Movies - Rabbit Test

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	Movies - Rabbit Test

Rabbit Test is a 1978 comedy motion picture about the world's first pregnant man.

Directed by Joan Rivers, Rabbit Test stars Billy Crystal as Lionel Carpenter, a night school teacher who has bad luck with women, remaining a virgin until his brash cousin Danny (Alex Rocco) sets him up with a one-night stand. Soon after this, Lionel starts feeling nauseous and throwing up, eventually doing so onto Segoynia Savaka (Joan Prather), one of his immigrant students. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise, as it gives him an excuse to ask her out on a date, and a romance develops.

When Lionel meets Segoynia's fortune-telling grandmother (played by Roddy McDowall in drag), she intuits that he is the world's first pregnant man. The rest of the film is a series of gags relating to his pregnancy and people's reactions to it. One sideplot has Lionel being pursued by the army, as the president is afraid of what effect the widespread ability of men to conceive will have on population growth.

The film is generally regarded as a failure, with "jokes" guaranteed to offend almost everyone - most of them being about race, religion, or fatness. In the ending sequence, which is patterned after the Nativity, Lionel finally goes into labour. The camera rises to heaven where God announces to the viewers the successful delivery: "Oh my god... it's a girl!"

This was Joan Rivers' first attempt at direction and Billy Crystal's first starring role and is considered by many to be one of the most unfunny comedies ever produced. Rabbit Test's lack of success is due not only to the absence of any real humour, but also to rampant illogic and plot holes. Whereas the similarly plotted Junior (1994) at least explains how its male protagonist gets pregnant (artificial insemination into a transplanted uterus), in Rabbit Test this area is never delved into; Lionel simply has sex and becomes pregnant.

Trivia

This film may have initiated the fanfiction term MPreg.
One of the first feature films to be shot on videotape, then transferred to film stock.
Billy Crystal's character has an Esperanto flag on his wall.

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