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.

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.

This Gallic horror oddity sees an ancient parasitic embryo burst out of its circus animal host in order to impregnate a big-breasted, gap toothed strumpet named Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou), who is then compelled by the creature to kill ugly French men (in order to feed her new 'baby' blood—hence the title).

Baby Blood is certainly quite splattery, with a lot of the red stuff splashed around and the occasional moment of graphic dismemberment, but even with the high gore content, I found the movie rather tedious in places, due to some rather drawn out and uneventful scenes between the visceral stuff. The story is way too simple to be stretched over feature length and needed more depth in order to fully hold this viewers attention.

Director Alain Robak shows some flair for the visuals (in fact, the opening scenes reminded me a bit of Peter Jackson's directorial style), but his treatment of the story—an uneasy mix of horror and bizarrely comic moments— ends up making the film feel disjointed. Had the film been either totally serious in tone or more outrageously silly, it might have impressed me more. As it stands, it all seems a little awkward in style.

On the plus side, the gore effects are well handled (lots of stabbing, a beheading, a head smashed in) and the Lovecraftian creature, seen towards the end of the film, is an impressively original looking critter—all slimy and pink, with moist quivering bits (which, for some strange reason, has reminded me to mention that star Emmanuelle Escourrou spends a lot of her time with her kit off!).

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' is a superb overlooked French horror movie that deserves a much wider audience. The beautiful and voluptuous Emmanuelle Escourrou stars as a circus performer who is impregnated by some kind of mutant monster. On the run, her unborn "child" begins to speak to her and demands blood - lots of it. Reluctantly she complies by murdering men she encounters. Eventually she develops a strange love/hate relationship with the monster within her.

This is a brilliantly entertaining variation on the killer baby theme (see 'The Unborn' and 'It's Alive'), with plenty of gore and nudity from the stunning Escourrou. I say steer clear of the American dubbed version as it is cut. 'Baby Blood' is one of the most underrated horror movies of the last twenty years. I thought it was a classic piece of exploitation and I can't recommend it highly enough!