The Monster aka I Don't Want To Be Born (1975)

Recently retired stripper Lucy (Joan Collins at the height of her 1970's allure) has married Italian businessman Gino Carlesi (Ralph Bates, with a wandering accent) and just given birth to baby Nicholas.

However, there's something "wrong" with the child, he's growing faster than expected and seems very aggressive.

Quickly this violence escalates from biting fingers, clawing faces, and trashing its nursery to pushing his nanny, Jill Fletcher (Janet Key) into a lake after he failed to drown her in the bath the night before!

The Carlesi's very patient paediatrician, Dr Finch (Donald Pleasence), is baffled but stresses that Nicholas is too young to be psychiatrically examined, while Gino's visiting sister, a Catholic nun, Sister Albana (Eileen Atkins), eventually comes round round to Lucy's way of thinking: that the baby is possessed by The Devil.

Earlier on, Lucy had confessed to her best friend, fellow dancer Mandy Gregory (Caroline Munro) that, after spurning the lecherous advances of her diminutive co-star Hercules (George Claydon), the dwarf put a curse on her to have a "monstrous baby".

How he is able to do this is never explained and what his connection to "The Devil" is is also handwaved; we're supposed to accept that because he is physically "Other" he has access to black magical powers or some other ableist nonsense.

Other than his 'lapse' in behaviour towards Lucy, at no other time in the 95-minute movie is he shown as being anything but a consummate, professional entertainer in a '70s Soho revue bar.

There's a sleazy veneer to the whole sorry affair that is 1975's The Monster (aka I Don't Want to Be Born aka It Lives Within Her aka The Devil Within Her) that accentuates its general awfulness.

Observe the sudden prevalence of naked female flesh during Lucy's return to the revue bar to confront her ex-boyfriend, slimy club owner Tommy Morris (John Steiner), who may actually be the child's father.

Given that when we see Lucy's act in flashback, she's wearing an enormous outfit (although, for some reason she is then shown in her lacy undies in her dressing room... three years before The Stud and The Bitch), I'd just assumed that this was one of those "cinematic strip clubs" where all the dancers keep their clothes on.

However, during Lucy's return there are a couple of dancers - Maria Lopez and Susie Lightining - auditioning for Tommy, who just casually strip off in the background.

Later, there's a random and unnecessarily protracted sex scene between Lucy and Gino... just before he gets bumped off in the most unintentionally hilarious murder I've witnessed in years.

This scene alone, which suggests that baby Nicholas has suddenly grown into a flesh-and-blood Chucky, was worth the (low) price of the Blu-Ray alone.

This moment in particular reminded me, unsurprisingly, of the disappointing HBO/Sky comedy-horror, The Baby, from back in 2022.

Luckily, ultimately, there's a book on exorcisms in the shelf of the laboratory where Sister Albana (a specialist in animal diseases... or something, it's not really important) is working and so the nun is eventually able to drive Satan out of the child.

Of course, the fact that everyone else in the house is dead by then and this act - for no readily apparent reason - also kills Hercules (who's just dancing at the revue bar and totally oblivious to all this demonic tomfoolery that's been going on), isn't even addressed as the film finishes at that point.

A sordid rip-off of The Omen, The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby, with phoned-in performances from most of the cast (there's an awkward scene early on between Mandy and Lucy that just sounds as though they were being poorly dubbed), The Monster definitely qualifies as being so bad it's good - primarily because of the comedy value surrounding several of the murders that the baby commits.

Clearly, some thought was put into the set-pieces, but not so much in how they would all hang together into a coherent narrative.

Even though the film is respectably short in duration, it still feels stuffed with lots of shots of people walking - or driving - through the streets of London (occasionally with 'authentic' dialogue dubbed over it), which, on one hand is a nice snapshot of this period in our recent history, but on the other highlights the paucity of actual story director Pete Sasdy had to show on screen.

Although immensely derivative (especially at that time in horror movies), there's possibly a half-decent story buried in The Monster somewhere, it's just unfortunate that everyone seems to have gone about telling it in such a half-arsed way.

UPDATE:

• JUSTICE FOR HERCULES: I was thinking more about this movie. When Hercules gropes Lucy, he has a glazed expression on his face and in my headcanon for The Monster I've decided that he was being possessed by an unseen demonic third party, which is why Hercules' random "curse" actually worked.
• JUSTICE FOR SISTER ALBANA: When the police roll up at the end (as the credits roll), they would have found the nun, the child, and a host of brutally murdered corpses. I can't believe the justice system will have much time for "the baby did it" and the Sister is probably facing a long stretch in prison or a psychiatric hospital.