The Suckling

A 2?! Oh c'mon. It deserves at least a 6 for the baby effects alone, which are pretty good for such a low budget film. First of all disregard the box comments that seem to compare it to die hard or alien because its the furthest thing from that. Look at more as an above average Troma film, which is probably who should have released it in the first place. My quest to see the movie began at a flea market in Wallingford , CT where I saw a guy selling the suckling press kit with a badass "only could have been made in the 90's" T-shirt. It looked Like an all yellow local metal band shirt. I laughed and had a look and new I had to see the film. The press kit came with a small poster on which someone had written a note in marker on the back. It says" Mike, See you Friday aug. 23 midnight bleecker theatre if possible. If not there'll be bigger + better movies next. Pete." I don't know if the suckling was a CT made film, since the company who made it, JER Pictures has a Port Chester , NY address. Either way its pretty funny, or appropriate depending on your thoughts, that the poster hangs directly above my toilet. I say we need to bring on The Suckling 2: Keep on Suckling.

Get the f!ck out of here people...1's and 2's for this film??? I'm well aware that THE SUCKLING is no great feat of exploit cinema - but this is one of the best concepts out there for sleaze and gore fans. It's a shame it wasn't pulled off more competently and with more gore, if it had, this would have been one of my favorite films of all time...

THE SUCKLING is about a guy and his girlfriend who go to a whorehouse that doubles as an illegal abortion "clinic" (?) to get rid of the unwanted bun-in-the-oven. The chick has reservations about getting rid of it, so boyfriend and the coat-hanger technician unwillingly drug the girl so she doesn't have a choice in the matter (??). After the fetus is yanked, it's flushed down the toilet (???) where it encounters some radioactive material (????) and begins to mutate(?????) (at this point I feel compelled to tell you that this is no joke, this is really the plot of the film - and the fetus-mutation scene is hilariously awesome - think the "resurrection" scene from HELLRAISER meets that weird looking baby-thing from COMBAT SHOCK...). The fetus grows into some giant goofy looking monster, puts some sort of membrane around the house so those inside can't get out...and takes it's revenge on the occupants of the whorehouse (including it's "parents") for it's mistreatment (????????????)...

I couldn't make this sh!t up if I tried...THE SUCKLING has one of the most gloriously sleazy plots I could ever hope to actually witness on screen. But with such a wonderfully insane storyline - this film actually ends up being kind of disappointing. It starts out very strong, and ends very strong - but the middle is pretty dull and uneventful. There are SOOOOOO many things that could have been done with this film (even with a micro-budget) that weren't, and there was too much sitting around and talking by the "hostages", where there really should have been more gore and sleaze. Even so, I still dug this one if only for concept alone...but nah, it wasn't just that - there are definitely some "fun" things going on in this one. Probably not to everyone's taste as most "normal" people would have no interest in watching a radiated aborted fetus kill a bunch of people - but some of us really do - so if this sorta thing's your bag, I suggest giving it the once-over...7.5/10

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!...

Oh come on! "Sewage Baby" can't be the worst movie ever made. But surely it's one of the crappiest, unintentionally funny exploitation/slasher flicks from the past 20 years.

The premise can be offensive but after half an hour it gets really cheesy and easy to enjoy. We know that the parents' solution for their "mistake" is solved in a truly horrible place where there are whores and also abortion practices. So our classy couple gets rid of their unborn child but little to they know that "him" will turn into a super cheesy monster. The now monster fetus returns where he was aborted and starts a killing spree as part of his revenge.

My guess is that the producers of this movie knew only the basics of film making : they got low budget, an "original" but cheesy idea, and a resolution. The result is almost amateurish film making but with a heart. The movie is entertaining for the bad reasons. There are some things to make fun of. For example, the fetus morph into a mutant is beyond cheesy. The puppet or whatever looks really horrible. The other problem with the movie is the horrid acting. The direction is just bad but not terrible.

This isn't by any means a must see. I won't even recommend it for b-movie fans or horror fans in general. This is one of those movies that you should only see if it's the last, last option in the forgotten VHS section in a local video store.

I actually enjoyed and admired The Suckling in some ways. The plot and the tone of the film are both absurd and disturbing--two properties that I love in artworks. It possesses one of the most important qualities for a film to have--passion from the cast and crew to do something artistically interesting. On the other hand, The Suckling is marred by horrendous performances and a fair amount of technical incompetence.

