Director: Kant Leung
Cast: Emotion Cheung, Annie Wu, Elvis Tsui, Anthony Wong
Screenplay: Kant Leung
85 mins. Not Rated.

Hey, man, I get it. You just get done marrying your fourth spouse, you get a little randy and sneak around your fortress having intercourse FOUR times in a manner of minutes, and then they all get pregnant overnight. I’ve seen it a thousand times. The Demon’s Baby is the most relatable film in all of cinema. These sort of things can happen to anyone.

Legend foretells of a group of five vases containing demonic forces and sealed by a golden Buddha statue. When General Hsu (Elvis Tsui, The Grandmaster) and his soldiers unearth an ancient tomb, they find the vases and the statue and he brings them home as artifacts of his conquest. He’s also preparing for the wedding of him and his fourth concubine. After a night of lust with him and his four wives, the demons are let loose and contribute to impregnation. Now, all four wives carry demon babies that can destroy the world, and the only one who can stop them is the general’s cook, Day Six (Emotion Cheung, Bio Zombie), and a priest named Ching Hoi (Anthony Wong, Hard Boiled).

Any horror fan who ignores international cinema due to the subtitles is going to miss out on these strange but wholly entertaining ventures. While it starts pretty slow setting up the politics of General Hsu’s home and the various moving parts, we get an establishing of the mythology early enough to watch it all unfold, and when it does, The Demon’s Baby becomes one of the most outlandish and exciting pieces of underseen international horror for the 90s. Cheung has great energy and spirit as Day Six, and the chemistry he has with Annie Wu (First Strike), who plays servant girl Little Fish, is excellent. Wong understands the type of character he needs to embody and becomes the most enigmatic version of that archetype, and Elvis Tsui takes villainy, gluttony, and lust, to a high degree here. These performances create a verisimilitude with writer/director Kant Leung (The Legendary Tai Fei) and his very particular stylistic choices.

I glossed over it earlier, but this movie’s biggest failing is that first half, and I understand the setup is necessary and important, and we’re given a lot of information to make up for the action-heavy finale. That being said, there’s a long and often ponderous first half succeeds in relaying this information but could have done so in a much more economic way, trimming some of the unneccessary squabbling between the concubines and their disdainful treatment of Little Fish. Some gentle trimming of unimportant plot points could have made a better pacing with which to accelerate the mayhem because when it arrives, it’s so bombastic, exciting, and unhinged.

After a slight hint of demonic action with the hopping undead, we get into that finale and the mayhem is well-directed and filled with fabulous shot composition and incredible effects work that rivals some of the goopy intensity of the early works of filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi. Gorehounds will have few complaints once the back half of the film really gets going with a variation on vagina dentata and possession-by-demon-baby that I couldn’t have seen coming. Amid all that chaos, The Demon’s Baby has a surprise emotional swerve that shocked the hell out of me. All the hints at the beginning that we were on the path to destruction could never have prepared me for this, and I wish the film had more visibility, but right now it seems like the only way to get your hands on it is to nab the MADE IN HONG KONG VOLUME 1 set from Vinegar Syndrome.

The Demon’s Baby is a film of two halves, and the ending saves it in every possible way. If you can handle the elongated buildup, the insanity is quite wonderful and so very entertaining. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get those demonic babies and their terrific practical effects execution out of my head. I’m so happy I was able to catch this one. I’m not rating it high due to the snoozy nature of the first half, but I still think it’s well-worth exploring.

3/5
-Kyle A. Goethe