The Suckling

The Suckling is one of my favourite trashy films for many reasons. For a trashy movie it more than delivers the goods. Scenes such as the topless axe-wielding nurse, the aborted foetus sliding into the sewers and then mutating into a monster - these images will be burnt into my brain forever! Never will you see such images again in a film. The dialogue and acting is terrible but hilarious too. A few quotes: "You wouldn't know bullshit if you were standing under a bull!", "A man comes in to get his penis sucked, and gets shot off instead". The most hilarious scene is when the monster shrinks back down to foetus size - making a "ga-ga" sound - and crawls back into his mothers womb. Priceless! The Suckling is pure trashy entertainment at its best and I would recommend it to all horror b-movie fans. Ignore what everyone else has said - it's not THAT bad. Also - people continually knock the musical score, what's with that?! The opening piano music sounds so dark and haunting and fits a horror theme perfectly. I would even say that it belongs in a better film than this (by that I mean a serious horror film) because it's perfect!

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that forces you to redefine what movies are all about. Sometimes it just looks better than everything else on the market. Sometimes it's just acted better that a lot of other movies in its genre. And sometimes it's just so different that it defies comparison to anything else. There are plenty of movies that live up to the hype and prove themselves, in retrospective articles for years to come, to be the pinnacle of film. Unfortunately, this is not it at all.

The Suckling starts off with one of the worst openings ever that has been used too many times before: The prologue for the movie reveals how many people survive! What is the point of that? I mean, in a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's still irritating but its placement was so that the movie retained a documentary feel. Here, it is completely pointless and ruins any surprise you may have if you pay attention.

Regardless of that, the movie begins and seems interesting enough. Sure, the acting is terrible and the filming isn't the greatest, but the story has to do with a woman being tricked by her boyfriend and some sweet drugs into getting an abortion. That's cool! The aborted fetus itself doesn't look too bad, and we get some shots of it growing eyes and nails. Soon, it begins killing people, and that's magnificent.

Unfortunately, too much of the film is bogged down by boring moments. As I've said in other reviews, most of the fun of watching a B-Movie like this is to talk about the scenes to your friends later. But there isn't much to talk about here. It's like my complaint with Bubba Ho-Tep: there was so much they could have done with this concept but they totally wasted it. If I were to do this movie, I would have had some Abortion Police come in, armed with coathangers! Instead, this is basically just like every other slasher or monster film we've seen before, except with characters you don't care about (a businessman who says "whore" a lot, a CRAZY guy who is SO CRAZY that there is no gun shot sound effect when he fires his gun, a horrible boyfriend to the main character, a bunch of prostitutes, etc).

Just not really that enjoyable and surprisingly mean-spirited. And what's up with the ending with the skeleton, the guy, and the boy?!

Sometimes, fun and blood go together. THE SUCKLING is under that rule. The plot is, of course, of clase B-films and so the FX and the actors. But the result is really funny: a little creature takes a house and its inhabitants and moves misteriously around it. The final scene is one of the more bizarre shots I have ever seen.

Some woman gets an abortion at someone's house... er brothel (??) and then the foetus mutates into a monster and kills people. The Suckling is a Christian movie that teaches us the values of pro life and the consequences of pro choice. Just kidding but the concept of "a foetus seeking revenge against its murderer" does sound like something a pro lifer would just adore. So there you go. Now, I kinda get why people didn't like this movie. It's shot for s···, the effects are stupid, even the stop motion crap, the acting is the worst and there are some boring fillers that can sometimes slow the pacing to a halt. Well, I don't give a f···, I liked this piece of crap. Along with the plentiful bloody kills, I love all the aforementioned flaws because its my kind of entertainment. That's right. Everything I like is crap so suckle my sausage.

THE SUCKLING opens with a rather bizarre nightmare sequence, followed by a woman and her boyfriend showing up at a combination brothel / abortion "clinic", where they meet several unsavory characters including the utterly odious "Big Mama".

Next, we witness a procedure gone horribly awry. The -obviously rubber- "fetus" is disposed of down the old porcelain receptacle, which is a possible health violation! After a tour of the sewer system, the "fetus" is exposed to some -conveniently placed- toxic waste. This causes an unholy resurrection, and the grotesque / absurd creature springs to life! The transformation scene is a disgusting wonder of ultra-schlock filmmaking!

The action switches back to Big Mama's place, wherein any further exposition is meant only to enhance the wretchedness of those who will soon meet their gruesome, collective doom. Whenever the hateful humans are busy NOT being killed, they blather on for intolerably long periods of time- 80-90% of the movie!

The titular mini-monster, which does grow to giant size, is only seen sporadically. Even then, it's far from spectacular. Making matters worse, any scenes without the creature are simply excruciating! Things pick up a bit by the final 20 minutes or so, but by then, viewers are most likely praying for death.

Heed the warning!...