The Suckling

THE SUCKLING is an indie horror flick from 1990 which offers a nice little experience for fans of so-bad-it's-good cinema. The tale was brought out on UK VHS under the title SEWAGE BABY. The bad-taste story sees an aborted foetus flushed down the toilet, where exposed to raw sewage it grows into a mutant before returning to attack the clinic from which it came. Yes, this film suffers from the usual constraints of low budget cinema. The acting is lamentable and the script is poor, given over to actors giving larger-than-life performances which fail to convince. However, it's also a fast-paced story with lots of death and destruction and melodrama, and it features some surprisingly decent (and icky) prosthetic and model effects which I thought were highly effective. The titular creation is much more interesting than the usual CGI mess we see in films these days, and it's clear that a lot of effort has gone into achieving just the right look. Add in plenty of gore and you have a short, snappy horror flick that might be cheap and clichéd, but which delivers the goods regardless.

people often forget what the point of a "monster movie" is .... um ...its a monster that kills !!!! and to expect more would be to disappoint ... and "trash" films ? ...this isn't anything like the trash films I've seen.. maybe im an idiot and don't know what the real definition of "trash" films are ..but to me this is a good old fashioned MONSTER MOVIE!! ILLEGALLY ABORTED FETUS FLUSHED DOWN TOILET TURNS INTO EVIL MONSTER BY TOXIC WASTE (i know your thinking "boy I've heard that story line about a million times, in every tom cruise ever made film") THEN TRAPS AND KILLS AN ENTIRE HOUSE OF HOOKERS AND THERE "CUSTOMERS" AND THEN RETURNS TO THE UTERUS IT CAME FROM !!!! .. "yeah OK story line sounds great ... but eric, great master of all things cheesy and b goodness, what about the effects?" well I've see people bash them ...? the baby in the sewer was great ..good job ..sure its a puppet ....but its a good looking puppet ...got a good creepy feel to it you know at times ... the grown up creature is awesome !!! sure its a guy in a suit ...but thats a cool @$$ suit ....lol....if you like MONSTER MOVIES then rent this and you'll be glad ... (4), vocalist GOD IN A MACHINE

Today my good friend Lyle Shelton tweeted that "The generation that killed its children by abortion will be killed by them through euthanasia". At first I thought he was just an idiot, but then I realised that he had seen this documentary. He's still an idiot, but this is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.

Now if you have the gall to sit through this poorly made pile of puke all the way to the end, besides very woozy you will see a message telling you that the story was based on a true story. Now I might have bought that was based on a true story except when it comes to the climax of the film when the monster shrinks back down into a baby and jumps back into his mother's womb. Either someone is lying or there was no mutant baby. Because they said they put her in an asylum for her crimes, which means they had no proof of a mutant baby. Even if the baby was able to be born, there would be proof, he would be crawling with radiation. Here's a hint to the makers, radiation can be tracked and measured with a little device called a Geiger counter. The monster was pretty good, but that lie about this being a true story and poor effects make this a poor movie. THE NOOSE!

Sometimes, fun and blood go together. THE SUCKLING is under that rule. The plot is, of course, of clase B-films and so the FX and the actors. But the result is really funny: a little creature takes a house and its inhabitants and moves misteriously around it. The final scene is one of the more bizarre shots I have ever seen.

