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The paramount cry is Dr. Frankenstein's, another might be Blake's for the hellion "like a fiend hid in a cloud." To scrape off the gloss from Rosemary's Baby is Larry Cohen's aim, his couple (John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell) are San Fernando Valley suburbanites forced to confront deforming tensions in the shape of a beastly infant, whose rampage kicks off with chewed-off umbilical cord and delivery-room massacre. Feints include smog and lead and radiation, "screwed-up genes" possibly and pharmaceutical skullduggery definitely. No use for a goblin's father at the public-relations firm, meanwhile mom endures quite the postpartum spiral. Fanged, clawed and bulb-headed ("you know, he's different"), Junior cuts a swath in smeary flashes, leaving in its wake a river of splatter and milk. Family ties, monsters and creators: "Somehow, the identities get all mixed-up, don't they?" Lurid ideas and acute execution for Cohen's most rigorous film, a key work in the decade's inquisitive horror—determined to distance himself from his ghastly offspring, the businessman can't deny it any more than a nation can deny its suppressed impulses and anxieties. Toys across the classroom floor, a splash of gore on a child's finger-painting, judicious wide-angle lenses in hospital corridors and Moog synth wails in Bernard Herrmann's score. The cellar back home is just the site for the intergenerational confrontation, it moves to the primordial slime of sewer tunnels in a splendid recollection of Douglas' Them! (Police sirens and searchlights in subterranean darkness reflect the molecular mutation of the opening credits.) The astonishing showdown finds repulsion melting into parental devotion in the face of the hideous toddler's gurgling. "Fine world to bring a kid into, fellas." Romero's Martin and Cronenberg's The Brood are blood relatives. With Andrew Duggan, James Dixon, Guy Stockwell, Michael Ansara, William Wellman Jr., and Daniel Holzman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |