Oh, what’s this?  The Suckling?  I wonder if this movie is any good.  What is it that they say?  Ah, that’s right…

“What’s in a name?  Everything.”

Oh.  Oh, no.  That doesn’t bode well.  Well, I can at least say that the monster on the cover of the box is fucking awesome looking.  Look at that guy!  He’s all head and teeth and grossness!

I also have to give it props for two things written up on for real, very reliable websites.  The first, is the very brief synopsis given on Amazon Prime Video: “An aborted fetus dumped in a sewer full of toxic sludge returns.  Newly restored in HD.”  Fuck yeah!  We got a dumpster baby!  AND!  AND!  It’s been restored to high goddamn definition!  That just kills me.  That part at the end about it being newly restored is likely not going to be the selling point for any normal person looking for a movie for this evening’s entertainment.

Second is the “Reception” portion of its Wikipedia page: “As stated in the copy of one release of this film, ‘THE SUCKLING has been compared to Alien for its claustrophobic intensity and Die Hard for its non-stop action.’ Given the film’s low budget and technical flaws, discerning filmgoers may disagree.”  Are Wikipedia pages allowed to infer stuff like that?  I kinda want to scream “FAKE NEWS!” at Wikipedia for that section like people who may try to use this film as “gotcha evidence” against Planned Parenthood on various conspiracy theory YouTube channels.

Also, before I dive in, I feel it necessary that this movie has a second title as well – Sewage Baby.  That’s all.  Just a fucking awesome secondary title for this movie I’m about to watch.

After pressing play on this movie, the Amazon Prime ad spotlighting all the new stuff coming in April is not in HD.  This fucking movie called The Suckling (as well as Sewage Baby) IS in HD, but the ad showing off such highly reviewed movies such as The Florida Project is being shown in dumpsville definition.

As the real movie begins, we have an awesome text crawl saying that on April 1st, 1973, a bizarre and macabre event took place in Brooklyn when twelve occupants of a whorehouse/illegal abortion clinic were all slain.  The only survivor tells a tale so fantastic that everyone thinks she’s insane.  All kinds of people of brilliant investigative skills (assumably, like, Batman) have been trying to figure it all out but to no avail.  This is the story of Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz’s lost weekend in New York.

Wait…  I’m being told this movie is not about Santorum and Cruz slaughtering prostitutes.  It’s about a sewer baby.  Okay, so scratch that last sentence in the last paragraph.

But I’m not not going to say it is about Santorum and Cruz slaughtering prostitutes.

On a stormy night, a person enters the room of a sleeping girl with a scalpel and a syringe of sleepy stuff.  The person takes the girl from her bed and wheels her down a hospital hallway where a woman in a sexy nurse’s outfit with her tits out, and carrying an ax, says everything is ready for them.  The girl wakes from an obvious nightmare.  Then they do that bullshit dream-within-a-dream thing and she wakes a second time after the doctor appears behind her and slits her throat.  This time, she’s in a mental hospital where a doctor and his intern study her recurring nightmares.

The doctor tells the intern that our main girl was the only survivor of the massacre at the brothel the week before.  I guess the movie flashes back to when a young couple arrive at what appears to be a rundown building.  The girl is our survivor we saw in the hospital (jeez, thanks for ruining the surprise, movie) and the guy is apparently the father of her baby.  They are going to get an abortion, even though the girl (no names have been given yet, by the way) says she won’t tell anyone he’s the father and she plans to put the baby up for adoption.

Just in case you were wondering if this was a real movie or some sort of bullshit direct-to-video titty flick, we get to see a pervert in one of those beanie caps with the propeller on top getting a dildo shoved up his asshole by one of the prostitutes.

The girl speaks to the brothel’s owner at the behest of her boyfriend.  The girl tells the owner that she’s planning to keep it, but she’s been drugged.  The owner goes forward with the abortion – which she says is the “largest second trimester fetus she’s ever seen.”  Her assistant flushes the fetus down the toilet which leads to it landing in some toxic waste.  And, yes, you actually see a little gooey fetus, umbilical cord and all rolling down some pipes and stopping under where an open barrel of waste drips on it turning it into a monster.