Get the f!ck out of here people...1's and 2's for this film??? I'm well aware that THE SUCKLING is no great feat of exploit cinema - but this is one of the best concepts out there for sleaze and gore fans. It's a shame it wasn't pulled off more competently and with more gore, if it had, this would have been one of my favorite films of all time... THE SUCKLING is about a guy and his girlfriend who go to a whorehouse that doubles as an illegal abortion "clinic" (?) to get rid of the unwanted bun-in-the-oven. The chick has reservations about getting rid of it, so boyfriend and the coat-hanger technician unwillingly drug the girl so she doesn't have a choice in the matter (??). After the fetus is yanked, it's flushed down the toilet (???) where it encounters some radioactive material (????) and begins to mutate(?????) (at this point I feel compelled to tell you that this is no joke, this is really the plot of the film - and the fetus-mutation scene is hilariously awesome - think the "resurrection" scene from HELLRAISER meets that weird looking baby-thing from COMBAT SHOCK...). The fetus grows into some giant goofy looking monster, puts some sort of membrane around the house so those inside can't get out...and takes it's revenge on the occupants of the whorehouse (including it's "parents") for it's mistreatment (????????????)... I couldn't make this sh!t up if I tried...THE SUCKLING has one of the most gloriously sleazy plots I could ever hope to actually witness on screen. But with such a wonderfully insane storyline - this film actually ends up being kind of disappointing. It starts out very strong, and ends very strong - but the middle is pretty dull and uneventful. There are SOOOOOO many things that could have been done with this film (even with a micro-budget) that weren't, and there was too much sitting around and talking by the "hostages", where there really should have been more gore and sleaze. Even so, I still dug this one if only for concept alone...but nah, it wasn't just that - there are definitely some "fun" things going on in this one. Probably not to everyone's taste as most "normal" people would have no interest in watching a radiated aborted fetus kill a bunch of people - but some of us really do - so if this sorta thing's your bag, I suggest giving it the once-over...7.5/10

Like others have stated, in England this went by the far better title of Sewage Baby. That was a better name because it had that certain special ring to it that any lover of eighties creature features would have found simply irresistible, whereas The Suckling, was just kinda dull. A movie about a poor unfairly aborted baby that gets callously flushed and then returns as a hideous slavering mutant slaughtering its way through hookers and lowlifes hellbent on returning to its mother-what the hell could be wrong with that? A lot!!! After a moderately moody opening and what I found to be an impressively gruesome sequence where the Sewage Baby is "born" everything goes downhill fast in a major way. It doesn't work. Nothing does. If you'll forgive my crudeness, watching this is like watching s**t slide down a wall for eighty minutes... It's so boring! Between the ridiculously gaping-jawed monster bursting out of walls and lashing out of toilets, there's a whole lot of nothing going on with only non-likable ugly bickering jerks to look at. I believe that it's the considerable bore factor that kills this movie. You can forgive monstrous acting effects and possibly plot, but to be boring is the very worst thing a film can ever be. Nowadays it's not really known of at all, and that's not a tragedy, trust me-it's a mercy! :::2::: The toilet of doom... I once found a scene in this film so scary, that it actually rendered me afraid to go to the bathroom-yep, I thought the Sewage Baby was gonna leap out of the bog and get me! It was the scene where the black chick gets her head ripped off. When I look at it now it's dumb. You don't see anything, just kind of a tentacle whipping out and you don't even see the head come off, it's just suddenly stuck in there, while the other lady hilariously blurts out her line:"Bertha!" I was only seven at the time by the way, you understand...: The thing being flushed and mutating via handy toxic waste angle is reminiscent of the opening of the 1980 classic Alligator. That was the only part I liked in this whole dang thing. I liked the humorous cliché of a coat hanger being used as an abortion instrument. The outrageous climactic scene where the monster "returns to mummy" is especially laughable. As it stomps up to her and somehow shrinks back into a regular sized baby thing that looks as if it's made out of silly putty, you can actually see the strings! And the final scene of the movie after that is still poor, but also surprisingly grim, with the girl in a rotten loony-bin, being abused by wardens. At least she'll always have her little "Suckling" to protect her! :::3::: It would've turned out awesome if Frank Henenlotter had been at the helm. In his more than capable hands, I'm sure this would have been a "cult classic". I don't like that term, I don't like the word cult-is everyone that loves certain horror movies from various decades-mostly eighties- supposed to wear sinister cloaks and chant and watch them by candlelight or what? Why don't they just call them what they are, POPULAR! But no, because it's horror it's gotta have some stigmatising word attached to it just to smooth everything over for the people who to this day, just don't get it. F*****g stupid label word. I hope nobody ever lumps this effort with Frank's movies. Because although they might be considered of this type of grungy schlocky monster flicks, his films have a grim quality and fruity flair to them, and fairly well-acted colourful characters that compensate well for any perceived poor qualities. Also, not one of his movies could ever be called boring, whereas this film is just a plain and empty joyless waste. Only watch if you wish to see something truly trashy and brainless that may give you one or two cheap laughs purely because it is so bad. It's the celebrated cult horror that never was. As it stank. Just a terrible movie-abort it!

