Tone is a tricky thing when you’re making a horror comedy,
especially one with this sort of premise.
Not only does it involve a pregnant woman (Alice Lowe), but her evil
fetus as well. The unborn baby urges her
to kill the people responsible for the death of her husband, but we’re never
sure if the killer fetus is real or a figment of Lowe’s imagination until the
very end. This aspect runs against the grain of its
humorous intentions. If played
completely serious, this could’ve been absolutely horrifying. Instead of trying to put the screws to the
audience, it goes for cheap laughs and mixes in some sloppy gore, just because,
I suppose.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are some laughs here,
but the filmmakers never hit a consistent tone.
Sometimes the punchlines are so dry that they fail to elicit much of a
response. Other times, it goes so over
the top that it resembles a Troma movie.
It doesn’t help that the film falls into a predictable rut
(Lowe finds a target, talks to them a bit, then stabs them with a butcher
knife) almost right from the get-go. Also,
many of the deaths are interchangeable, except for the scene where Lowe tries
to kill a kickboxing woman. Lowe’s
fearless performance helps to anchor things whenever it threatens to go off the
rails. Maybe next time she’ll star in a
movie worthy of her talents.
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