Dumpster Baby

Ha ha, just kidding. The sound is awful. The actors were indecipherable for most of the film.

It's low-budget, trashy, apocalyptic stuff. I like Troma for the over-the-top gore and laughs, and this was lacking in those areas. A raving mad cannibal provided a few chuckles, but that was about it.

I got the impression the directors were intending for this to be much more disturbing than it actually was. They did succeed in one cringe-inducing scene, making me feel uncomfortable to the point of skipping ahead to the end of the scene.

The screenplay and some of the acting was one positive aspect of the film. What dialog I could make out seemed particularly realistic and strikingly out of the low-budget league. In particular, the teenage boys drinking and discussing their discovery of "dumpster baby" was fairly well-acted.

The best part of the DVD is the trailer for Poultrygeist. That movie looks fantastic.

I will never understand how this movie got on Netflix. It's barely good enough to be on you tube. I was expecting a dumpster baby crawling around seeking revenge but instead a bundle of blankets (Seriously Dumpster Baby director, couldn't even put a baby doll in the blanket?) is passed around to drunks, a cannibal, a catholic school girl, crack whores and a retarded garbage man. Believe me, sounds a lot funnier than it is. It also sounds a lot more comprehensible. I think that's what the movie is about, because you can only hear half the dialog. The plot is thus, somebody finds Dumpster Baby and instead of saying, "Hey, we should take this to a hospital or a police station or something." Said person takes responsibility for dumpster baby. "Hey we found a baby, let's put him in a box, then two people will have sex and guys with guns will come for some reason and then the baby ends up in a Styrofoam cooler...How did it end up there? I dunno. We made a movie called Dumpster Baby, shot in our backyard and forgot to rent microphones. You expect us to have all the answers? Oh, I forgot about the creepy guy who walks around, I think it was dumpster baby in the future but instead of trying to figure that out I'd rather stick my junk in a lobster tank.

Recently watched the DVD Troma released of this movie. It wasn't at all what I thought it would be: something more like Sewage Baby. It's more like Twenty Bucks, except with a baby instead of a twenty dollar bill.

The sound quality is unfortunately pretty bad. A lot of the dialog is missed, and without it, there's not much to follow.

A woman is shot at and climbs some stairs. How she relates to the rest of the movie isn't clear. Two women do some crack; the fat one announces she's having a baby. The other one helps deliver with the use of a chef's knife. Somehow she delivers without ever taking her shorts off. The baby is dumped in a dumpster after an altercation with a gang. A guy in a bar discovers it after a hooker starts blowing him in the alley. A pimp shoots him, and he and the baby are dumped into a cab.

Somehow the baby keeps winding up with other people, but it's not always clear how it gets from place to place. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention, or I missed something in the dialog. There's also a pale man in black who wanders through some of the scenes; he's reminiscent of the Thorn characters from the Halloween series to some extent. He seems to be supernatural, although he kills people in conventional ways.

There is some nudity in the movie, for those looking for that. Not a whole lot of blood, but some. It plays more like a drama than a horror movie, despite the deaths and weird figure in black.

I listened to some of the commentary track at the beginning and end of the movie to see if it shed any light on the story or what they were aiming for with the movie. They didn't touch on that in what I listed to at all, unfortunately. It wasn't interesting enough for me to listen to the rest.

The DVD has a number of trailers on it; Poultrygeist looks like it will be fun. There's also a music video for a Russian band's song "Wild Man" in which Troma head honcho Lloyd Kaufman stars as a blind man stumbling through a bar in which the band is playing. The Toxic Avenger shows up a couple times, and there's a sex scene and a shooting spree, so it's fairly Tromatic. The music is fairly catchy, and at least some of the lyrics are in English, like the chorus "Wild man in big city, wild man empty heart."

Troma are best known for their cheap and nasty little horror flicks, and despite many proclaiming that this film is a cut above a lot of Troma's stuff, it's still not really that good. The idea is a good one, however, and I dare say that the film would have been great if it had been gifted with better handling. The film takes place in a very sleazy city, and the main plot follows a baby wrapped up in a blanket. It's the offspring of a crack whore, who decided to throw the child in the bin so that her boyfriend, whom she hasn't has sex with for two years, doesn't find out about it. We then watch as the unfortunate kid is passed from pillar to post! The film remains interesting at all times because of the way that the plot constantly changes. The kid is with one set of people one minute, and then with someone else the next; so we've always got a fresh mini-plot to deal with. The fact that the city in which the film is set is completely sleazy is a bonus, and directors James Bickert and Randy Hill make good use of their central location; as it really is believable that someone living there would dump their baby in the trash.

As you might expect, the acting is terrible and it didn't come as a surprise to me that most of the 'stars' didn't make another film after their debut in this one. The way that the plot changes is good, but none of the segments in the film are really that interesting in their own right and so it's not necessarily an advantage that the film changes often. There's not a great deal in the way of horror in the film for most of the running time, and it plays out something like a crime drama with various people being killed. The baby isn't really all that important to the plot for most of the film, as it exists merely as an excuse for the audience to get an insight into the various people living in this city, and we don't even get to see it for most of the film. It has to be said that the ending is rather predictable, but it's also very disgusting and provides a decent climax to a trash flick such as this one. Overall, I can't say that this film is anything like a classic; but despite its shortcomings, it's not actually that bad and even though I'm not Troma's biggest fan - I will recommend this film to those who are, as it's likely to be better than a lot of the Troma films you have seen.

OK, so all the reviews that rate this movie anywhere above 5 stars are lying to you. The only reason they rated this film so high is because they want to try to get you to watch it so you can have the same horrible feeling hey did. My friend and I saw this on the Netflix instant que list and were expecting a horror movie with terrible production values, which can be pretty fun. We were expecting some kind of horrible dumpster baby monster terrorizing people and corn syrup blood, etc. etc. What we got was the worst attempt at a serious film ever, and not in a good way. This film, no exaggeration, made me want to kill myself. I felt genuinely horrible after watching it. So don't be fooled by the high praises this movie gets from other people, they just want to drag you down with them.