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While October is officially just days away now, we have another batch of excellent genre home media releases in the meantime to help get us ready for the best month of the year. Scream Factory has put together an incredible box set for the [Rec] series that fans will definitely want to add to their personal collections, and for those who have made the upgrade, John Carpenter’s original Halloween makes its debut in 4K this week.

Arrow Video has put together a Special Edition release for The Baby, and for those of you who may have missed it earlier this year, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich heads to multiple formats on Tuesday. Both The Swarm (1978) and The Cyclops (1957) head to HD for the first time ever courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, and there’s a bevy of cult classics headed to both Blu-ray and DVD from the likes...

“Maybe you think too much. When it comes to Baby, I do all the thinking.”

The Baby (1973) will be available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video September 25th

Still traumatized by the loss of her husband, well-meaning social worker Ann Gentry throws herself into her latest assignment: the case of Baby , a 21-year-old man with the mind of an infant who crawls, cries and has yet to make it out of nappies. But Baby s family the tyrannical Mama Wadsworth and her two demented daughters aren’t the only ones with a warped conception of familial relations, and the full horror only begins when Ann sets her sights on liberating the drooling man-child… and in so doing unleashes the wrath of the Wadsworth women.

45 years after its original release, this film remains one of the most bizarre horror movies ever committed to celluloid. Directed by Ted Post and co-starring Marianna Hill,...

Only in the ‘70s, man, only in the ‘70s. Long before PC culture invaded popular entertainment, movies were the haven of the taboo, a safe house for ideas two steps from the norm. Now, many of these films of perversion were relegated to grindhouse theatres and the third feature of a Dusk Til Dawn showing at your local Drive-In. But occasionally a film will crawl towards the mainstream and plop itself down, bawling for attention. The Baby (1973) is one such film, so twisted in conception that it’s hard to believe it would be released in any decade. Except the ‘70s of course, where you could even get the director of a Dirty Harry and a Planet of the Apes flick to helm it.

Distributed by Scotia International in March, The Baby was given a limited theatrical release; and that’s really for the best – as much as the film...

Conscious-free kids who kill, a man living like a baby, and a killer stalking Spanish schoolgirls: Severin Films is plucking these three stories from the old-school horror shelf and bringing them to Blu-ray this summer, and we have the release details for you now.

Set for a July 8th home media release, the Blu-ray releases of 1981′s Bloody Birthday, 1973′s The Baby, and 1981′s Bloody Moon should excite fans of these grindhouse films and bring new viewers in, as well. Here are the release details from Severin Films:

Bloody Birthday Blu-ray:

“Get ready for the rarely seen slasher classic from the ’80s that may also be the most disturbing ‘killer kids’ movies in grindhouse history: Three babies are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings and beyond.

It's always an exciting thing when horror flicks hit Blu-ray for the very first time, and Severin Films has three such debuts in store for us on July 8, inviting us to a Bloody Birthday, allowing us to hold The Baby, and encouraging us to howl at the Bloody Moon.

Read on for complete release details for all three!

Bloody Birthday Synopsis

Get ready for the rarely seen slasher classic from the 80s that may also be the most disturbing "killer kids" movies in grindhouse history: Three babies are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings, and beyond. Can the town's grown-ups stop these pint-sized serial killers before their blood-soaked birthday bash? K.C. Martel (E.T., "Growing Pains"), Joe Penny ("Jake and The Fat Man"), Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja...

The Baby

Directed by Ted Post

Written by Aby Polsky

USA, 1973

Shocking and unsettling in breaking a number social taboos, this forgotten gem centres on the kind of dysfunctional family seldom depicted on screen. The Baby is a politically-incorrect pseudo horror film about motherly love gone horribly wrong.

Our story follows a recently widowed social worker (Anjanette Comer) who investigates a strange case of child abuse and discovers a grown man (David Manzy) has been held in a state of infantile his entire life. The grown man still behaves like a baby, dressed in diapers, unable to speak and under the full dependance and care of a mother and her two teenage daughters. The social worker becomes increasinly obsessed with Baby, fearful for his wellbeing under the manipulative, psychotically abusive family who control and torture him for their own benefit.

Ted Post’s The Baby is surely one of the...

The 70s were a great time for movies. Filmmakers experimented and created some of cinema history’s greatest classics. The Baby, released in 1973, while not one of these classics is still worth mentioning. Now regarded as a cult classic, this weird and twisted horror-thriller has a story that will probably stay with you for quite some time.

The Wadsworth family consists of a single matriarch (Ruth Roman), two daughters and one Baby. The Baby I’m referring to is actually the name of a twenty-something man (David Mooney) with the mental capacity of an infant. A social worker named Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) learns of Baby and develops a special interest in his case. As Ann gets closer to Baby, she becomes emotionally attached to him. This angers Mrs. Wadsworth who is extremely overprotective of Baby and soon, bizarre events start to take place.

Read more...

