FrightFest review – Attack of the Adult Babies

My notes on this thing.

This is the sort of movie in which multiple characters are dosed with a super-enema and crap themselves to death. Director Dominic Brunt –  who also voices Sterculius, ‘the God of Poo’ – has been building up a filmography of Northern, socially-engaged, gross-out horror with the domestic zombie drama Before Dawn and the loan shark revenge picture Bait.  Here, he gets a bigger canvas to smear – with a relatively sumptuous country house location  – and goes for much blunter satire.  Paul Shrimpton’s script, from a story by Joanne Mitchell (who puts in funny teeth and plays a killer nurse), posits that a cabal of Establishment figure get together regularly and dress up in huge nappies to be regressed to childhood and pampered by a gaggle of nurses in stripper uniforms.  It’s not just a question of kink, since the whole thing ties into a mythology involving a shit-eating, gold-shitting giant pig-baby in the cellar who seems to reward followers with wealth and power though they also transform into snouted, fungus-faced horrors.

George (Andrew Dunn), a spineless MP, is helpless when Eastern European thugs invade his home and hold him at gunpoint, sending his wife (Kate Coogan), her son Tim (Kurtis Lowe) and his daughter Kim (Mica Proctor) to break into the mansion and steal some vital incriminating evidence … only it’s a scam by the louse to get others to do his dirty work for him and furthermore predictive text means he gives the wrong instructions.  At the house, martinet Margaret (Sally Dexter) and minion Clinton (Mitchell) instruct the nurses in their tasks and the big babies (including Seamus O’Neill from Inbred, Laurence R. Harvey from the Human Centipede sequels, and other tubby grotesques) settle down to the weekend of gurgling and shitting.  When the invaders show up, followed by the guilt-ridden George, a raft of plots get dropped (most of the nurses just run away) but a pile of new ideas are thrown in.  The grossness isn’t quite as hilarious as it might be, but the finale includes weird guest turns from other directors as Alex Chandon (Inbred) handles Tim’s psychedelic chat with the God of Shit and claymation specialist Lee Hardcastle (his mash-up of The Thing and Pingu is a masterpiece) handles some chainsaw splat action.

There are some Society-like ideas about the repulsive origins of social order, but this owes at least as much to the cinema of Warren Speed (Zombie Women of Satan) as to Brian Yuzna.  Besides explosive shit, this features shedloads of offal, gouged eyes, a chainsaw to the crotch, a massive blood-puke fountain, Cannibal Apocalypse all-the-way-through bullet wounds and an intermission featuring a couple of bored internet burlesque girls standing around.  The subtlest bit of nastiness has the most repulsive of the pervs (whose name is bleeped, as if the lawyers only found out something at the last minute) whispers his desires over the phone to one of the webcam girls who burst into tears and has to be comforted by her co-worker.