Postulated its credentials, you'd have expected "Progeny" to be at least a youngster sci-fi first-rate. It was directed by Brian Yuzna ("Re-Animator"), co-written by Stuart Gordon ("From Beyond"), and stars Arnold Vosloo ("Dark Man 2 & 3"), Jillian McWhirter ("Last Control Standing"), Brad Dourif ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), Lindsay Crouse ("The Arrival"), and Wilford Brimley ("The Thing"). Instead, the film barely rises above the on of most made-for-TV eatables and up front it's halfway in all respects descends irreversibly into standard dread-movie clichés. It appears to oblige bypassed theaters and gone straight to video.

If you memorialize "Communion" with Christopher Walken, you'll be on familiar clay with "Progeny." The superficial hypothesis concerns alien abduction and, in the case of "Progeny," alien insemination. It's a tempting object: What if space aliens impregnated a human woman? What tantalizing stage show would result? Unfortunately, we under no circumstances push to hit upon out, as the film loses control long before anything sound is allowed to develop.

After what they think is a short period of lovemaking one evening, a doctor (Vosloo) and his wife (McWhirter) note that two hours demand gone by unaccounted conducive to. OK, time flies when you're having fun, but they solve two full hours is out of the question. However, neither of them thinks much more about it. At least not until she discovers she's pregnant, and they affect that she conceived the darned night of the missing hours. This clue is doubly disturbing to the save because his sperm count is intent to zero, meaning they would have had a one-in-a-million chance for success. So far, so salutary, as the anxiousness begins to mount.

Then it all falls not counting into Hollywood stereotypes. The mollify suspects a conspiracy but no one believes him. When he finally convinces a love doctor that something about his unborn baby is not quite natural, the peer doctor mysteriously dies. Next, the hitherto rational couple become hysterical, doing totally irrational things. The helpmeet goes maniacal commencement, unreasonably defending with her vim the issue she is carrying, alien or not; and then the save goes equally nuts in his attempts to prey the kid preceding the time when it's delivered.

You can tell a good sci-fi or horror flick when the characters on the screen comport more resourcefully than the average moviegoer; endure Sigourney Weaver in the first two "Alien" movies, in return instance, or Donald Sutherland in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." But when a movie's characters undertaking dumber than the guy popping his gum in the seat behind you, you know the movie is in trouble. Brimley, as a skeptical Ogygian friend of the conserve, is killed touched in the head early. Crouse, as a psychiatrist, gets to hear both the husband and the wife tell her identical stories directed hypnosis, but she sees absolutely no connection between them except synchrony. Dourif, as an alien abductee specialist, gets to signify around aimlessly and say things like, "No, you can't do that; you're crackers!"