A quick recommendation of a new DVD of an old cult film: 1973's "The Baby," from director Ted Post. The story is sort of "Cinderella" if instead of forcing Cinderella to do manual labor, the wicked stepmother and stepsisters brutalized her into pretending she was a giant overgrown baby so they could suckle off the government teat by collecting her welfare checks. There's no Prince Charming in this version, but there is a charming social worker who believes the "baby" (whose name is, well, Baby) is being mistreated and abused and is capable of acting like the adult he physically is.

For the life of me I can't figure out how this film came to exist. A world in which no one but a single social worker is concerned or even skeptical about the "Grey Gardens" nutjobs and their adult baby son? Even her bosses at the welfare offices tell...

by Zach Clark

[Editor's Note: In honor of The Baby's release on DVD tomorrow, this appreciation could only come from Mr. Clark, a NYC-based filmmaker and a life-long fan of psychotronic cinema. His most recent feature films are Modern Love Is Automatic and Vacation!.]

You can't un-see Ted Post's 1973 feature The Baby. What begins as a quasi soap opera for infantilists uses seemingly non-tongue-in-cheek camp and slasher tropes to mutate into an anti-morality play about families and normalcy. What's right is wrong. What's wrong is wrong, too. There are no answers, only questions. Hope is non-existent. You could call it misanthropic, or you could call it honest. Baby doesn't walk and Baby doesn't talk and there isn't really anything anyone can do about it.

The star of The Baby is Baby (played by David Manzy), a grown man who is also a baby. You have to see it to believe it. He wears infant clothes. He wants to play with toys and breast feed. His food is pureed and gets all over his face. But, he is not chasing the modern adult baby's dream of permanent regression. Baby has nothing to regress to.

by Zach Clark

[Editor's note: in honor of The Baby's release on DVD tomorrow, this appreciation could only come from Mr. Clark, a NYC-based filmmaker and a life-long fan of psychotronic cinema. His most recent feature films are Modern Love is Automatic and Vacation!.]

You can't un-see Ted Post's The Baby, which comes out on DVD this week. What begins as a quasi soap opera for infantilists uses seemingly non-tongue-in-cheek camp and slasher tropes to mutate into an anti-morality play about families and normalcy. What's right is wrong. What's wrong is wrong, too. There are no answers, only questions. Hope is non-existent. You could call it misanthropic, or you could call it honest. Baby doesn't walk and Baby doesn't talk and there isn't really anything anyone can do about it.

The star of The Baby is Baby (played by David Manzy), a grown man who is also a baby. You have to see it to believe it. He wears infant clothes. He wants to play with toys and breast feed. His food is pureed and gets all over his face. But, he is not chasing the modern adult baby's dream of permanent regression.

DVD Playhouse June 2011

By

Allen Gardner

Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion) Robert Aldrich’s 1955 reinvention of the film noir detective story is one of cinema’s great genre mash-ups: part hardboiled noir; part cold war paranoid thriller; and part science- fiction. Ralph Meeker plays Mickey Spillane’s fascist detective Mike Hammer as a narcissistic simian thug, a sadist who would rather smash a suspect’s fingers than make love to the bevvy of beautiful dames that cross his path. In fact, the only time you see a smile cross Meeker’s sneering mug is when he’s doling out pain, with a vengeance. When a terrified young woman (Cloris Leachman, film debut) literally crossed Hammer’s path one night, and later turns up dead, he vows to get to the bottom of her brutal demise. One of the most influential films ever made, and perhaps the most-cited film by the architects...

You can’t beat late night television to catch some of the oddities of the film world. Series’ like Moviedrome and Mondo Macabro presented some weird and wonderful films, but sheer scheduling alone would bring the occasional strange delight our way. The only bonus of insomnia was that I’d never miss these films when they were on and it’s how I got into loving film, the veritable B-movie banquet that was the early hours So, here are my choices of five late night TV gems:

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (1973) Now you see them, now you don’t…now you die

Be afraid, be very afraid in this very effective made-for-tv movie which has already made an entry in fistinface’s ‘Five: TV Movies Not About Eating Disorders’. I love cheesy TV movies but this is the rare thing of a darker, more original film and...

• Screamkings Productions has announced that its new shocker Frat House Massacre (pictured) will have its first U.S. screening next Wednesday, February 4. It’ll be showing at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue) as part of the NewFilmmakers New York series.

The movie begins at 8 p.m., and director Alex Pucci and cast members Jon Fleming, Niki Notarile and Rane Jameson will attend and hold a Q&A. Scripted by Draven Gonzalez, Frat House Massacre is supposedly based on true events and is set in 1979, following two brothers as they join the Delta Iota fraternity and find themselves enmeshed in sex, drugs and brutal hazing that leads to torture and murder. Veteran Italian composer Claudio Simonetti provided the score. You can check out the movie’s official website here.

• While it continues to search for a distributor, Jim Isaac’s new film Pig Hunt has been set...