Rating: C-
Dir: Joe Lam
Star: Lauren LaVera, Julian Curtis, Bill Moseley, Amy Arena
I have to respect any film where the merchandising includes packets of condoms (above), signed by the movie’s director. Certainly, the first half of this feels like it should become a required component of sex ed classes, because it would put any right-thinking teenager off unprotected aardvarking. Okay, I just used “right-thinking” and “teenager” in the same sentence. My mistake. Anyway, the couple engaging in said barebacking – albeit, unintentionally – are Alessa (LaVera) and Chris (Curtis). The resulting pregnancy shows up with remarkable, indeed suspicious, haste. Alessa spurns Chris’s offer of the morning after pill, and instead insists on a trip to visit her widowed father, Maddox (Moseley), a blind Vietnam vet with PTSD and… Well, we’ll get to that.
The problem is, Alessa’s mother died giving birth to her, and she is worried the same fate will befall her. There is clearly something up in her uterus. For it climbs out, attached by an impressively long umbilical cord, commits murder, and then returns whence it came. This is a bit of a shock to her. Less so to Maddox, which explains his strong belief in abstinence only sex education. He knows that the only way to save his daughter, is to keep feeding the foetus until it is ready to be born. Which fortunately, will not require the usual nine months’ gestation period. The “and”? That would be a hole in the basement floor, in which lives…
Well, we likely will not get to that. In part for spoiler reasons, in part because I’m not entirely sure what should follow those ellipsis. I will say, it appears to be on vacation from the cellar in The Evil Dead. Somewhat clearer than the details of the plot, is the way the film wants to tie in pregnancy, and fears thereof, to generational trauma and abuse. There’s probably some kind of pro-life message here too. Or pro-choice. Just don’t ask me what. But Chris, in particular, is terrified at the prospect of becoming a father, because his own father loved the bottle more than him. “I’ll drink to that!” fires back Maddox. It’s not particularly interesting, in part because Curtis is definitely the weakest side of the acting triangle.
Moseley seems to be having most fun, and the more he takes a backseat, the more the film suffers. I certainly did appreciate the practical approach taken to the killer foetus and the other effects. This lends a physicality to proceedings which is welcome, and for me was the closest this came to delivering the humour expected from the dreaded “horror-comedy” designation. It does feel like the proceedings here run out of steam. I suspect this proves that there’s only so far a movie can sustain interest with foetus attack sequences – had you been wondering about this, I guess. File the production alongside The Coffee Table, as another film likely to contribute towards declining birth rates in the Western world.