The Suckling

well. you may guess I was being sarcastic. This is probably the worst film I have ever seen. Sewage Baby is ridicule in its purest form, with awful plot, inconsistent characters, poor editing and a puppet that could have come straight from a cereal packet.. in fact I think it did. oh dear, I don't feel I will recommend this film to anyone but those with a very odd sense of humour, or those who really have no idea about film. Vaguely good idea, yet fails to take off in the slightest. I hope you are not one of those actors...

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!...

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that forces you to redefine what movies are all about. Sometimes it just looks better than everything else on the market. Sometimes it's just acted better that a lot of other movies in its genre. And sometimes it's just so different that it defies comparison to anything else. There are plenty of movies that live up to the hype and prove themselves, in retrospective articles for years to come, to be the pinnacle of film. Unfortunately, this is not it at all.

The Suckling starts off with one of the worst openings ever that has been used too many times before: The prologue for the movie reveals how many people survive! What is the point of that? I mean, in a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's still irritating but its placement was so that the movie retained a documentary feel. Here, it is completely pointless and ruins any surprise you may have if you pay attention.

Regardless of that, the movie begins and seems interesting enough. Sure, the acting is terrible and the filming isn't the greatest, but the story has to do with a woman being tricked by her boyfriend and some sweet drugs into getting an abortion. That's cool! The aborted fetus itself doesn't look too bad, and we get some shots of it growing eyes and nails. Soon, it begins killing people, and that's magnificent.

Unfortunately, too much of the film is bogged down by boring moments. As I've said in other reviews, most of the fun of watching a B-Movie like this is to talk about the scenes to your friends later. But there isn't much to talk about here. It's like my complaint with Bubba Ho-Tep: there was so much they could have done with this concept but they totally wasted it. If I were to do this movie, I would have had some Abortion Police come in, armed with coathangers! Instead, this is basically just like every other slasher or monster film we've seen before, except with characters you don't care about (a businessman who says "whore" a lot, a CRAZY guy who is SO CRAZY that there is no gun shot sound effect when he fires his gun, a horrible boyfriend to the main character, a bunch of prostitutes, etc).

Just not really that enjoyable and surprisingly mean-spirited. And what's up with the ending with the skeleton, the guy, and the boy?!

The Suckling is one of my favourite trashy films for many reasons. For a trashy movie it more than delivers the goods. Scenes such as the topless axe-wielding nurse, the aborted foetus sliding into the sewers and then mutating into a monster - these images will be burnt into my brain forever! Never will you see such images again in a film. The dialogue and acting is terrible but hilarious too. A few quotes: "You wouldn't know bullshit if you were standing under a bull!", "A man comes in to get his penis sucked, and gets shot off instead". The most hilarious scene is when the monster shrinks back down to foetus size - making a "ga-ga" sound - and crawls back into his mothers womb. Priceless! The Suckling is pure trashy entertainment at its best and I would recommend it to all horror b-movie fans. Ignore what everyone else has said - it's not THAT bad. Also - people continually knock the musical score, what's with that?! The opening piano music sounds so dark and haunting and fits a horror theme perfectly. I would even say that it belongs in a better film than this (by that I mean a serious horror film) because it's perfect!

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.