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.

"Baby Blood" follows a downtrodden circus performer, Yanka, who finds herself carrying a mysterious parasite that has entered her uterus against her will. Now, she's eating for two, but not the usual meals— the parasite craves human blood, and will stop at nothing to make sure it gets it.

Given the tendency of French cinema to err on the side of the extreme (especially when it comes to genre films), it's no surprise that "Baby Blood" is as unabashedly gruesome as it is. For all of its other attributes, the film is, at its core, a gross-out body horror splatter flick that delivers mind-numbingly gruesome violence that manages to be legitimately discomforting at times. The film also plays itself as something of a first-person slasher film as well, with the caveat being that the "killer" is operating by proxy.

But there's more to it than that; there is also a well-shaped psychological dimension to the film that is captured effectively through macabre voice overs in which the parasite inhabiting the protagonist's womb speaks within her mind, commanding her moves and actions and chastising her when she doesn't do what it wants. The interplay between the mind, the body, and the invader is well-realized and offers opportunity for scenes that are unnerving and scenes that are darkly funny. Emmanuelle Escourrou gives an instinctive and engrossing performance here that is impressive given she is reacting mainly to herself.

Overall "Baby Blood" is a generally strong horror flick that excels as both an exercise in psychological torment as well as a no-holds-barred body horror splatter flick. Shades of dark humor and a playful edge give the film an extra bit of zest, but it doesn't even really need it, as there is enough clever writing and buckets of blood to keep the most hardened horror fans engaged on some level. 8/10.

Here's an interesting concept;; Alien like pregnancy with a woman instead of the John Hurt character in that overrated bore fest. The unfortunate baby host is Yanka(Emmanuelle Escourrou). A reptile sort of creature wanders into her uterus and has a thirst for blood. The good mother travels from village to village, killing anyone available to feed her growing fetus's voracious need for plasma in order to grow into a really large and dangerous monster.

The little one is very verbose, having funny conversations with its' host. Yanka is sexy and often naked, which adds to the entertainment value this atmospheric thriller. Baby blood provides buckets of the red stuff, as expected, and I thought that the acting and script were pretty good for this genre.

The director, Alain Roback, has an eye for detail and a sense of humor. The talking baby is a different twist, and it works in Baby Blood.

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.