Baby Blood (1990)

... aka: Evil Within, The

Directed by:

Alain Robak

The miserable Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou), who works as a tiger tamer's assistant in a scuzzy French circus, is trapped in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship with controlling circus owner Lohman (Christian Sinniger). However, she's soon offered a chance to escape... though not in the way she may have expected! The circus has recently acquired a leopard from Central Africa which, late one night, explodes and unleashes some kind of snake-like prehistoric parasite. The being sneaks into the sleeping Yanka's trailer and enters into her womb from between her legs. After finding out she's pregnant, she packs a suitcase, steals what little bit of money she can find and runs off to the city. With help from a taxi driver, Lohman manages to track her down to a derelict building in a crime-ridden neighborhood but he doesn't quite get the happy reunion he imagined. Instead, she promptly brandishes a knife and stabs him to death. As for the parasite that's embedded itself inside her womb – which communicates with her internally in a way that only she can hear – orders her to then slit his throat and drink his blood. After all, it's a growing baby and needs its nourishment.

And so begins the strange, brief and (eventually) strangely symbiotic relationship between Yanka and her unborn "baby".

One sign of a clever screenplay is not blatantly providing background information on characters through dialogue or exposition yet still managing to provide a wealth of information through plot detail and circumstance alone, and that's precisely what we get here. Very little is blatantly spelled out about Yanka, yet we still end up knowing quite a bit. She's one of those lost, adrift souls in the world; goalless, aimless, sporadically depressed and someone who hasn't really done much of anything in her life aside from get by. She has no home, she has no friends and there's no mention of any family. All of that makes her the ideal host for this particular creature. 

More time, though not an excessive amount, is actually spent on the mythology of the organism. It's been around even longer than humans, only stuck in an extremely slow-moving evolutionary stage, and has just now made it to the point where it can inhabit a human host to move to the next phase of its development. After it's able to achieve rebirth through a human, likely picking up human traits during this process, it will then find its new home in the ocean, where it will continue to grow and multiply. Eventually, and we're talking millions of years into the future, it will emerge from the waters and take over the planet. Despite being physically undeveloped, it is intelligent, manipulative and intellectually and emotionally advanced.

After setting up its premise, the film takes on a sort-of road movie feel, with our protagonist temporarily settling down in a new city, getting a new job and preying on various men for their blood to feed the lifeform growing inside of her, before moving on to somewhere else. On one of her stops, she gets a job as a waitress and is pursued by a truly pathetic guy named Richard (Jean-François Gallotte), who's been stringing along a frustrated buffet line cashier (Roselyne Geslot) yet asks Yanka to marry and have kids with him after just one brief fling. Her next stint as a taxi driver offers up an ever greater opportunity to procure victims. Others are easily seduced, like a man lured into an alley, or just happened upon as need be, like passersby and paramedics. She even hijacks a blood mobile at one point! The men in this movie are played in an almost universally negative light, culminating with Yanka almost getting gang raped by a bunch of rowdy footballers on a bus!

Escourrou, a completely unknown actress here in America who probably wouldn't pass muster as a leading lady because she's gap-toothed and very voluptuous (what would probably be referred to as "fat" by some viewers nowadays), seems to merit more comments about her looks, teeth and weight than her acting abilities, which is both unfair and unfortunate because her actual performance here is pretty strong.

A number of well-known French performers also show up in cameos, including highly acclaimed and heavily-awarded filmmaker Jacques Audiard (A Prophet; Rust and Bone) and comedian / director Alain Chabat (who also does the French voice for the animated ogre Shrek) as victims, Jean-Claude Romer (who co-wrote LITAN) as a man whose truck is stolen, Cannes-winning actor / director Yann Piquer as a vagrant, professional prankster Jean-Yves Lafesse as a truck driver and even an appearance by Chimbot, the canine star of the memorable black comedy Baxter (1989), which was co-written by Audiard.

Despite being screened out of competition at the Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival in 1990, the film ended up winning an award anyway when the jury went to see it; the first time that's ever happened. Wes Craven viewed the film there and offered the director the chance to direct The Hills Have Eyes Part 3, which he passed on because he didn't like the script. Hills 3 would instead be retooled to become Mind Ripper, which was eventually filmed in 1994 in Bulgaria by another director and with Craven serving as producer. Robak's only other genre contributions were shorts contributed to the horror anthologies Adrénaline (1990) and Wacko (1994), which is rather surprising considering this film's success. And it seems to have only grown in popularity over the years.

Numerous, slightly cut versions of this were released here in America in 1994; one with its original French language audio accompanied by English subs and another with an English-dubbed track. A-Pix Entertainment was the original VHS distributor and that was followed up by a DVD from Anchor Bay in 2006 and then a Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in 2019. The good news, and where I disagree with many other reviewers, is that I don't at all mind the English dub and find it actually quite good. As an added bonus, Gary Oldman (!) does the voice of the creature in this version, which is much better than the more tinny / electronic-sounding voice used in the original French version. On the downside, there have been some changes for the worse in the soundtrack department on the English version.

The German release Baby Blood II: Welcome to Hell is not a sequel to this but instead a re-title of the American film The Unborn II (1994). The actual sequel, Lady Blood (2008), which again starred Escourrou (who also co-wrote the film), did not receive the same kind of international release as the original and came and went with very little fanfare. I've not seen it but it's reputedly not very good.

