amie is a transfer student, going to school far from home, who makes ends meet by taking babysitting jobs. She finds more than she can handle in the house of one strange couple, who play strange tricks on her while interviewing her for the job.
They tell her the baby, now sleeping upstairs, is a handful,
but she believes she can handle him.
As the couple prepare to leave for a costume party, she compliments them on how realistic they look, even though they don't seem to be costumed at all. Then she waits around the kitchen, wanders around being appalled by the family's vast collection of inexplicable art and makes her way upstairs to look at the baby.
The baby, a grotesque doll-like creature with a definite nasty side, attacks her, forcing her to fight back. She ties it up at one point, but it gets loose and attacks her again. As the battle reaches its climax, we learn that the baby is not what it seems—but neither is Jamie, the family, the house or the nature of the costumes worn by the terrible tyke's mother and father.
A 20-minute idea stretched to a full hour
It's possible to make a fun, even great, short film about a lone woman being terrorized by a killer-baby. The people behind That Little Monster seem to have the tools they need to accomplish such a feat, including a likeable leading lady and splendidly moody black-and-white cinematography. Alas, the film is overwhelmed by stylistic flourishes that don't enhance the suspense, but rather bury it; it seems to take forever before the story begins, with all of the preliminaries both tedious and exasperating.
There is, for instance, a long section depicting our heroine's reactions to the house's eccentric furnishings; she smiles approvingly at some, looks confused at others, seems dumbfounded by a few and sick and nauseated by a few. It amounts to several minutes of mugging reaction shots. Does it help tell the story? No. Does it add tension? No. Does it make any specific point? No. Is it even remotely entertaining? To the extent that the actress is able to express her personal charm, yes. She is, but she can't carry a sequence that otherwise adds nothing. Stuff like this is the major reason the film's 56 minutes seem to last forever and a day. The killer baby sequences pick up the film's pace, in the sense that something is identifiably happening, but they're not staged in any interesting way.
Much of That Little Monster's distinction comes from the two well-known celebrities who provide the film with its prologue and epilogue, respectively. The prologue is courtesy of longtime SF fan Forrest J. Ackerman, who provides a disclaimer speech modeled after the one that opened James Whale's Frankenstein. The other cameo, which takes place during the closing credits, is more startling. It adds little, and it amounts to little more than a series of one-liners that fail to match the tone of the film itself. It still earns the film its minor footnote in history by representing what is probably the very last screen appearance of one of Hollywood's all-time biggest stars. That star, ancient then, and though still alive as of this writing, has long been sidelined by extreme age, and isn't the kind of guy normally found in this kind of thing. One wonders how much he saw of the film that preceded his appearance.
