| This week's topic: monster-in-the-womb movies. There's a lot of them, so let's get right to it.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968): Suspense builds as a pregnant Mia Farrow finds more and more evidence that The Devil might be her baby's daddy in this well-known Roman Polanski-directed feature.
The Devil’s Daughter (a.k.a. The Sect, a.k.a. La Setta, 1990): Terrific Italian horror from director Michele Soave. Young schoolteacher Kelly Curtis finds herself at the mercy of a vicious sect of devil worshippers – much like in Rosemary’s Baby, only with more face amputations – and is destined to bear Satan's son.
The ending is flabbergasting – Curtis sacrifices her life to end the evil, seizing the newborn child and running straight into a raging fire. At dawn, the fire department hose away the soot, scorched human remains and various other detritus, and as the charcoal flakes away, Curtis is found within, unharmed. The child, it seems, held no grudge against his destroyer, and used his Satanic powers to protect his mother.
The Alien movies (1979-97): It's no longer only women who have to worry about giving birth to toothy alien larvae – the first victim in this phenomenally successful series is John Hurt, who famously burst open at the dinner table as the little monster cast him off like a snake's skin. This "chest-burster" scene would be reprised in the sequels, as well as by Hurt himself in the jokey sci-fi parody Spaceballs (1987).
Humanoids from the Deep (1980): Roger Corman and his studio decided that The Creature from the Black Lagoon would have been a much cooler movie if the whole "monsters want our women" angle had been played up a bit more. So, we wound up with this exploitation classic in which horny gill-men run around raping bikini-clad beauties on a beach. To this day, Humanoids is reviled as an example of extremely bad taste in filmmaking. In the final scene, a victim gives gruesome birth to a baby monster. Cheerfully repugnant in a way that is seldom seen these days (as the relatively tame 1996 remake will attest).
Toxic Avenger 4: Citizen Toxie (2001): Toxie's girlfriend is pregnant with not just one, but two monstrous little zygotes. Trouble is, one of them is the son of the true-hearted avenger, while the other is the progeny of Toxie's evil clone, The Noxious Offender! While the two daddies battle it out with colour-coded brooms (aping the famous light-sabre duel from The Phantom Menace), we get glimpses of a similar fight going on in the womb! The little guys even have tiny brooms to fight with! That's so cute….
Carnosaur (1993): Congratulations, Mrs. Smith! You just gave birth to a bouncing baby… er, Allosaurus! Mrs. Smith? Mrs. Smith?
Possession (1981): Isabelle Adjani gives birth to an octopus who becomes her lover. I think. This is an extremely confusing movie, especially in the censored 80-minute cut. (Anchor Bay recently released the 127-minute version.) Wonderfully intense performances by Adjani and Sam Neill, though.
It’s Alive! (1974): Killer mutant baby kills everybody in the delivery room, and then goes off to seek its fortune. The sequels are rare examples of movie characters learning their lesson from the previous film, as SWAT teams are assigned to maternity wards, and cabbies run away if their pregnant fares go into labour in the back seat.
The Kingdom (1994): Brilliantly strange Danish mini-series set in a haunted hospital. Watch for Udo Kier's dramatic "entrance" at the end!
Xtro (1991): Once again, Lamaze classes don't help if your baby's fully grown at birth.
Basket Case 2 (1990): It’s no match for the twisted originality of the first Basket Case, but has some good moments, including a nice "normal" girl who secretly has a monstrous fetus that never bothered to come out of the uterus, although he pokes his face out and snarls from time to time
Seeding of a Ghost (1983): Notorious Hong Kong film from the Shaw Brothers, filled with scenes of icky birth and re-birth. "European Trash Cinema" scribe Craig Ledbetter praised it for "going out of its way to disgust." Other Hong Kong-produced killer fetus movies from this period include Ghost Nursing (1982) and Devil Fetus (1983).
The Evil Within (a.k.a. Baby Blood, 1990): Quite possibly the ultimate killer fetus movie, this French shocker stars sexy gap-toothed Emmanuelle Escourru as Bianca, a pregnant woman whose unborn child talks to her. (He makes suggestions like "Why don't you seduce him, and I'll grab his balls.") The fetus demands blood, sending Bianca on a nine-month killing spree. She's reluctant at first, but as time moves on, she begins killing people out of pure habit. It’s practically a one-woman show for Escourru, whose full-figured beauty and intense eyes make her fascinating to watch. Baby Blood is the title of the subtitled version – the dubbed version features the uncredited voice of Gary Oldman as the talking fetus! |
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