I enjoyed this bleary-eyed melodrama, with a title as tabloidy as any 1950s science fiction B-picture (which this is most certainly not) and a pair of lead performances that hold you through the sometimes dull predictabilities of the story. Wronged, made-for-television women don't come any more emotionally vulnerable than Michele Greene, who, after learning of a mysterious pregnancy, accuses her dentist of raping her while she lay under sedation. Looking like Paige Davis just out of rehab, Ms. Greene doles out her character's screaming and crying judiciously, as if she were rebelling against the teleplay's original directives. With eyes that can gaze wistfully past the grey Toronto horizon as well as stare down various male tormentors (be it the villanous doctor Joe Penny or her disloyal, mistrustful husband William R. Moses) with equal woundedness, Ms. Greene offers the audience a veritable graduate-school course in Lifetime histrionics, without ever succumbing to silliness. As the bad doctor who just can't keep his hands to himself (notably so in the third act!), personification of evil Mr. Penny represents yuppie scum in its most rabid left-wing perception: not only is he a cocky, middle-aged, physically imposing rapist with a comb-over and a dated sports car, but he occupies a profession as bland and emasculating as dentist. One gets the subtextual impression that he's still resentful that he's not a "real" doctor, and with this rage, Mr. Penny icily delivers lines like "You can't beat me" or "You'll never prove anything, because I'm the man and you're the woman" and sends moderate shivers up your spine, if only for the actor's bracing commitment to such a throwaway movie.
As it grows more and more plausible that the final 50 pages of the script were written in a pizza & cocaine-fueled hurry (with Ms. Greene's character musing like Adam West on how to attain a young, beautiful undercover policewoman who also needs a great deal of dental work for a sting operation), one can begin to ask themselves honestly how much better this film would have been starring Ashley Judd and Alec Baldwin, and then, inevitably, one may begin to wonder about what's stopping those actors' careers from being completely replaced, like pod people, with the more obscure but equally competent talents of She Woke Up Pregnant's leads.