A 2?! Oh c'mon. It deserves at least a 6 for the baby effects alone, which are pretty good for such a low budget film. First of all disregard the box comments that seem to compare it to die hard or alien because its the furthest thing from that. Look at more as an above average Troma film, which is probably who should have released it in the first place. My quest to see the movie began at a flea market in Wallingford , CT where I saw a guy selling the suckling press kit with a badass "only could have been made in the 90's" T-shirt. It looked Like an all yellow local metal band shirt. I laughed and had a look and new I had to see the film. The press kit came with a small poster on which someone had written a note in marker on the back. It says" Mike, See you Friday aug. 23 midnight bleecker theatre if possible. If not there'll be bigger + better movies next. Pete." I don't know if the suckling was a CT made film, since the company who made it, JER Pictures has a Port Chester , NY address. Either way its pretty funny, or appropriate depending on your thoughts, that the poster hangs directly above my toilet. I say we need to bring on The Suckling 2: Keep on Suckling.

Ohhhhh words can describe how i felt when i finally finished watching the movie. It was so bad when i was watching it the environment of the whorehouse made me want to puke. It was an awful try even for a b- movie. There are b-movies underrated as hell like Carnosaur (1993), The Cellar (1989) which is my favorite b-movie people hated those but i loved them much better than this sh*t. And i watched this movie in a boring winter afternoon and it ruined the whole afternoon. Then i fixed it by watching the much better Thinner (1996). Even for a b-movie fan this movie can't be watched i don't know how i managed to watch that crap.

This sublimely sleazy and wonderfully warped jaw-dropper rates highly as the greatest cheeseball low-budget indie fright flick ever made about a grotesquely misshapen murderous mutant fetus. In fact, I'm pretty sure this deliciously dreadful and disgusting doozy might very well be the only horror movie thus far ever made about a grotesquely misshapen murderous mutant fetus. The extremely tasteless plot centers on a young couple who go to a scuzzy bordello on the outskirts of town so they can get an illegal abortion (the film takes place in the early 70's prior to the famous Roe Vs. Wade verdict). The aborted fetus gets rudely disposed of by being flushed down the toilet (yes, you read that correctly). The poor little bugger winds up in the filthy sewer and mutates into a huge, lethal, clawed, fanged, goofy-looking humanoid beast after being exposed to toxic waste. The foul ferocious subhuman fiend proceeds to go back to the squalid brothel and terrorize the occupants inside, which include the fat Southern madame, various skeevy prostitutes and their scummy customers, and even its own scared parents. Man, does this gloriously ghastly marvel possess all the so-thoroughly-wrong-they're-paradoxically-right schlocky stuff to qualify as a real four-star stinkeroonie. For starters, there's the hilariously horrendous acting from a rank amateur no-name cast. The ratty'n'ragged cinematography and annoyingly redundant droning synthesizer score are likewise suitably sub-par. The wonderfully wretched dialogue is absolutely priceless. The fact that the uproariously inane story is treated with utmost seriousness by the filmmakers only makes matters that much more enjoyably absurd and abominable (the filmmakers have the gall to claim said story is based on an actual real-life event!). The murderous mutant monster itself rates as one of the single most laughably ludicrous man-in-a-rubber-suit creatures to ever scamper its way across the screen (the creature strangles and decapitates its victims with its lethal prehensile umbilical cord!). Moreover, this fabulously fetid flick delivers a handy helping of grotty gore and a nice smattering of gratuitous nudity. The Elite Entertainment DVD for this terrifically tacky, trashy and twisted cinematic treasure offers a grainy, but acceptable widescreen (!) presentation with the trailer as the sole extra.