for other directors, most notably the frequently quite amazing trilogy of films begun with Maniac Cop (1988), Uncle Sam (1997), Misbegotten, as well as more high-profile films like Phone Booth (2002), Cellular (2004) and Captivity (2007).
Misbegotten is reminiscent of The Tie That Binds (1995), a psycho-thriller about a White Trash couple who come after the middle-class parents who adopt their daughter. Misbegotten goes one beyond The Tie That Binds into a pleasantly quite morally dubious area – a psychotic sperm donor comes after the middle-class couple that end up bearing his child. (Larry Cohen after all ventured into twisted parent-child obsessions in It’s Alive, although that was really more the reverse of the themes there – there the child was the monster, here the parent is. And before that Cohen had also written Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969) about a woman who is stalked by her ex-boyfriend after she aborts the child of his that she is pregnant with).
There’s a perverse humour that fuels Misbegotten. This hits in from the opening scene where Kevin Dillon hijacks Stefan Arngrim (once the kid on tv’s Land of the Giants [1968-70]) and his car, finds he is a songwriter and then gets him to compose a theme music for the situation – “Does this feel like a movie?” – before he kills him. Of course from the point that Kevin Dillon contacts Lysette Anthony, Misbegotten sets in with a hold where you are never sure where it is going to go from one minute to the next. The games and Kevin Dillon’s obsession really get quite wonderfully twisted, eventually arriving at the amazing scene where the head of Lysette Anthony’s husband is delivered to her in a box at the baby shower, immediately followed by a scene where she tries to conduct a home abortion with a coat hanger. It all arrives at a wonderfully sardonic ending that initially starts out as the usually upbeat, seemingly miraculous, happy-ever-after twist that another formula film might do, before dashing it with quite deliciously nasty regard.
This film, only released to cable/video markets, is the best effort in the otherwise ‘misbegotten’ career of Mark L. Lester, director of Class of 1984 (1982), Firestarter (1984), Class of 1999 (1990), The Ex (1996), Sacrifice (2000) and Pterodactyl (2005).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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