There are entirely too many horror films about possessed children, or babies borne of the devil. The notion of kids alone is monstrous enough without them being monstrous themselves. HELL BABY is a jumbled parody of the finest in that popular subgenre, including ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE OMEN, and THE EXORCIST, while taking after the glut of crappy exorcist films we’ve been inundated with over the years. Ironically, a movie trying to make light out of the ubiquity of demon children will forever be paired with another like-minded film, BAD MILO!, which also came out around the same time this past year.
Bad timing aside, HELL BABY is leagues better than BAD MILO!. Why? Because HELL BABY, for the most part, is pretty darn funny, even if it’s guilty of dragging jokes out too long, or hammering you with something in the belief that it will eventually be funny, two relatively new comedic trends that I could do without. Its game cast is talented (featuring a who’s who of comic players familiar to avid cable watchers of Comedy Central, FX, and Adult Swim) and an exceedingly likable bunch throughout, even if the movie feels as long as this sentence (and it’s only 90+ minutes).
Jack (CHILDEN’S HOSPITAL’s Rob Corddry) and Vanessa (THE LEAGUE’s Leslie Bibb) are a not-so young couple looking to start a family with a fresh start and new home. They dim-wittingly buy a run-down, decrepit, sure-as-heck haunted, murder house in a bad part of New Orleans (the lower lower Garden District; “white people don’t know it exists”), because they got a deal for it. But that’s not all: Vanessa is overwhelmingly pregnant, with twins (a fact as tacked on in the film as is this parenthetical), less than a month from squirting out like the pee that does when Jack carries her across the threshold. It’s a cute and funny moment, and the last before Vanessa becomes possessed, as does her womb, by the evil forces that surround the house.
F’resnel (Keegan-Michael Key), an unwanted roommate as immovable as bed bugs, who lives in the crawlspace and is always there to startle you, is the best part of this film. He delivers some of the very best lines, and his style of comedy meshes perfectly with the proceedings. But sometimes, HELL BABY relies too much on F’resnel to make the movie. Keegan makes his dialogue pop the most consistently, but also delivers some clunkers, like the several times we have to hear him shout “bitches be trippin’.” Ugh.
The parallel narrative involves Father Sebastian (Robert Ben Garant) and Father Padrigo (Thomas Lennon), two chain-smoking, gun-toting priests sent from Rome to tackle the oncoming evil burgeoning in New Orleans. As they say to the bumbling, funny cops they meet upon arriving in NO, Ron (Paul Scheer) and Mickey (Rob Huebel), the “Devil is real, and he’s a dick.”
Leslie Bibb is a very effective, over-the-top, villainess, as there’s far more Hell Wife than Hell Baby in this misleadingly titled film. She scrubs her fingers to bloody stumps, she growls in her sleep, communicates with an intimidating Rottweiler (a la THE OMEN) and is unconcerned with their transient moving boxes and the flirty demon granny neighbor Mrs. Nussbaum who haunts Jack. It’s nice to see Rob Corddry being uncomfortable, rather than the one making us uncomfortable for a change.
The film squeezes in a few odes to New Orleans cuisine, with at least 3 marathon shrimp po’boy eating sessions. It also features pizza salad and a round of puking, which I could’ve done without. HELL BABY is a mixed bag of gags, like you’d expect from an improvisational parody fest. Depending on your tastes, you’ll either love HELL BABY, or detest it. I found myself ultimately enjoying the romp, thanks to exasperated lines from Corddry like, “I am so sick of being stabbed!”
The Blu-Ray comes with over 40 minutes of extras, including 28+ minutes of deleted scenes, a gag reel and “Rawdog Radio Comedy.” The latter is an odd featurette with Fathers Sebastian and Padrigo listening to a rant from Keegan-Michael Key on the radio, as they smoke cigarettes as deadpan as possible. While I could listen to Keegan say arugula all day, that nugget is nestled in 8 minutes of Keegan yelling “Bitches Be Trippin’,” something so far from my definition of funny.
The gag or “goofs” (a term familiar to David Wain fans, from his comedy THE TEN; the writer-director appears in this film), are mostly ho-hum, with the exception of jokes surrounding the fabled Y2K virus, and how it and phantom cell phone rings come from the devil. I love me some Y2K jokes (“never forget”), if for no other reason than to remember how silly that fiasco was.
The “deleted” scenes are more accurately termed extended scenes, or alternate scenes (or even more gag reels), as these actors are almost purely improvisational performers, and many of their jokes go off-track or in different directions, and we get to see the results of that here. With the exception of a painfully long attic scene between Corddry and Key, I’d argue that a majority of the scenes have some lines funnier than what made it in the film, especially in the various versions of when the group smokes from Marjorie’s peace pipe. This is likely because it means more Kumail Nanjiani, who plays the completely nonsensical cable guy, and for Marjorie’s assertion that we’re all bleeding… all the time. Whoa. SHE’S RIGHT. Sitting through all 28 minutes of this jokey milieu makes you impressed that Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon were able to turn HELL BABY into an actual movie, since almost all of the footage lacked any sort of urgency, acting or structure.
Of course, so did the finished product, but sometimes that’s alright.
- Release Date: 12/31/2013
- Running Time: 98 minutes
- Written By: Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon
- Directed By: Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon
- Starring: Rob Corddry, Leslie Bibb, Keegan-Michael Key, Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, Rob Huebel, Paul Scheer, Riki Lindhome, Michael Ian Black, David Wain, Alex Berg, Kumail Nanjiani
December 17, 2013 By Andy Greene