Reader's film review: "Sexmission"

I just returned from an engineering conference in Poland. While there, the subject of feminism came up. The guys told me about an extremely popular movie that was made in Poland in 1985. It values men and the role they play. I thought I'd share the plot of a movie called "Sexmission". See if you can rent it where you are. (I now live in Norway so it will be a few weeks before they send me a copy with English subtitles.)

Two men, Albert and Maks, are chosen to be cryogenically hibernated as part of a test. However, something goes very wrong and they are left frozen for many more years than they were supposed to. They wake up in a post-apocalyptic underground totalitarian world inhabited entirely by women, and find themselves defending the very fact that they're men.

In the future, it seems, all of history has been re-written to only star female heroes. Cain did not kill his brother Abel; rather, men invented murder and Cain killed his sister, Abel. Einstein was actually a woman, and men have since been done away with entirely. The women decide that the only option is to turn both men into women through surgical intervention.

But is everything as it seems, and are men really useless, like the new society claims? Eventually, Albert and Maks turn the world back on the right track.

The ensuing adventure is part sci-fi sex comedy, part harsh criticism of Eastern European Communism. The film is still well-loved in Poland.