★★★

Hukum Karma (1982)

... aka: Karma Punishment

... aka: Karmic Law

Directed by:

Jimmy Atmaja

Striking out with the ladies, Bramono (Hendra Cipta) goes to see powerful black magician Jubah Hitam (Ucok Harahap). The wizard gives him a special ring that he cannot take off, which enables him to become irresistible to members of the opposite sex. He first sets his sights on virginal village girl Darti (Sri Gudhi Sintara). After he promises her the world and eventual marriage, the two start a sexual relationship and Darti becomes pregnant. Bramono then decides to end the relationship in none-too-subtle fashion, which includes flaunting his lovers right in her face, berating her, slapping her, pushing her down, punching her in the face (!), hitting her in the stomach with a car door (!!) and throwing her from a moving vehicle (!!!) Because Asian women in black magic horror movies cannot possibly suffer enough, Darti also loses her mother after she vomits blood all over her and, in a coup de grace, dies giving birth to Bramono's child in a graveyard. However, she manages to recite a curse and vows that her death will be avenged. After this twelve-minute-long opening, we finally get to the title screen, which is spelled out in afterbirth.

Many years later, Darti and Bramono's daughter, Fitri (the very beautiful Marisa Haque), has been raised to adulthood by her loving granny (Wolly Sutinah). After receiving adequate martial arts training, Fitri relocates to Jakarta to attend school. There she meets mini-afro'd rich kid Roy (Irwan Palengcahu) and decides to date him despite the fact he doesn't lift a finger to help her when a couple of thugs attempt to kidnap her at knife point. Not that she needs his help anyway, as she's able to easily kick their asses all on her own. Still, putting in a little effort wouldn't have hurt! Roy takes Fitri back to his mansion home to meet his mother (Mieke Wijaya), but she turns out to be a complete moron who doesn't understand that Fitri is way out of her son's league by just about every metric aside for the whole being born into wealth part. She even attempts to pay her off to make her go away!

Roy takes Fitri to the Graffiti nightclub, where we get to see a groove band, choreographed disco dancing, a female snake dancer (who sucks on the snake's head) and a disappearing act performed by GIANT Jheri curled magician cum police officer Tony DeVota (Eddy S. Jonathan). Unbeknownst to Fitri, but Bramono is also now living in Jakarta and running a crime / prostitution ring out of the same club. Once he spots Fitri and tries to use black magic against her, he starts shaking and his magic ring starts bleeding and crushing his finger.

Bramono returns to Jubah Hitam so he can get the ring off. It's tossed in a teacup and starts bleeding some more. Jubah Hitam then slices his own stomach open. A glowing intestine lamprey (?) shoots out, sucks some blood from Bramono's chest and spits it into the cup, which starts smoking. He then recites a chant, the cup spins and glows and a little green ghost shoots out of it. I'm not exactly sure what all of this is doing but I guess it's cool. Bramono then repays the black magician for his help by attempting to beat him up and stealing his powerful beetle talisman, which, among its many other uses, can heal wounds. Before Bramono can turn his magic against him, Jubah Hitam vanishes, but he'll be back.

Fitri and Tony attempt to infiltrate Bramono's club but are cornered by his goons outside. A martial arts fight with boards, chains and axes ensues, which ends with Tony dead and Fitri in the hospital. Once she recovers, she meets up with Jubah Hitam, who teaches her his magic. Through meditation and going through rituals like having a dead chicken drip blood on her head, she's learns to levitate, disappear and reappear at will, scale mountains in a matter of seconds and withstand being stabbed. After the wizard finishes with his round of teachings, his head explodes! Our heroine is now ready to get revenge.

While this eventually proves to be worthwhile schlock, there are a few problems one must first be willing to forgive, starting with the fact this is front loaded with melodrama and takes a little while to get going. The second major issue is with the various fight scenes. Even though there's always something rewarding about watching a woman beat the tar out of a bunch of bad guys, that doesn't change the fact that this kind of thing was being done so much better in other Asian countries at the same time. While Haque tries her best and can do decent high kicks, the stunt ability and fluidity just isn't there, and she's let down by the subpar fight choreography, staging, camerawork and editing, which could have all helped improve the action scenes if they'd been done with more care.

After the slow set-up, this thankfully does become pretty good in the second half. Fitri first pays a visit to her almost mother-in-law and causes her to have a heart attack by staring at her with her green glowing eyes. And then it's off to do battle with Bramono's thugs, which she dispatches one by one. The real pay-off though is the long fight between father and daughter at the very end. It features all kinds of insane stuff, including lots of lasers, glass shattering, getting kicked down a hillside, riding a glowing rock through the air like a surfboard, flipping, flying, climbing up tall trees, decapitation, a head sprouting from a neck stump, a tree being transformed into a woman and Bramono being attacked by the lamprey thing, which pops out of his stomach, eats his foot and then disembowels him!

There were a couple of poor quality VCD releases for this one in Asia, but it's never been released elsewhere and is currently not available in an English version. I also was unable to find any theatrical poster. The director also co-wrote and was assistant director on Mystics in Bali (1981), easily one of the most famous 80s horror films from Indonesia.

★★1/2