From the debuting writer-director Alain Robak, BABY BLOOD a pretty incredible 1990 French horrorfest that boasts a highly respectable gore quotient, stylish direction and a strong performance by newcomer Emmanuelle Escourrou. What more could any serious horror fan want?
Horror, it should be stressed, wasn’t too popular in France during the late 1980s and early 90s. BABY BLOOD was, along with Jerome Boivin’s BAXTER (1989), an outlier in the French cinema landscape, but it was successful, scoring distributuion in America on video (in English dubbed form as THE EVIL WITHIN) and, later, DVD and Blu-ray. It can be viewed as one of the forerunners of the French Extremity boom of the 2000s, which included HIGH TENSION, CALVAIRE and FRONTIER(S).
The opening scenes are clumsy. A fiendish something-or-other is shipped from the jungles of Africa, via a corrupt white hunter, to a carnival in France—where it impregnates the young circus hand Yanka (Escourrou). It’s here that the story really picks up, turning into a perverse variant on LOOK WHO’S TALKING (1989). Yanka’s unborn child, communicating with her from the womb, turns out to be quite a chatterbox, asking its mother inappropriate questions about everything from sex to breast feeding. In addition, this fast-growing fetus needs blood to stay alive, compelling Mom to embark on one of the nastiest murder sprees ever.
The violence is fast, relentless, and plenty gory. There’s also not one but two ultra-grotesque, ALIEN-styled mutant birth scenes. Unfortunately, the story loses its relentless drive toward the end, when the newborn creature—it looks like an octopus—goes on a FIEND WITHOUT A FACE-esque brain-sucking spree.
The acting honors go to Emmanuelle Escourrou as the put-upon heroine. An unknown who hasn’t been heard from since (at least, not on these shores), Escourrou proves appropriately menacing as she commits murder after murder, yet still engages our sympathy. Loving mother, sex kitten and lethal murderess: Escourrou plays all of the many facets of her role convincingly. The only other performance of note is that of the baby’s voice, intoned by Alain Robak himself.
As far as I know, this is the first and only feature directed by Mr. Robak, who also co-authored the screenplay. The opening scenes of the creature being transported from Africa, a poorly edited mess of shifting POV’s and pedestrian set-ups, are clumsy, revealing the director’s amateur status, but Robak’s confidence grows once the heroine is impregnated, with the resulting killing-spree done with much style and black humor. He doesn’t skimp on the gore, either, creating a superlative arthouse splatter film. That approach had been tried before (most notably in the aforementioned BAXTER), but rarely with such ghoulish finesse.
Vital Statistics
BABY BLOOD (a.k.a. THE EVIL WITHIN)
Partner’s Productions
Director: Alain Robak
Producers: Ariel Zeitoun, Joelle Malberg, Irene Sohm
Screenplay: Alain Robak, Serge Cukier
Cinematographer: Bernard Dechet
Editor: Elisabeth Mouunier
Cast: Emmanuelle Escourrou, Jean-Francois Gallotte, Christian Sinniger, Francois Frazier