Baby Blood

Every so often, I need a break from the art house and avant-garde realm and feel the need to wallow in the sort of tasteless and morally retarded horror trash that caused me to develop cinephilia in the first place but I find most of such works absolutely intolerable nowadays and am quite discerning when it comes to what sort of celluloid trash I choose to devour. While the French have never exactly been masters of horror, I decided it was about time I give the oftentimes lauded, if not equally times hated, body horror flick Baby Blood (1990) aka The Evil Within directed by Alain Robak a watch due to its reputation as a rather raunchy and darkly mirthful piece of ‘reproduction horror.’ Of course, as a completely Judaic produced and directed work that depicts virtually all French women as desperate whores and French men as superlatively sleazy untermenschen vermin that use whatever means necessary to get into a strange pregnant woman’s seemingly never washed panties, the film is about as organically French as Serge Gainsbourg. Indeed, Baby Blood more or less does for the French what Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940) did for German Jewry, albeit in a more seedy and of course less melodramatic fashion as a stereotype-driven piece of racial caricature that reminds the viewer that the Hebrew nation has yet to get over the petty Dreyfus affair. On top of that, the film has the honor of being probably the first quasi-feminist body horror film ever made, as a work where virtually every male character attempts to defile the pregnant female lead, who becomes stronger and stronger each time she slaughters an imbecilic male character. As a socially scathing and darkly comedic film where an ancient and rather talkative parasite of the rather pernicious sort takes over the protagonist’s body and forces them to ‘feed’ (aka kill) for them, Baby Blood is surely the closest thing to a French equivalent to Frank Henenlotter’s crusty cult classic Brian Damage (1988), albeit featuring a voluptuous frog babe instead of an all-American turdboy. Indeed, for those that enjoy seeing completely unclad babes with large bosoms and an equally plentiful derriere killing men while drenched in blood, Baby Blood is probably your film but expecting mothers should probably stay clear of such a work, as it depicts pregnancy as something that is all the more grotesque than in vaguely related works like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974), Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), and David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), and Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (1981) aka Horror Planet. Of course, in its portrayal of a fetus as a sort of murderous parasite, the film might wet the all-too-dry panties of bull-dyke pro-abortion activists and other fecund-free aberrant females.

Baby Blood begins with the ancient parasitic antagonist declaring, “At the beginning of the world, earth was just a planet…which had just cooled down covered by ugly vegetation…and hideous gargoyles fighting for their food…under the star-filled sky. At the beginning of the world, appeared the first life forms…around the hole of a lost African swamp. And all of them started to reproduce. All except one. Me, who was deprived of one thing. Birth.” In the hope of being born, the creature takes over the body of a Central African leopard, which is ultimately shipped to a carnival in the North of France to be sold to a traveling circus. Ultimately, the parasite, which resembles a sort of grotesque snake, will enter the vagina of a beauteous, if not intellectually challenged, dame named Yanka aka ‘Bianca’ (Emmanuelle Escourrou) while she is sleeping in her trailer. Bianca ‘works’ at a traveling carnival owned by an abusive little prick with the Judaic surname ‘Lohman’ (Christian Sinniger), who beats the female protagonist for ostensibly acting like a whore while treating her like a whore at the same time. The very night the infected leopard is brought to the circus, the parasite escapes its body by blowing it up and then invades Bianca’s nether-regions, which causes the protagonist to wake up startled. Upon going to a doctor and discovering that she is pregnant, Bianca decides to leave the circus and Lohman behind for good and then flees to a city where she lives in squalor in a rat-fest dump of an apartment in a third world-esque ghetto.

Not unlike feminism, albeit in a more innately absurd way, the parasite in Bianca’s womb gives her a warped sense of independence that makes her feel the need to look at man as a perennial enemy who she must destroy before he destroys her. Indeed, everything changes for the protagonist when Lohman hunts her down in the apartment building and the creature that has invaded her cunt coerces her into stabbing to death her ex-beau. The ancient parasite in Bianca’s stomach has the power to make her feel great pain if she does not follow his deranged demands of killing men and drinking their blood so that the creature can be properly nourished. While Bianca initially attempts to commit suicide by drowning herself, she merely gets her clothes wet and ultimately hitches a ride with a ‘reformed gay’ trucker of Portuguese ancestry who ultimately ditches her for two much younger kraut babes. Like many downtrodden (future) single mothers, Bianca is forced to take a degrading job as a waitress and eventually slaughters a degenerate downtrodden would-be Don Juan that lives off of women named Richard (Jean-François Gallotte) after she has less than charming coitus with the fellow and he later proclaims that he would like to have children with her. Meanwhile, Bianca begins to develop a sort of bizarre attachment to the parasite in her womb, who ultimately becomes her best friend. When the parasite asks her if she likes men, Bianca strangely replies, “The eyes, a sad look, I like when they are unhappy.” A somewhat melancholy monster with a soft spot for his beyond hospitable host, the parasite confesses to Bianca, “Sometimes I am unhappy.”

