OMG Horror.com

The Frog's doing a rare bimonthly check in (a technicality, we assure you), this time shining my swollen eyes on Francis Teri's 1990 release of The Suckling - an utterly vile, low-grade, micro-budgeted piece of underground trash. In other words, a great fu*kin' picture! Also known as Sewage Baby (U.K.), Teri's flick centers on a young woman who goes to a back alley abortion clinic that not only doubles as a seedy brothel, but resembles the house of Leatherface, stranded, bucolic. High technology has the poor girl discharging a miscarried fetus into a toilet, it slides through the pipes and lands in a steaming pond of radioactive bilge. It mutates in some of the most jaw-dropping effects work we've seen (especially in a movie of this caliber). The fetus animates, developing an insatiable thirst for blood and rockets back up the toilet pipe to wreak unadulterated hell on the people who unceremoniously flushed him/her. Seriously, this is the most convincing pro-life film to ever be committed to celluloid!

Inside the house (clinic), a band of estranged misfits do all they can to prevent any attacks, but not a single one of them seems to get along with the others; all of them at bickering and casting insolent barbs for the duration. It's hilarious that not even in a ploy for survival can these people act civil and unified. Meanwhile, between each interval of seeing the fetus, it grows two or three-fold into a degenerated killer mutant humanoid - replete with walrus like fangs and a melted oblong cranium. Really, it's sight to behold! But that's nothing, not until you see the way 'the suckling' enraptures victims with a deadly lasso-like umbilical cord, lashing it out and luring humans as if flies to a frog's tongue (no wonder I like this flick so much).

With a single setting, a grainy unfiltered 8mm film stock, a cast of below horrid actors, a slew of gore-ridden effects - The Suckling warrants the kind of "it's so damn bad it's fu*kin' awesome" codification that should garner the film legitimate cult status. Set in 1973, the look and production style certainly reflects that despite being produced in 1989-90. The crude amateurish editing and incompetent continuity lend an authentic comic tone to the film; to say it's simply a lark b-movie is quite the insult to actual b-movies. This is a revolting, highly disturbing piece of cinematic sleaze. A great time all around!

Best 3 Parts:

The actual metamorphosis, I can't overstate enough, will flat out render you mouth agape, eyes bugged. Teri holds the camera on the fetus in a sewage pipe for like 5 minutes, squirming, smoldering as it bulks up. It's staggering.

One of the characters in the clinic begrudgingly refers to all the women as whores, spouting foul insults that usually result in the butchered pronunciation, instead calling the them 'dirty hooers.' This guy is too funny!

Toward the climax, 'the suckling', now man-sized - bursts through a wall and rips a woman through the a hole in the wall like some crazed and determined primate, growling and frothing ooze from it's mouth

Check out a few selected scenes in the clip below, and make sure to check in next month for the Frog baby's newest underrated gem!

• << prev
• next >>