Baby Blood

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.

This overlooked, nearly forgotten 1989 film that took an idea (could be influences from Alien/Aliens films and Cronenberg's Body Horror films) of gore and violence in childbearing, directed by Alain Robak, produced in France.

Its main character, Yanka played merciless by Emmanuelle Escourrou featuring a disembodied voice, being that of an unborn baby.

It's opening with stock footage of volcanic eruptions/ocean waves with an oral narrative on prehistoric/evolutionary thematic dialogue.

Then after opening credits it sets upon a present day circus community where Yanka works as a performer with the lion act and in an abusive relationship. A new feline creature arrives and imprints on her, later it mysteriously dies.

She soon discovered that there's a pregnancy, unborn and escapes the circus environment and becomes a nomad (with the unborn voice) speaking to her on what she needs to do.

Throughout a series of misadventures leading her to Paris, discovering that the unborn has an appetite for blood.

Yanka, becomes the unborn's slave by feeding on unsuspecting people, mostly men. She tries to see if she could find love, but nothing happens except murder.

The more unborn needs to feeds, more violent are Yanka's crimes. Advancing to the unnatural birthing, as the blood trail lengthens.

This film uses a tongue in cheek approach, making some scenes comedic, almost as innocent fun. 80s cultural antics are bright patterned fashions, etc.

"Baby Blood" is before contemporary Francophone horror, precedes 90s with it's psychological explanations with motherhood. It's way before French films like "Inside" (2007) and in 2008, a long awaited sequel, "Lady Blood" that didn't have the first film's originality.

This is worth a look, if your taste is obscure, but smart Euro-Horror styled cinema with practical special effects.

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.

French cinema isn't exactly known for its many horror masterpieces (the exceptions that prove this rule are "Les Yeux Sans Visage" and the more recent "Haute Tension") but, as much as in every other country, there are always some gore-loving genre fanatics that sooner or later direct their own independent cult gem. Alain Robak clearly is such an enthusiast filmmaker and his "Baby Blood" is a hugely entertaining and cheerful splatterfest, despite the poor and inept screenplay. The relatively unknown but impressively voluptuous Emmanuelle Escourrou (what's in a name) stars as the unhappy fiancée of a circus artist who gets impregnated by a parasite that burst out a newly imported cheetah. The fetus growing inside Yanka is pure evil and demands her to kill men so that it can feed on their blood. This results in some of the most over-the-top bloody and sadistic massacres ever shot on film, with cut off heads, slit throats and many outrageous knife-attacks. Of course, this exaggerated amount of bloodshed makes it all blackly comical and "Baby Blood" therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously. This isn't the fist horror film handling about ferocious fetuses/infants (there's also "It's Alive", "I don't want to be Born" and even the premise of "Rosemary's Baby" is remotely similar) but "Baby Blood" is much more creative and tongue-in-cheek than anything you've ever seen before. The camera-work is quite nifty and there are several cameos of eminent Frenchmen, like Jacques Audiard (director of "Read My Lips") and Alain Chabat (who played Caesar in "Asterix"). The script is very man-unfriendly, which is quite a new approach for exploitation! Nearly every male is presented as a weak and imbecile creature whereas Yanka gets stronger with every murder she commits. "Baby Blood" is ingenious, somewhat bizarre horror fun.