FrightFest review – Big Baby

FrightFest review – Big Baby

Writer-director Spider One (born Michael Cummings) and actress-producer Krsy Fox made the interesting, unusual vampire movie Little Bites … which makes you wonder what The Blackest Moon, the werewolf movie the protagonist of Big Baby has written is actually like.  Screenwriter Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott) has a supportive partner Kate (Fox) and a theatrically-released horror credit going for him, but he’s rattled by a podcast duo who diss his film and advise him to kill himself … a coffee shop encounter with the young, white, nerdbro podcasters reinforces his feeling that he needs to up his game.  While racked with doubts, he literally dreams up the character of Big Baby (Adam Macinowski), a hulking slasher movie baddie in a bloodied over-the-head baby mask, and starts to write a screenplay.

It’s presumably deliberate that the film doesn’t show Adam interacting with producers, agents or a director and instead focuses on the writing – with inset scenes of Big Baby murdering folks, and Adam becoming convinced he needs to keep writing or else his monster will manifest in the real world … or perhaps he’s on the verge of becoming a killer himself.  When Adam tells Kate his script is called ‘Big Baby’, she wonders if it’s going to be autobiographical – and he is very much a whining successor to the kind of screenwriter Nicolas Cage played in Adaptation.  Down the line, we find out that Vampire Greg (Jordan Elsass) and Steve Strange (Radek Lord), the podcasters, love Big Baby as much as they disliked The Blackest Moon … and it’s hard to tell from what we see whether Adam has written something as ambitious as In a Violent Nature or as string-together-a-random-set-of-grossout-kills schlocky as a Terrifier sequel.  Similarly, the film feels a bit like an inside-the-mind-of-a-cracking-up-creative picture tricked out commercially with slasher movie set-pieces.

Scott and Fox are good in well-written scenes, and even get round the charges of special pleading you can level against any film which makes a filmmaker a flawed visionary hero – even if, in this case, he’s also at the very least a violent fantasist whose bloody dreams may have consequences in the real world.  Mr One is well-connected – he’s Rob Zombie’s brother (so far, he’s made more interesting films than Mr Z) and Cher is one of the producers – which means guest spots for a range of genre celebs from Catherine Corcoran of the Terrifier films to frequent Renfield/Hollywood bookstore proprietor Del Howison.