Ok, prepare yourselves for another weird movie experience that mirrors this writer’s morning watching The Greasy Strangler last year.
It probably went down at times like a lead balloon with fans and wasn’t one of the picks, but we are willing to be considerate towards Attack Of The Adult Babies, based on a reasonably humorous second half that defies everything the first half does with gutsy vigour
Given that Larry Cohen’s documentary showed us bits of It’s Alive, the poster beamed on screen before the screening did suggest that perhaps we were going to get a UK version of that film. However, the babies in this film aren’t mutants, but traumatised businessman in nappies (yep!)
On balance, the film comes across like a combination of Carry On Emmanuelle (without doubt the low-point of that landmark series) and Kevin Conway’s Motel Hell. If it had been more effectively developed, then perhaps there would have been a more rewarding film.
The set up is this: A mother and her two children are blackmailed by a couple of hitmen into retrieving some important documentation from a country manor, just as a group of men arrive for conditioning to become babies, run by a woman looking like an extra out of SS Experiment Camp (!) The trio then discover some dark secrets amidst the evening feeds….
Dominic Brunt is to be applauded for at least trying to combine an old-style British movie with some contemporary horror and to be honest with you; we aren’t getting many of these styles of films at present.
In hindsight, there are all kinds of combinations that could be seen in its place. In the hands of David Cronenberg, for example, the film could have been a Brood-esque concept about progressive regression, with babies fully formed as adults out of the womb. In the hands of Edgar Wright, you could picture Simon Pegg as a malicious son who, in trying to deal with the trauma of his ageing father’s developing dementia, places him in this clinic with disastrous results.
The performances are passable and there is a very funny gag surrounding predictive text that sets up the film early on, but the focus of the film should have been primarily on the clinic and the men in nappies, as there is more than enough meat on the bone (or chainsaw later on) to create a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest single location drama.
If you are prepared to stick out the meandering and confusing set up and can suspend your disbelief through to the second half, then you will be rewarded with a gung-ho climax that compensates.
ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: DOMINIC BRUNT / SCREENPLAY: PAUL SHRIMPTON / STARRING: JOANNE MITCHELL, KATE COOGAN, SALLY DEXTER, ANDREW DUNN, CHARLIE CHUCK / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE DATE TBA
