Baby Blood

Here's an interesting concept;; Alien like pregnancy with a woman instead of the John Hurt character in that overrated bore fest. The unfortunate baby host is Yanka(Emmanuelle Escourrou). A reptile sort of creature wanders into her uterus and has a thirst for blood. The good mother travels from village to village, killing anyone available to feed her growing fetus's voracious need for plasma in order to grow into a really large and dangerous monster.

The little one is very verbose, having funny conversations with its' host. Yanka is sexy and often naked, which adds to the entertainment value this atmospheric thriller. Baby blood provides buckets of the red stuff, as expected, and I thought that the acting and script were pretty good for this genre.

The director, Alain Roback, has an eye for detail and a sense of humor. The talking baby is a different twist, and it works in Baby Blood.

Over the years, plenty of film fans have turned director and churned out ultra-cheap gore-fests which go out of their way to desensitise the viewer with endless bloody murders and guts splashed all over the place. Most of the time, these independent filmmakers come from America or the U.K., and thus the '80s and '90s are full of little-seen films like THE ABOMINATION. BABY BLOOD is a French take on this sub-genre of movie-making, a dark little splatter film with a bizarre plot that capitalises on the late '80s/early '90s trend in "evil baby" films, perhaps set off by US flick THE UNBORN. While it's cheap and sometimes badly acted, BABY BLOOD tells a simple story that moves along at great speed. Essentially, it's about a woman possessed by her primeval baby, who turns out to be a slithery Lovecraftian creature with a penchant for blood.

Along the way the woman becomes a blood-drinking maniac who, in a distinctly feminist angle, goes after the men who slight her, before turning her sights on all men in general. After a series of murders and vehicle accidents, the baby is born with predictably disastrous consequences. BABY BLOOD succeeds in creating some eerie moments, mostly in the creepy voice of the killer baby (word has it that Gary Oldman dubbed this role for the American release). As the heroine, the voluptuous Emmanuelle Escourrou isn't afraid to spend much of the film in the nude, adding to the exploitation value, and she transforms her character from an attractive and fragile victim to a blood-soaked maniac with a certain level of convincingness. The male characters in the film are all pretty stupid and sleazy, so it's hard to work up empathy when they get their guts torn out.

At heart, this is a gore film and director Alain Robak focuses on the bloodshed throughout. There are knife murders, people getting crushed and run over by cars, bodies being torn to shreds and severed heads galore. The blood is liberally sprayed all over, pushing the boundaries of good taste on many occasions, and the low budget special effects are surprisingly decent. One of the most disturbing sequences is a nightmare in which the heroine sees bloody hands emerging from her stomach – a truly stomach-churning and weird moment. Robak also creates a brilliant and offbeat sequence of the heroine staggering down the street, where the actress is shot from a low angle and there's a look of animation to the shot. I can't quite describe it, but it's one of the most inventive things I've ever seen. Bizarrely, despite the downbeat, degrading nature of the story and all the darkness and brutality of the murders, the baby turns out to be quite a humorous creation and engages in some comedic question-and-answer sessions with its mother as it tries to find out more about the human world. The final set-piece, on a bus full of drunken footballers, is well-executed with some memorably slippery special effects work, and the final shots are neatly portrayed. BABY BLOOD won't rock anybody's world, but it is a well-made and distinctive little shocker.

If you're looking for something a little off the beaten path, Baby Blood might just do the trick. It's a story about a woman who gets pregnant and starts hearing the voice of her unborn child telling her to kill and drink the blood of her victims. Wanting to be a good nurturing mother, she does what her baby wants and gets into all sorts of trouble.

Baby Blood might be stylish and filled with nasty special effects, but it also suffers from redundancy midway through. It turns into a series of murders as the lead character lures one hapless victim after another into her web, killing them, and drinking their blood. Pretty soon after, her baby gets hungry again and she does the same thing. The first few times, it's somewhat shocking and interesting, but it gets old after awhile.

Thar said, Baby Blood does deliver the gore, so if that's what you're in the mood for, you could do much worse.

A chatty entity that has existed since the dawn of creation lives on into the 20th century. It ends up inside a cheetah that gets acquired by a circus. After making a messy exit from inside the big cat, it slithers inside Yanka, a circus performer (super sexy French starlet Emmanuelle Escourrou), and starts incessantly nagging at her. "Feed me", it says to her, much like Audrey II from "The Little Shop of Horrors". It turns out that the monstrous fetus needs blood for sustenance, and Yanka is obliged to go out and nastily slaughter a great many male victims during the duration of her pregnancy.

It's true enough that horror stories about monster babies were not exactly original by this point, but director Alain Robak gives the scenario a fresh coat of blood-red paint with his themes of maternal instinct and feminism gone berserk. (One can hardly fail to notice that most of the men in this story are incorrigible rotters or even worse.) The cast gives the visceral, sadistic material a great, straight-faced go, and Robak gives it great pace as well as dark humour. And, of course, horror fans who rate their movies based on the amount of bloodshed should be more than satisfied. There is also no shortage of nudity.

Overall, this is an engrossing exploitation-horror film that gets a lot of mileage out of the developing relationship between the reluctant mother and the monster within her.

Look for a cameo from the canine star of the French cult hit "Baxter"; director Robak supplies the voice of the monster in the original French version, and none other than Gary Oldman does the voice for the English-language version.

Seven out of 10.

'Baby Blood' is a superb overlooked French horror movie that deserves a much wider audience. The beautiful and voluptuous Emmanuelle Escourrou stars as a circus performer who is impregnated by some kind of mutant monster. On the run, her unborn "child" begins to speak to her and demands blood - lots of it. Reluctantly she complies by murdering men she encounters. Eventually she develops a strange love/hate relationship with the monster within her.

This is a brilliantly entertaining variation on the killer baby theme (see 'The Unborn' and 'It's Alive'), with plenty of gore and nudity from the stunning Escourrou. I say steer clear of the American dubbed version as it is cut. 'Baby Blood' is one of the most underrated horror movies of the last twenty years. I thought it was a classic piece of exploitation and I can't recommend it highly enough!