Humorously, the film begins with scrolling text implying that The Suckling is based on a true story. It tells of an unsolved massacre in a "whorehouse and abortion clinic", and suggests that the filmmakers, such as director Francis Teri, believe the account of the sole survivor of the massacre--a woman whom the authorities believed to be insane. From there, we cut to a surreal sequence where a woman is accosted in bed and taken to a seedy hospital, complete with a topless nurse walking down the corridor with a bloody axe. Sadly, this turns out to be one of those "this was all just a dream" openings. We then change gears to a young couple. We quickly figure out that they are visiting the whorehouse/abortion clinic. The film shows us the "true story" of the massacre.

The story is set in the early 1970s. The quality of the film (meaning the physical quality of the actual material this was shot on) and various other visual cues all say "early 70s". However, the film's publication date was 1990, and there are other visual cues (such as some clothing and hair styles) that set The Suckling firmly in the late 1980s. The crux of the story is that the protagonist is visiting an illegal abortion clinic, which explains why the film would be set in the early 1970s--prior to Roe v. Wade (1973), but this emphasizes two very unusual aspects of this film. One, it's a very low budget independent "grindhouse"-styled horror flick that happens to be written and directed as a period film, and two, it very subtly, though inexpertly, captures its period. Those are indications of a concern for a subtler artistry that isn't usually attributed to this film.

The abortion stuff could be seen as having a moral/political subtext. Although the graphic scenes are ridiculously humorous in one respect, they're also unsettling. Abortion is shown as a pretty nasty business, but on the other hand, this is an illegal abortion clinic, and Teri could be seen as making the argument that if abortion is made illegal again--even though abortion is disturbing--people are still going to get abortions in places like this. When we consider that subtext, it makes more sense that The Suckling was written and filmed during the Reagan era in the U.S., a time when the "Moral Majority" gave it their best shot to turn the country into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy.

The overall tone of the film is often close to Frank Henenlotter's early work, such as Basket Case (1982); it has that same heavy 1970s subculture-grime feel. That's one of the assets of the film, as are the creature and other special effects, which are also reminiscent of Henenlotter, who is fond of twisted, darkly comic and ironic "morality plays".

I'm a huge Henenlotter fan. I don't think his films are "so bad they're good", I think they're often legitimate masterpieces. Both Basket Case and Frankenhooker (1990) are among my favorite films of all time. Even though The Suckling does a fair job creating a rough Henenlotter-styled atmosphere, it falls far short of his excellence, primarily because of the performances, the scriptwriting and the awkwardness of many of the technical elements, such as the editing.

Not every performance in The Suckling is awful, but too many are. Luckily, some of the worst offenders are in bit roles, such as the short doctor in the bookends. Occasionally, the performances are sublimely bad ("so bad they're good") due to a confluence of actor and script. For example, the blonde prostitute has a natural propensity for a combination of cheese and overacted melodrama, but when she utters lines like, "All these guys want to do these days is shoot their load in your face", the result is (probably unintentionally) hilarious. The script has our "heroes" flabbergasted by a gurgling toilet with a moving but closed lid ("Try jiggling the handle again" says the blonde prostitute), it has a bizarre "comic" S&M scene, and it has a lot of melodrama caused by conflicting macho attitudes from the house pimps and "bodyguards", as well as from the house madam, Big Mama, who is humorously dressed like a clown, complete with Tammy Faye Baker-styled makeup for most of the film.

Although Teri is skilled at setting up shots, he runs into problems when it comes to editing them together. The pacing is slightly but frequently off. Worse, there are a couple sections of repeated footage as padding. There is also padding in the plot. It seems like Teri had some good ideas, but had a problem stretching them out to feature length. The middle of the film devolves into a very pedestrian Ten Little Indians knock-off sequence that slows the film to a crawl. The score doesn't help, either. It's hokey at best, annoying at worst.

The principal sets/locations are also a bit unimaginative. It's a shame, because a few locations--such as the basement and the sewer--are visually intriguing and work well. Better yet is the bizarre biological stuff surrounding the house. That should have been used more, but it was probably way too expensive to do. The Evil Dead-like stop motion animation should have been dropped instead.

Of course, you shouldn't bother with The Suckling unless you have a well-developed taste for this particular kind of low budget, campy but disturbing, taboo-breaking horror. If you like that stuff, there's a good chance you've at least heard about this film. You might not love it, but it's worth a look.