Film Review: HELL BABY (2013)

A long time has passed since Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon’s influential police spoof-comedy Reno 911! ended its run in 2009.  It hasn’t been long enough for the two to come up with any new ideas as can be seen in their latest film Hell Baby (2013) which is part spoof-comedy and part genuine gross-out horror-comedy that doesn’t mix either well.  Garant and Lennon both write and direct this film.

Jack and Vanessa (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb, respectfully) are an expecting couple who move in a predominantly African American neighborhood in the haunted house that everyone crosses the street to avoid except for, of course, their neighbor F’resnel  (Keegan-Michael Key) who more or less lives in the crawl spaces of the house.  It’s not even one night before Jack and Vanessa start to experience strange things in the house and Vanessa finds herself possessed and ready to give birth to a baby from Hell.  When Jack and Vanessa need help they contact Father Sebastian and Father Padrigo (Garant and Lennon, respectfully) who come in to try to save Vanessa and her unborn child before it is too late.

Corddry plays it straight whereas everyone else knows they’re in a spoof film as everything that can go wrong does…to Corddry that is.  This could actually have been a very funny movie in a Tom Hanks in The Money Pit kind of way if not for the extreme over reliance on gore FX and gross out humor that is repetitive and goes on for too long.  Both gross out humor and gore can be used to great effect (such as in Stand by Me and American Pie or Shaun of the Dead) but in this film it is over used to the point of being excessive and no longer funny which probably wouldn’t have been too bad but all the jokes fall flat or are just bad.  Whereas I loved this type of humor in the thirty minute episodes of Reno 911! it is ineffective here.

The always funny Key is wasted in this film as he has humorous “bits” are nothing on the same level as his own show Key & Peele.  One good thing about the film is the high production values and the art direction which are better than anything Garant and Thomas had on the Reno 911 show or even the movie version.  It’s just a shame that it was all wasted on this film.  The two seem like they want to do a straight up comedy-horror film but it ends up crashing under the weight of being a spoof film and fails completely in both.

Film Review: DEVIL’S DUE (2014)

There are a lot of things that newly wedded couples can fear but suddenly becoming pregnant is somewhere at the top of the list.  This is part of the premise for the film Devil’s Due (2014), a film that is a modern day retelling of the classic Ira Levin story Rosemary’s Baby by way of a found footage film.

Zach and Samantha McCall (Zach Gilford and Allison Miller, respectfully) have just gotten married.  Everything is perfect on their honeymoon except that at a party they drink a little too much and things get out of hand.  When they return home they discover that they are pregnant despite taking all precautions against it.  At first the idea of Samantha being pregnant is a godsend until, Zach discovers that she is acting strange and he starts to see strange men in the shadows watching over them.  As the day of birth looms ever so closer, Samantha believes that something “else” is going inside her and that the men in shadows want her baby for their own reasons.

With Satanic cults, demonic babies, and men in shadows there is a lot of ground that this treads that has been seen a hundred times before in other films.  The idea of doing this story as a found footage film is a novel one except that it wears its welcome off really fast.  What starts off as a genuine story tactic for the first third of the film (depicting the marriage and honeymoon) comes off as forced for much of the rest of the film and takes you out of the story.

Unfortunately, this is a problem with most found footage films (and films that copy the style) in which the overall story just doesn’t require the style for the duration of the film.  There’s an interesting idea to be had in this modern day version of Rosemary’s Baby but this was probably not the best way to go about it.