n opening crawl, before the credits, assures the gullible members of the audience that on April 1, 1973, a crime occurred unequalled in "all of Brooklyn's modern history." Twelve people were found dead inside a house of prostitution that doubled as an illegal abortion clinic. The one survivor was a young woman who told a tale so fantastic that she was immediately committed to a mental asylum. Experts researched the case for years, without finding an explanation. Only the brave filmmakers believe the poor young woman's tale to be true.
So this story of an aborted fetus, flushed down the toilet and mutated by a close encounter with toxic waste until it becomes a 7-foot-tall, slimy, fanged monster that within hours returns to that abortion clinic to cocoon it with something that looks like yarn and munch down on the inhabitants while periodically saying "Raaaaaarr!" is, in effect, a docudrama.
The uncanny historical recreation begins with Rebecca (the young woman in question, who could be any one of several cast members the credits name but don't connect to their respective characters) lying in her bedroom at home, while a sinister figure in medical whites, brandishing a nasty-looking straight razor, slowly climbs the stairs and makes his way to her side. By the time he reaches her, his straight razor has become a hypodermic, which he uses to knock her out. Next thing Rebecca knows, she is strapped to a gurney and being wheeled through a strange hospital where a bare-breasted nurse emerges from a gore-soaked room carrying a bloody ax. Then Rebecca finds herself being operated on, without anaesthesia.
Psych! It was all a nightmare. Rebecca is in the hospital, where two doctors discuss her case. One tells the other, a neckless little dweeb who must be the worst actor in the history of the planet, that this girl was the only survivor of a massacre in a house of prostitution, but her story of how 12 people died was so unbelievable that she was committed to this asylum. So it's something like 10 minutes into the movie and our personal store of information has not advanced one iota since that opening crawl. Gee, thanks for nothing.
Revenge of the aborted fetus
The easiest kind of horror movie to make, and the absolute hardest to make well, is that which employs the age-old trope of the slimy mutant that leaps out of dark places and says "Raaaaaar!" Because, basically, once it says "Raaaaar!" and opens somebody up from piehole to pupik, it's pretty much run out of tricks. The rest of the story becomes an exercise in waiting for somebody else to decide the best thing to do in this particular situation is wander off into that moldy basement. Along the way, we'll be treated to point-of-view shots of something sneaking up on the pretty girl, only to have her whirl around in terror and reveal, yes, that it's just one of the guys, waiting for his own best moment to be stupidly killed.
We all know it's been done well. It's also been done horribly, often. (See Breeders.) And while sometimes "horribly" is just another synonym for "so bad it's good," it is even more often a synonym for reminding you at the end that you're two minutes closer to taking your own long dirt nap, and not at all enriched, entertained or even diverted.
It doesn't help that every single actor in this thing—and I mean every single actor, with the possible exception of the guy who gets to wear rubber and say "Raaaar!"—is beyond awful. So awful, in fact, that you start marveling at the simplicity of the lines they manage to blow beyond redemption. I mean, it's genuinely hard to say, "There's a monster in here that wants to kill us," and make it convincing; that situation doesn't often come up in everyday life, so it takes real talent to sell that particular sequence of words with conviction. Being good at it made Sigourney Weaver a star. But the actress playing Bertha manages to make "I don't know" sound awkward. The actor playing Phil can't quite manage to sell "Let's get out of here." It's as if these words had to be memorized phonetically, rehearsed so many times they lost all sense of meaning, and then recited through a tin-can telephone wire by brain-damage patients. The occasional, accidental, halfway-good line, like "You wouldn't know b-llsh-t if you were standing under a bull!", doesn't even stand a chance.
One of the few properly credited actors is Brian Muirhill, who plays the whorehouse's only customer, an obnoxious little perv in a garish blue suit, who, between displaying extreme cowardice and calling the hookers "bitches," tries to spend the last hundred dollars in his pocket in the only manner available to him. I mention him not only because his performance is as bad as anybody else's, but because he demonstrates the movie's level of effectiveness. Normally, in a movie like this, the death of this guy would be a high point. Audiences would cheer. Guess what? The effect here is zero. Zip. Nada. Neither is the death of the movie's official psycho, Axel, who sort of looks like Lou Diamond Phillips and seems determined to channel Bruce Dern. I mean, really. A horror movie that can't make you gleeful over the death of the worst yutz in the room really isn't trying.
I'd be remiss if I didn't devote a little space to the tastefulness of the subject matter, which leads up to a warm-fuzzy scene where the feisty, disenfranchised fetus hunkers down real low and crawls back inside his abandoned previous apartment, while his poor mom Rebecca shrieks like a proctology patient being probed with an active leaf-blower. It's a scene that operates as it could have been made as propaganda meant to scare the crap out of young girls entering their sexually active years with the allegation that abortion leads to violation by carnivorous raaaar-beasts. And I'd almost applaud its sheer bravado, had it appeared in a better movie. But since we don't give a damn about Rebecca, and we can't believe she's real, since the actress playing her seems to have all the conviction of a sack of dead cats, it's not even as icky as sticking your hand inside your pocket and unexpectedly finding something wet. It's just sad. But, you know, at least there's no goat.
