Almost Pregnant Reviews

Superficially similar to PROMISES, PROMISES, the notorious 1963 Jayne Mansfield skinflick, ALMOST PREGNANT contrives, via lightheaded performances and direction, to make impotence and explicit wife-swapping as cutesy as they're ever going to get. "Spermwise, you're shooting blanks," opines Dr. Beckhard (Dom DeLuise) to Charlie Alderson (Jeff Conaway), whose marriage to kittenish, motherhood-obsessed Linda (Tanya Roberts) has produced no offspring. Linda refuses artificial insemination, but all the doctor's treatments fail to boost Charlie's sperm count. Undaunted, Linda convinces poor Charlie to hunt up a "surrogate father," an appropriate male to perform stud service. The top prospect is Gordon Mallory (John Calvin), a self-absorbed poet, complete with mini-goatee, who's sired numerous kids with his dutiful earth-mother wife Maureen (Joan Severance). Gordon enthusiastically agrees to impregnate Linda as long as Maureen isn't told. Charlie becomes depressed over his wife's regular sessions with Gordon and starts a counter-affair with the neglected Maureen. Meanwhile, Linda has learned that the deceitful Gordon had a vasectomy to prevent swelling his family further. Stunned, she continues the sex with him to avoid hurting Charlie, while turning to Charlie's homely but unspayed cousin Ray Burns (Christopher Michael Moore) for further furtive intercouse. The whole thing resolves at a Christmas party that sees both women pregnant, back with their respective spouses, and everybody happy. Viewers will just be happy that it's over, though ALMOST PREGNANT contrives to be less offensive than it might be, with only mild naughty language, bouncy music and cheerful turns from the actors. Roberts and Conaway play their comic parts in a fairly low-key fashion, leaving Calvin, Severance and DeLuise to do most of the mugging. Former model and Playboy centerfold Joan Severance has in the past stolen whole movies from the nominal superstars in BIRD ON A WIRE and SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL. Her role here muffles her effervescent presence by turning it into a joke; even though Maureen looks like a million bucks, her moody husband treats her like a scullery maid, and she meekly accepts the abuse as the price to be paid for living with "genius." ALMOST PREGNANT went to home video in a by-now-familiar dual format gimmick. Box art displayed a woman's underwear-clad torso; red lace meant it was the unrated version, with abundant nudity and graphic sex, while white lace signified the trimmed-down R-rated edition. The softcore stuff mostly occurs in the form of daydream sequences and time-filling montages, easily excisable, highly gratuitous, and wholly crass. While Tanya Roberts and Joan Severance are svelte and shapely specimens of femininity, one montage lingers on a melon-breasted body double who's obviously neither of them, a suggestion of the priorities here. Apart from that lapse, director Michael DeLuise (son of Dom and an actor himself, mainly for TV) orchestrates the whole thing with a sure hand for someone in his early twenties. As if to comment on his precocity, DeLuise fils is depicted as an ovum in a director's chair in the opening computer-animated title sequence set in a uterine system. (Nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.)