Attack of the Adult Babies (FrightFest 2017)
David Gelmini
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Starring Kurtis Lowe, Andrew Dunn, Sally Dexter, Joanne Mitchell
Directed by Dominic Brunt
Director Dominic Brunt’s Attack of the Adult Babies is not going to be an easy film to review, but I’ll do my best. If you like toilet humor and don’t think you’ll tire of seeing it spread over a feature-length runtime, then you’re probably in for a good time. But I doubt the rest of us will find much of value here.
The plot focuses on a dysfunctional family who are ordered by two mobsters with unconvincing Russian accents to steal top secret documents from a secluded manor house. The same manor house which happens to be currently occupied by a group of upper-class Englishmen who are using it as a sort of vacation retreat where they engage in their sexual fantasies of pretending to be babies. If you ever had an overwhelming desire to see elderly men suffering from such severe explosive diarrhea that it literally stains the walls, then I guess you might find this premise somewhat entertaining. I was also pretty sure that cinema had shown us every single kind of way a human being could meet their end, although I must admit I’ve never seen someone die from drowning in shit onscreen before.
In addition to the literal shit we see onscreen, the filmmakers also found it necessary to fill up the movie with as much metaphorical shit as humanly possible. Almost as if they didn’t have faith in their own story and felt that clogging it up with as much random claptrap as they could would somehow make it work. So we get stop-motion sequences, 2D-animated sequences, giant CGI pig monsters, and hoards of alien spaceships raining down from the sky.
Undoubtedly, it must have taken a great deal of effort to put all these things on the screen, but ultimately they just weren’t necessary. We do occasionally see the titular man-children going berserk with chainsaws and meat cleavers, but most of these sequences are cut short to make room for the extravagant set-pieces described above. Call me crazy, but if I go in to watch a film called Attack of the Adult Babies, I’ll be okay with just watching adult babies attacking people. That’s a strong enough premise to carry an 80-minute film, so there’s no need to cram in anything else.
So I end my review by giving Attack of the Adult Babies a score of 2.5 out of 5. I’m giving it the extra “half” score because the sheer amount of effort the team clearly went through to make the film visually be all that it could be means I would feel like an ogre if I gave it anything less. I give it no more because I’m really not sure what the point of it all was. And I don’t think the filmmakers know either.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
