El bebé infernal

How can you not love Joan Collins as the new mom of a baby boy possessed by the demonic spirit of a dancing dwarf? It's laugh out loud funny! I must add it to my collection of lovable, very bad horror movies. It's like Rosemary's Baby meets The Leprechaun.

A woman (Joan Collins) gives birth to a baby, but this is no ordinary little tyke. The child is seemingly possessed by the spirit of a freaky, sexual dwarf (George Claydon) whom the mother once spurned. From director Peter Sasdy, who made "Countess Dracula" (1971) and "Hands of the Ripper" (also 1971).

First, let me absolutely say that I love this film being retitled "Sharon's Baby". The original title, "Devil Within Her", is so much better, and the new title just sounds like a cheesy knockoff of "Rosemary's Baby"... which, of course, is a film it could never live up to. Sounds like the sort of new title that would get it played at sleazy drive-ins or theaters on 42nd Street.

The soundtrack is awesome. Not unlike Goblin's work in Italian films, it seems that the musicians here were going for the same style. The only problem is that this style of music only works in Italian films... and sounds completely silly in British or American works. I loved it, but I can imagine the average person wondering what the heck is going on.

Horror fans will love seeing Donald Pleasence, who has far too small of a role as Dr. Finch. Maybe he did not read the script, or maybe it sounded better on paper than it turned out on film, but I am glad he signed on for this.

At the time of release, Andrew Nickolds wrote that he film was "derivative and disastrous in every respect: a poor idea... an abominable screenplay by Stanley Price... ludicrous acting... and worst of all, Sasdy's direction. Almost every foot of film not concerned with the baby is travelogue at its most banal – extraneous shots of Westminster and Oxford Street, plugs for Fortnum & Mason and Holiday Inns. Completing this sorry tale of rip-off is borrowing from The Exorcist... and any number of details from Amicus, Hammer and Swinging London horrors. Give it a wide berth." Wow, Andrew, harsh!

Luckily, the film has since enjoyed its place as a cult camp favorite, because really, who besides Nickolds was taking it that seriously?

Poor old Ralph Bates looks miserable in this movie and it's not hard to see why, it really stinks.

Joan Collins plays a stripper and proves she dances as well as she acts. It's really bizarre, I think it's supposed to be erotic but it looks like she is having some kind of slow-motion embolism. Correctly deciding that she isn't cut out for being a stripper she leaves to marry her Italian lover played with a comedy accent by long-suffering Ralph.

Before she goes though she gets cursed by a dwarf who she spurns. She promptly has a baby that has unusual powers. Oooer, spooky - you'd imagine they might give it demonic powers or something but no, it has sharp nails.

Time and time again we see actors stagger back from its cot screaming "it scratched me, with its sharp nails" - cue closeup to harmless baby without sharp finger nails.

This atrocious plot goes nowhere and throughout it all there's a soundtrack of a baby crying, for goodness sake. What were they thinking of? It's impossible to watch this movie without getting a blinding headache. It's almost worth it to hear Ralph Bates trying to be Italian though, it really is the worst accent I've ever heard in a movie.

Dreadful from start to finish and with a supporting cast that are just ludicrous thrown in for good measure. A final special mention to Caroline Monroe who plays her friend, her acting is so bad that I genuinely thought at first that her wild overacting and astonishingly funny dubbing was part of the plot and that she'd been possessed or something. You can see why they had to rename it about 50 times, I pity the person who was tricked into seeing this film twice.

I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN

(USA: The Devil Within Her)

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Mono

A nightclub stripper (Joan Collins) is cursed by a dwarf (George Claydon) whose attentions she spurned, and she later gives birth to a murderous baby possessed by a demonic spirit.

Clearly inspired by the contemporary vogue for satanic shockers, this slapdash concoction - memorably dismissed by UK journalist Nigel Burrell as a 'crapulous farrago'! - was thrown together by Hungarian director Peter Sasdy, previously responsible for such superior offerings as "Taste the Blood of Dracula" (1969), "Countess Dracula" (1970) and "Hands of the Ripper" (1971). Here, his contempt for the material is obvious in the weak storyline, feeble horror scenes and lackluster staging, and his concessions to the exploitation marketplace (strippers at work, a gory decapitation, etc.) are shoehorned into proceedings with reckless abandon.

Quite apart from its ridiculous premise (unlike the mutant creature in Larry Cohen's similarly-styled IT'S ALIVE, sweet little babies simply aren't frightening, no matter how much filmmakers try to make them seem otherwise!), the movie is further stymied by indifferent performances and half-baked characterizations: Collins runs the gamut from A to B and back again, Donald Pleasence provides little more than marquee value as Collins' doctor, and Ralph Bates (playing the heroine's husband) is a blank slate throughout. Hilary Mason - the blind lady in DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) - plays the wary housekeeper, and Eileen Atkins is Bates' sister, a nun who performs the commercially-dictated climactic exorcism. Support is offered by Caroline Munro as a fellow stripper (though she looks far too glamorous to be playing such a lowbrow Cockney strumpet!) and Euro-favorite John Steiner as one of Collins' former boyfriends. There's enough campery to entertain die-hard fans, but the sloppy production values and leaden pace will certainly limit the film's appeal to anyone else.

Oh, and watch out for abbreviated prints: If you don't see the head come off in the aforementioned decapitation sequence, you're viewing a censored version...

Well stone me, what a farce. I actually enjoyed this film.

It certainly is, as somebody a long time ago said, a game of three halves. The first half hour or so is laughably bad, and had me chuckling throughout. Then the tone shifts slightly and you find yourself actually getting vaguely interested into what on Earth's going on and where it could all possibly be leading. And then the last thirty minutes are genuinely disturbing, with some rather scary bits in there and a few set pieces that you won't have seen coming. All in all, rather absorbing.

The plot itself sounds like something cobbled together from "The Exorcist" and "The Omen" (despite the latter film being released the year after, but stay with me). Joan Collins (?!) plays a woman (good show) who's given birth to an "evil" child, who spends the film apparently viciously assaulting people whilst those of the religious faith find it all terribly intriguing. The scenes of the aforementioned child attacking people are usually quite laughable, usually comprising of somebody leaning close to it, recoiling in horror clutching their cheek and moaning "It bit me!", followed by a shot of a not particularly frightening little child looking frankly bewildered at the fact that he's in a film. Ah ha, but the baby has "Surprising strength for his age," we are told, so that's all right then.

The rationale for all this, given to us as a flashback about 10-15 minutes in, is one of the funniest bits of the film. Joan's character used to be a stripper, and performed her acts with a small dancing midget who apparently fancied her like mad. On her last day of work, the midget toddles along to her dressing room and tries to feel her up, whereupon she screams and a spiv wanders in and tells the midget to get lost. The midget toddles away again and Joan and the spiv (her old boyfriend, and manager of the strip club) begin to make out, Joan switching from "horror-struck and upset" to "giggly and horny" in the space of three seconds. The whole scene looks like it was shot in one take, and is played so languidly to defy belief. Later that evening, as Joan leaves the club, the midget leaps out at her from the shadows and rather improbably cries "You shall have a devil child!!!" before scampering off again.

Quite why Joan (recounting the story to a bored-witless Caroline Munro) should assume that this is the only explanation for why her child has anger-management problems I have no idea. And quite why she turns out to be right is even more startling. Soon she starts seeing the baby transform into the very same gurning midget in the blink of an eye, and most of the deaths are accompanied by such supremely seminal camera work depicting the hands of the midget (hmm, now there's a title for a Hammer... "Hands of the Midget") groping around and punching people.

And this is just the basic premise of the story, all given within the first twenty minutes. From then on it's a whirlwind of the good and the bad. For the former we have Donald Pleasence giving a superbly understated performance as the doctor whom everybody seems to be seeking advice from (he actually seems like a doctor, somebody the makers had hired out from a surgery to appear in the film rather than just an actor, and it works wonderfully). The spiv, though a complete bounder, has a few amusing lines - "Said you'd come to me so I could cheer you up. I've got another six Irish jokes since we last met." Joan Collins, despite being a bit wooden at the beginning, actually gets better as the film progresses. And I was positively delighted by a cameo from Stanley Lebor, better known as lovable Howard in "Ever Decreasing Circles" (and, hurrah, a sitcom actor who actually survives the film - that's a rarity in the 70s). And then there's Pleasence with "I thought today was going to be normal routine, I didn't think I'd be discussing mysticism with an Italian nun." And then there's the laughably bad bits, including the rather shaky ground surrounding the "Midgets are evil" thing, the most unconvincing birth scene ever, in which Joan looks more as though she's being orally pleasured than having a child, and the gratuitous stripper scenes peppered about every so often which don't serve to do anything much at all ("Am I boring you?") In fact, various scenes of steamy romance and general sauciness seem to be chucked in just to give the film a higher rating - that's the only reason I can think of for a rather touching courting scene between Joan and blank-faced husband Ralph Bates (nice accent, Ralph) being followed up by the two of them having sweaty, fumbling sex whilst the melodious seedy music that we've been subjected to throughout the entire duration reaches a new low. And eyebrows will raise when you glance at the credits and see that this entire musical travesty (it really just sounds like porn music, I'm sorry) was composed by Ron Grainer, the man who composed the "Doctor Who" theme tune. Go Ron. You do your funky thang.

But yes, to sum it all up, "The Monster" (where "I Don't Want to be Born" comes from I have no idea, as it's not the title on the print) is at times a rather lopsided affair which manages to actually remain consistently entertaining throughout, whether by accident or by design. It's probably all a matter of taste, and maybe I just ended up liking it as it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it'd be, but it's a rather fun feature that does end on a few shocks. 7/10