I Just Saw

One of the… stranger horror films of the 1970s, director Ted Post’s The Baby was recently reviewed on YouTube channel RedLetterMedia’s “Best of the Worst” strand and described as one of the best that they’ve seen on that show. It’s certainly something. The plot sees Mrs Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) meet social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) about her son, “Baby” (David Manzy), a literally infantile man who sleeps in a giant crib.

Mrs Wadsworth is assisted in the care of her man-child by her daughters Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Susanne Zenor). Ann, however, believes that Baby is being kept in his current state through coercion and abuse. She’s determined to rescue him from the Wadsworth household, and so begins a deadly game between her and the women…

The central conceit of The Baby is so tasteless and vile yet delivered with such awkward sincerity that I watched it with my hackles raised for the first half. (Stupidly I elected to watch it while eating a takeout sundae, a decision I soon regretted.) If it was pitched at a gonzo John Waters level, a la Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and other “midnight movie” satirical comedies, it would be easier to digest. I could see the drag queen Divine in the Mrs Wadsworth role, and Baby as a character isn’t far from Edie the Egg Lady in Pink Flamingos.

But it’s clearly aiming at a more serious psychological tone, and it’s just… deeply uncomfortable. You can argue that that’s the point, and in that sense, the movie succeeds. The problem is that it’s not discomfiting due to believable or well-realised themes so much as because it frequently plays like scenes from a fetishist’s unconscious. You wonder whether the writer had some weird hang-ups about sexuality and gender and power dynamics that would have been better worked out in therapy. This is a movie where an adult baby is shocked with cattle prods and breastfed by a teenage babysitter. Don’t watch with mother.

On a logical plane, the story falls apart almost immediately since this situation simply couldn’t come about outside maybe some isolated town in Appalachia. Would LA social services really allow a physically mature adult man to live in a giant crib, dressed in romper suits and fed from rubber nipples? Correct me if I’m wrong, but there are no literal “adult babies”. The term “adult baby” refers to a desire among mentally mature people to regress.

There are of course mentally challenged people, and the film describes Baby as “retarded”. (In a pretty offensive bit of visual juxtaposition, comparison is drawn between Baby and several disabled children at a clinic.) The mentally challenged, however, do not resemble pre-verbal infants and there would be no reason to maintain the idea of them as thus with bowl cuts, diapers, and all the other accoutrements of toddlerhood.

I hope I’m not labouring the point here. What I’m trying to say is that even in 1973, the authorities would have cocked a few eyebrows at a sexually mature adult male being pampered without informed consent.

And yet… as The Baby moves towards the end of its second act, it finally starts to rise above its porno-quality premise and become genuinely engaging as a story. There are themes and misdirection going on as Ann and Mrs Wadsworth face off against each other for ownership of Baby. Comer and Roman’s characters respectively are the strongest parts of the film. Everyone else in the cast is basically either a stooge or a MacGuffin, including Baby.

Roman was a classical beauty and her work here is kind of in the “hagsploitation” or “psycho biddy” genre, where Hollywood starlets on losing their youth turned to villainous roles in horror. (For example Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) She starts as a tough and domineering Mrs Bates figure, but come the third act you start to see her as less malign and ill-meaning, while mousy Ann becomes more deadly.

It all ends in an honestly somewhat brilliant chase around a house and a shocking final twist that was foreshadowed early in the film. The twist, though also not very logical for much the same reasons that Baby as a character isn’t, is actually clever and redeems what came before. It edges The Baby into cult classic territory and is a large part of why I’m rating it so highly.

It’s far from a great or even good film really. It’s creepy in the wrong ways, doesn’t rise above trashy melodrama, and is subject to numerous logical fallacies. On its own cult wavelength, though, it works. It’s never boring, and by the third act has begun to exert a horrible fascination that lasts until its surprisingly satisfying final twist.

Rating: 3/4