Friday, January 16, 2009

Movie Notes- Baby Blood [1990]

A young woman in a lousy relationship, working at a French circus, gets impregnated by a strange life-form and ends up carrying a monster who commands her to kill men and drink their blood by communicating with her telepathically from within her womb. In some sense, pregnancy involves a parasitic being controlling its host from within; and the film takes this idea to its Cronenbergian extreme. The fetus turns its mother into a killing machine in order to satisfy its strange cravings; probably worse than late-night pickle and ice-cream binges.

All of this is as loopy as it might sound; after all, the fetus-monster isn't an alien, but a primordial aquatic squid-thing that wants to return to the ocean. Also, the girl seems to be able to kill and mutilate men across France with relative impunity. And every time she tries to escape the predicament by killing herself, the fetus just revives her body.

Luckily, the filmmakers treat this material with the right amount of humor, turning the final reel into something like a particularly bloody Road Runner cartoon. Not surprisingly, the film became something of a cult classic in France, and was recently sequalized with a film called Lady Blood that I will no doubt wind up seeing at some point.

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