There are times when you sit down with a low budget indie horror film knowing exactly what you’re going to get from the moment it begins, with no real surprises along the way to the end of the tedious hour and a half. Then, on the other hand, there are times when you sit down to a film like Attack of the Adult Babies. Actually, I should retract that last statement: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film quite like Attack of the Adult Babies. Imagine Brian Yuzna’s Society as a 1970s British sex comedy, and you may get some vague sense of the gleeful weirdness director Dominic Brunt and company have in store here. While it hits on various familiar tropes from low-brow horror and exploitation, it all adds up to something surprisingly unique, and unmistakably British – and, in the tradition of the best low culture these fair isles have ever produced, it’s all done in the worst possible taste.
At a remote country manor house, a group of women who we can only assume to be the 2017 graduating class of the Mary Millington School of Nursing are preparing for a slightly unorthodox weekend assignment. Drilled with military precision by head nurse Margaret (Sally Dexter), the nurses are under strict instructions to stay by the side of their charges and attend to their every need for the entire day ahead, with discretion and secrecy paramount. The clients in question are grown men, high-ranking members of local society, undergoing a bizarre ritual which temporarily reverts them to state of intellectual infancy. Naturally, not all the nurses are entirely at ease with the job, but it’s made clear that the consequences will be severe should they not fulfil their duties. However, things are complicated further when, under somewhat convoluted circumstances, suburban mother Sandra (Kate Coogan) shows up at the house along with her son Tim (Kurtis Lowe) and stepdaughter Kim (Mica Proctor). So begins a very strange ordeal that will only get stranger, and bloodier, as the time rolls on.
It scarcely needs underlining at this point, but Attack of the Adult Babies is of course a very, very silly film indeed. By extension, it should be screamingly obvious that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea; many viewers will doubtless find it too puerile, too random, too lacking in traditional neat & tidy, logical plot-driven storytelling. Yet it is of course this very puerility, randomness and messiness that gives the film its charm. Almost nothing about it makes sense, and at every turn there’s some new oddity to keep things from getting dull, be it theatrical Eastern European gangsters, a quasi-incestuous subplot, or a surplus of toilet humour at its most joyfully crass. Again, no doubt it will leave many viewers bemused, but I’m hard pressed to see anyone being bored.
Even so, as might be apparent from my earlier nod to Society, there is a element of social satire here. Like Yuzna’s film, Attack of the Adult Babies portrays the rich and powerful at their most grotesque, and the ultimate explanation for their behaviour may be absolutely batshit crazy (hard to believe, I know), but it’s rooted in familiar anxieties about the abuse of power, and how the laws of the land tend not to apply to those at the top of the ladder. Of course, none of this would amount to much were the viewer not to be amused by the sight of grown men with pig noses in nappies. And there are some familiar faces on big baby duty: contemporary genre fans will be pleased to see Laurence R Harvey of The Human Centipede II infamy, whilst some of the slightly older ones among us are liable to cheer heartily at the presence of Charlie Chuck, AKA Uncle Pete from The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer. (He never says “donkey,” but otherwise his characterisation here is much the same.)
This is the third feature from director Dominic Brunt and producer Joanne Mitchell (who also gives a very funny performance as one of the nurses), and it’s fair to say they’re one of the most exciting teams working in UK indie horror in recent years. More of it, please!
Attack of the Adult Babies is released to DVD, VOD and limited edition Blu-ray on 11th June, from Nucleus Films; pre-order here.