Who Summons the Killer Baby?

It has a possessed baby, it has distinguished actors taking their roles seriously, but 1975's I Don't Want to be Born (a.k.a. The Devil Within Her and The Monster) never approaches The Exorcist in quality. Some nice dialogue thoughtfully delivered by Donald Pleasence and Eileen Atkins is undercut a bit by thoroughly unconvincing scenes of people getting pummelled to death by a newborn.

Baby's fingers dripping with his mother's blood following an attack when she tried to cuddle him soon after birth is the first real sign of trouble. For the baby's parents because this is not normal infant behaviour, for the audience because we're meant to accept what looks like drops of strawberry syrup on the fingers of a baby with an unmistakably oblivious facial expression as the sign of it cruelly perpetrating an act of physical violence. I wonder if anyone dared point out to director Peter Sasdy that one of the reasons The Exorcist worked is we were eventually able to see Linda Blair looking pretty convincingly demoniac.

Joan Collins is delicious as the baby's self-centred mother and I did like the scene where she narrates a flashback of the child's conception. Lucy (Collins) had worked as a stripper in a burlesque club where she performed with a dwarf named Hercules (George Claydon). In the flashback scene, she grudgingly admits to being turned on when he unexpectedly began fondling her in her dressing room but she angrily rejected him, pushing him away when he grabbed for her breasts. And so, like many evil dwarves before him, he takes revenge by putting a curse on Lucy. In case anyone thought this curse's relationship to the baby was too ambiguous, shots of Hercules in the crib in place of the baby are flashed for Lucy in moments when it's being particularly malevolent.

Lucy's husband, Gino (Ralph Bates), is blissfully unaware the baby might not be his, his guilelessness emphasised by an Italian accent so broad Chico Marx might call it stagey.

Gino's sister, a nun, has an accent not much more convincing but she's played with enough steel and intelligence by Eileen Atkins to make her seem the worthy counterpart to Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. She almost elevates every scene she's in, but maybe no performance can make up for a hairy little hand swatting up at adults from a crib. But I did really like a scene between Atkins and Pleasence, who plays the family's doctor. They have a fairly predictable debate about faith and science, with Pleasence concluding that, "a doctor can't write up a prescription against evil and violence. It's one of the severest limitations of our profession." But I love how Pleasence plays the scene. Except for the slightest of hints in his last few lines there's little sense of smugness in him and there's a sparkle in Atkins' eye that suggests her shrewd excitement in engaging in debate. I'd have loved to have seen these two as adversaries in a better movie with better dialogue.

This film is effectively funny, even if it didn't mean to be. Well, I'm pretty sure Lucy's hilariously useless stripper friend played by Caroline Munro was meant to be funny. I Don't Want to be Born is available on Amazon Prime under the title of The Monster.

Tangled Voices in the Empty School

After suffering a nervous breakdown, a young woman is attacked by a man with a prosthetic arm at the beginning of the 1972's Hammer horror film Fear in the Night. The assailant isn't caught--and her friends seem to harbour doubts he even existed--but her new husband encourages her not to worry because they're moving to a remote country school house to live with Headmaster Peter Cushing and his game hunter wife Joan Collins. What follows is as about as juicy and delightful as you might imagine a psychological horror movie with that premise could be.

Written and directed by Jimmy Sangster, the plot is a little convoluted--Wikipedia quotes one critic as saying the film's little more than a retread of Taste of Fear, a Hammer film from eleven years earlier, also written by Jimmy Sangster. While Taste of Fear is a much better film, Fear in the Night has a plot that resembles Taste of Fear on only a few superficial points.

Judy Geeson plays the protagonist, Peggy Heller, with the right amount of vulnerability and perpetual nervousness. We're led to wonder along with her if the attacks she suffers from a mysterious one armed man are the products of her imagination but the film doesn't stick exclusively with her point of view. Point of view is complicated in a subtle, intriguing way in the film's best scene, when Peggy meets the headmaster, Michael (Cushing), in the deserted school where she inexplicably hears the voices of boys learning lessons.

Cushing takes full advantage of the fact that the audience is keenly watching him along with Peggy to determine what his character's role might be. He does so in a way that plays brilliantly off of what we do eventually learn about him in what turns out to be a highly improbable plot. But it works because he clearly accepts the reality of it and you can see in the way his eyes stay on her that he has an agenda of his own as well as a painful restraint he must exercise.

Somewhat less complicated but also very entertaining is Joan Collins' introduction, armed with a shotgun she's just used to murder a rabbit Peggy had been trying to make friends with. It's immediately clear there's nothing innocent about her on any level.

Peggy's husband is played well enough by Ralph Bates and the film features some lovely very autumnal location footage.

Twitter Sonnet #1168

Enormous plants would tilt to hear the song.
The radio produced sustaining cries.
The theremin persists the evening long.
As morning breaks the water sprinkler sighs.
The collared stars were fain to serve the beach.
Transitioned drapes admit the dawning fish.
The speckled life of whales revealed the breach.
A growing branch fulfilled the sapling wish.
A line of yarn connects the panelled wall.
Inside the paper, lives were kept to watch.
In time with shining steps it built the hall.
A hour's arm would stick upon the notch.
The misty clues dissolve in thinning fog.
Saluting chorus sang from near the log.