Now, one might think what I just typed there above is either dumb, stupid, or possibly even idiotic.  It’s all three, but there are some good practical effects of the suckling being created.

The girl wakes up and realizes the abortion was done.  She’s understandably pissed off.  One of the prostitutes tells our main girl that she has a “good boyfriend” so everything’s gonna be alright!  You know, because good boyfriends have their girlfriends drugged, and have abortions done on them.  Amirite, guys?  High five for being awesome!

Anyway, a dispute between a customer and a prostitute leads to the hooker, whose name is Tammy, the only name we actually know in this fucking movie, shooting and killing the customer.  The owner of the place decides no one can leave so they can clean up the situation of having a dead john inside the brothel.

My favorite lady in this movie – another abortion customer (is customer the right term here? I kinda feel like that’s not right, but I don’t know what else to call this lady) is waiting for the owner to come in and perform another abortion for her.  She’s apparently a frequent customer.  Anyway, she is chatting about life and tells the owner’s assistant one of my favorite lines I’ve ever heard in a movie: “All these guys wanna do these days is shoot their loads in your face.”  Truer words have never been spoken, sister.  Preach on.

Sadly, the suckling comes up through through the toilet it was flushed down and uses its razor-sharp tentacle to slice off the assistant’s head.  Thankfully, our truth-spouting, spunk mask-wearin’ heroine escapes.  For now.

I do have a question though…

So the toxic barrel that gave birth to the suckling appeared to be rusted and old and dripped constantly into the sewer.  Okay.  That lines up.  And while our main girl’s fetus was “the biggest second trimester fetus I’ve ever seen” according to the owner, I assume a buncha fetuses have been flushed in various states of development.  Wouldn’t that stand to reason that there are a bunch of sucklings running around?

Oh I dunno.  What do I know?

Originally, the dead john was impetus to keep everyone inside the brothel to figure shit out, but now, everyone realizes they can’t open the doors to get out anyway – especially after seeing the assistant girl’s decapitated body.  The entire house is covered with some sort of veiny membrane.  Inside, the suckling is beginning to kill people one by one.  It kills the murdering hooker before anyone can get into her room.  When they finally get inside, the suckling escapes through the sink.

I guess I can try to explain who is left at this point.  You have the main girl (they still have not said her name) and her boyfriend (we don’t know his name either).  There’s the owner of the place (Big Mama).  The dildo-up-the-butt customer.  Two more hookers plus my favorite lady who bemoaned getting loads on her face (Candy), and two guys who do… stuff?  One guy is a hot head (Axel, pictured on the left) and the other is a cool headed black dude.

I think a bunch of these people are going to die.  You know how I’ve come to that conclusion?  Because the opening text crawl, in trying to be like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, told us so.  The black guy says they should clog the drains because that’s how the suckling has been able to get in.  As the boyfriend and the black guy start clogging the kitchen drain, they hear skittering and suddenly the suckling’s tentacle comes flying out from under the sink and tries to pull the boyfriend under, but the black guy cuts it off causing the creature to retreat.  They plan to not tell anyone else about the attack because they are worried enough.  I’m betting that is a great plan.

I know the Wikipedia “Reception” section for this movie referenced the claustrophobic feel of Alien.  It’s all because they only had the inside of one house to film this turd in.  It’s pretty easy to make a shitty monster movie in the vein of Alien when you can just spend about 30 minutes over a weekend filming in your shitty house.

I do have one positive to give this movie.  Aside from the black guy, and I guess the main girl because she’s kind of an innocent bystander of her boyfriend not being able to pull out in time, this movie does a pretty fantastic job of making you want these assholes to die.

Okay, another positive then – the suckling is pretty cool looking.  I think they spent all their budget on that thing.

Now that the black dude is dead, Axel takes over.  He starts barking orders and Candy says she’s not really scared of him.  So he shoots her in the head for talking shit to him.  What the fuck man!  Candy just wanted to live life.  She just wanted to make it through the rat race of getting loads shot on her face time and time again.  This is what she gets for just trying to get by?  Axel cannot die soon enough.

