You know you’re in for something special when a film begins with the cooling of the earth’s crust. It takes a special kind of bravado to begin at the beginning. As we watch the stock footage of lava bubbling and oozing out of the ground we are treated to some dramatic narration delivered by the director himself who sounds like a cross between Kraftwerk and Golem. Here is the first sentence, “In the beginning, the world was no more than a cooling star covered in hideous vegetation and foul gargoyles who fought each other for their sustenance under the star-spangled sky.”

Baby Blood is a French film written and directed by Alain Robak in 1990. The movie is equal parts trash and treasure, but they are not separate, they are smeared together in a never-ending torrent of blood and more blood. The film lurches precariously between sleazy gore and auteur cinematography.

Our heroine is a woman of grand proportions. She struts and stumbles across the screen with big, frizzy hair, big, round hips, big, unruly boobs, and big buck teeth with a big, wide gap between them. Cover all that with a few buckets of blood and she is truly a vision.

Along with her many outsized attributes, she also has a blood-thirsty parasite living inside her that sends her psychic messages. He’s creepy in a way only French people know how to be. He is a combination of friend, father, lover, and life coach. He’s sentimental and needy, but he is also a bully who forces her to kill people so he can quench his thirst for the scarlet stuff. It’s a simple premise and the film sticks to it. Our heroine stabs people, runs them over, strangles them, and even blows one up by pumping him full of gas. The film is less scary than it is violent, but the violence is quite spectacular.

Baby Blood pours itself out as a horror movie but then there is a unique and truly bizarre scene where the camera wanders through our heroine's innards. This is before the invention of CGI so they use a bizarre and bloody model made from rubber? Papier-mâché? Pasta and pipe-cleaners? All of the above? I don’t know, but its’ wonderfully grotesque. It’s worth seeing the movie just for this one minute of film.

You get a lot of bang for your frank in this movie. Alain Robak was generous in ladling out a hefty serving of body horror and Emmanuelle Escourrou, the leading lady, deserves our praise and admiration for her courageous foray into the disgusting. 

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