Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!
Before George Romero made Night of the Living Dead, horror movies were either weird science fiction, killers like Norman Bates, or Gothic tales. With Romero, though, horror movies became whatever the writer and director wanted. The source of the horror became anything. And because of this, we got some truly weird movies. One of these is The Baby from 1973. The premise is bizarre and the execution is just as weird, and it’s sort of an odd little miracle that the film actually exists.
I don’t remember exactly why I watched The Baby for the first time. I probably came across it in a “movie” that was a collection of previews or something like that. It looked so completely bonkers that I had to watch it. While there isn’t any gore here, the movie is also incredibly transgressive. It’s the sort of movie that I don’t think could really exist outside of the early 1970s.
Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) is a social worker who has been assigned to the Wadsworth family. The matriarch (Ruth Roman) and her daughters Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Suzanne Zenor) survive through modeling jobs and the assistance they get from the state for taking care of Baby, the youngest child and only male in the household. Here’s the twist—Baby (David Mooney) is a grown man.
It would be fair to think that this is some sort of weird, upsetting kink (and there are a few moments of that in the film, once with his babysitter and once with one of his sisters), but it appears to be much more. Baby doesn’t walk or talk or even stand up. He drinks from a bottle, needs to be fed, and wears a diaper. It’s really upsetting to hear a grown man cry literally cry like a baby, and this happens throughout the film. Seriously, a lot of this plays like a very weird and gross kink film.
As the film goes on, we start to see a number of things that make the entire living situation of the Wadsworth Clan weirder and nastier. Ann seems to become obsessed with the family, and at one point, when she is alone with Baby, she gets him to stand up, something that, after Ann leaves, gets him tortured with a cattle prod. Why? Because it’s clear that Baby is probably a completely normal person who has been kept in a state of arrested development for whatever psychological reason by his mother and sisters and because it allows them to get money from the state for his care.
Ann seems determined to get to the truth of what is going on with Baby and to see if he can be rehabilitated, which makes the Wadsworth women turn deadly, which leads to a fairly violent third act and a final reveal that, honestly, makes the whole movie. It’s a long way to get to the final couple of minutes, but it’s almost worth it.
Aside from being really upsetting in a lot of ways, The Baby has a significant problem that can be overlooked, depending on what you want out of a movie like this one. There are absolutely massive plot holes in this film. Essentially, there is no way that anything like this happens outside of a movie. Oh, I fully understand (and tremble at the realization) that there are people who can and do keep a child in this sort of arrested state.
It's how public the Wadsworths are with Baby that doesn’t actually work. It’s absolutely true that someone could keep a child hidden away and abused like this. It’s far less the case that you could have someone like Baby—a fully grown adult man—out in public and acting like a 6-month-old infant. At the end of the second act of the film, the Wadsworths have a well-attended birthday party for Baby. Everyone is drinking and dancing, and there’s an adult, grown-ass man crawling around on the floor with his face covered in birthday cake.
Additionally, anyone claiming an adult man hasn’t progressed in any way for a couple of decades is going to have that kid studied and tested by not merely government agencies but scientists. I get the idea here, and for what the movie wants to do, there’s a lot here that is fun and gross—and fun specifically because it’s gross. But it simply doesn’t hang together.
I get it; it’s not really supposed to hang together. It’s supposed to be a spectacle, and it is. It’s just one that makes you want to take a shower when it’s done. The ending is a shock and it’s pretty great, but you have to wade through what feels like more than an hour of “adult baby” kink to get to it.
Why to watch The Baby: It’s about as transgressive as ‘70s horror gets.
Why not to watch: There are some weird plot holes here that don’t make a lot of sense.
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