Axel believes that since the suckling is a creature, it has to have water to live.  Drawing the perfect conclusion based on that logic, Axel, the boyfriend, the dildo guy, and one of the hookers goes to the boiler room…

I’ve got nothing.  I fully admit that maybe they said something about the boiler room having water or something, but I also fully admit that I’m basically zoned out pretty hard on this movie.  Candy is dead and I miss her spunk.  Well…  You know what I mean.

Black guy is dead and I kinda miss his mustache.  We’re just left with assholes.  We know they are all gonna die – except for the main girl who has done literally nothing besides getting an abortion and sleeping off the procedure.  I feel like this is kind of a shitty movie.  Anyone else getting that impression?

Anyway, the suckling gets another hooker in the boiler room.  Axel is such a complete and total idiot, he runs out of bullets because he fires blindly in the general direction of the monster but misses badly.  Even better he tries to use the dildo guy as a bait, but when that guy runs away, he tries to stab the suckling with a metal rod only for the suckling to slowly slide out of the way causing the rod to go into a fuse box.  It electrocutes the dude until his goddamn head blows up!  So finally the completely unhinged asshole has died.  Spectacularly.  His head spectacularly exploded because he’s an idiot.

The movie is barely limping along now.  People are cracking up and desperately trying to get out.  The boyfriend finally punches a hole through the door and the membrane, but they still can’t really see outside.  The main girl offers to go first since the hole is very small, but the dildo guy insists because he’s not just “dildo guy” but also a butt munch.  He works his way through some of the membrane but gets caught by the suckling and killed.  Realizing it was a trap, the last remaining hooker blows her brains out.

This leaves us with our final three – Big Mama, the boyfriend, and the main girl.  Big Mama decides she needs to be with Axel since she raised him.  I’m not sure she realizes that he’s lost his head – literally.  Whatever.  I’m relatively desperate for these last 11 minutes to pass.  The suckling gets Big Mama (like, no surprise, right?).

The suckling comes up through the floor and has practically no problem killing the boyfriend.  He does not, however, kill the girl.  Probably because he realizes she’s his mommy and that’s sweet.  Seriously, I have a tear in my eye.  This poor suckling just wanted to live.  But he was aborted.  And tossed into the toilet.

That isn’t what actually happens.  Oh no…  He does recognize the girl as his mother, and runs toward her.  As he does, he Benjamin Buttons himself back into a fetus and crawls up her vagina.  Yup, he… uh… reborts (?) himself.  The cops come in, sometime later, and find the girl.  We return to the mental hospital where she’s kept in what appears to be a gymnasium with a bunch of other loonies just roaming about.  A couple orderlies take her outside the room and rape her because apparently that’s what happens all the time at these places.

But the joke’s on the orderlies!  The suckling slips out and kills them!

Good.  It’s over.  Oddly enough, there are a couple scenes of two yokels watching some guy tear his face off out in the woods.  I’m not sure if that was some sort of short film the people who made this movie (or possibly the makeup people) did on the side, or if it was supposed to be the dildo guy or what.

This one was rough.  In a way, it made the best of what it had.  I guess I can say that.  They had no money but a day’s worth of filming opportunity someplace that could look like a hospital.  They also had that house and knew enough people to fill out the cast.  They definitely had that monster.  But goddamn this is a bad movie.  I couldn’t recommend it.  I saw the website Bloody Disgusting said this was a movie people needed to stream right now just because of how enjoyably bad it is.  It really isn’t.  If there’s a way to get a supercut of the monster’s scenes, I’d recommend that on YouTube, but it’s a miserable 90 minutes.  I’m also not really sure the opening and closing scenes at the hospital were originally part of the movie.  They felt tacked on.  The weirdness of the nightmare within the nightmare was not made at all like the rest of the movie.

Honestly, I’m just glad to be out of the woods here.  April was pretty awful for movies.  From Terror on Tour to Saturday the 14th to that shitfest After School Massacre to The Suckling, I’m ready to move onto something else.  So!  I’m gonna watch some fucking kung fu movies next month!  Let’s “kick”off May (see what I did there?) with the Chuck Norris classic The Octagon!