Throughout Baby Blood, Bianca takes on a number of odd jobs and even odder murders. At one point, Bianca becomes a taxi-driver, which ultimately becomes a handy trade as she later carjacks a medical bus. When Bianca accidentally crashes the bus after an unruly blood donor takes his revenge against her for stealing his vital fluids, she ends up dropping dead, but the parasite gets extremely lonely and somehow brings her back to life while she is in an ambulance. After coming back to life, Bianca brutally murders the EMTs, even bashing one’s brains in with a fire extinguisher. While lying in the blood splattered ambulance, Bianca manages to give birth to a happy baby boy and subsequently steals a car that soon breaks down. While attempting to get a mechanic to fix her car, Bianca’s baby is blown to bits when the parasite explodes out of its body. Ultimately, the parasite manages to slither its way into a bus full of sleazy soccer players that Bianca also manages to hitch a ride from. The lard ass alcoholic driver of the bus allows Bianca to ride the bus on the condition that she does not wake up the players. Of course, when one of the sportsmen wakes up and spots Bianca, he wakes up all his comrades and they begin pawing at the protagonist as if they plan to gang rape her while singing lyrics like “fondle my dick.” While Bianca attempts to warn the hyper horny soccer stars about the creature on the bus, the parasite randomly jumps on the fat fuck bus driver’s head in an Alien-esque fashion and begins draining his blood. As the now petrified players bang on the back of the bus window, Bianca attempts to stop the vehicle from crashing, but it ultimately does and explodes. While Bianca presumably perishes in the accident, the parasite manages to realize its goal of reaching the sea.

Undoubtedly, as a work of cryptically Hebraic horror of the morally retarded yet darkly humorous sort where bodily dismemberment becomes a sort of nihilistic slapstick routine, Baby Blood is probably the closest thing to a ‘French’ equivalent to Judaic auteur Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead trilogy. In fact, the scene in Robak’s film where the parasite enters the protagonist’s pussy seems to be a homage to the infamous ‘tree rape’ scene from The Evil Dead (1981). Of course, aside from the films of Raimi and Henenlotter, Baby Blood also deserves comparisons to the early works of Peter Jackson like Bad Taste (1987) and Dead Alive (1992) aka Braindead. Horror fans should note that Robak’s film also features a cameo role from not only the screenwriter of the French arthouse splatter flick Baxter (1989), but also the eponymous bull terrier that appeared in the film, though this should be no surprise since Judaic frog Ariel Zeitoun produced both of the films. In keeping with the film’s somewhat inconspicuously kosher flavor, Jewish actor and sometimes director Alain Chabat also has a cameo in the film. With a Béatrice Dalle lookalike as the protagonist, all-too-stylish direction, and a somewhat cynical modernist depiction of France, Baby Blood is like the horror-comedy equivalent to the mainstream art house works of Jean-Jacques Beineix. Naturally, not unlike most of the films of Beineix, Robak’s film has more style and substance and thus is a work that ultimately has about as much artistic merit as the classic frog fuck flick Le sexe qui parle (1975) aka Pussy Talk. As a work that portrays the majority of Frenchmen as sleazy scumbags and potential rapists, Baby Blood demonstrates that, despite whatever country or film genre, Jewish filmmakers are always looking to undermine the people and culture of their host nation. Undoubtedly, fellow Franco-Hebrew filmmaker Alexandre Aja would continue Robak’s kosher trend of degrading French culture with the sick-for-sick’s-sake celluloid abortion Haute tension (2003) aka High Tension. Notably, Baby Blood was followed by two sequels directed by horror hack Jean-March Vincent that include Lady Blood (2008) and Eject (2010) but they are both so appallingly horrendous that I would not even recommend them to schlock-loving completists. Undoubtedly, the best thing I can say about Baby Blood is that it makes the perfect antidote for anyone that has ever had to suffer watching the rather retarded romcom Look Who's Talking (1989).

-Ty E