★★★☆☆
A horror screenwriter’s baby-masked nightmare bleeds into his life: a meta-slasher with squishy gore, produced by Cher.
Spider One (Powerman 5000 frontman and Rob Zombie’s brother) expands his own short into a meta-slasher, with Cher of all people executive producing. Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott) is a horror screenwriter gutted by a podcast that tears his debut apart and all but dares him to end it all. That night he dreams a killer in a crying baby mask and a giant onesie, turns the nightmare into a script, and watches the murders start spilling into his waking life until he can no longer separate what he is writing from what is happening.
It’s excellently shot and edited, with squishy practical gore and an enjoyably uncanny design in the baby mask – a fun contrast between infant helplessness and lumbering menace. Scott gives a superb central performance, sliding from wounded artist into full psychosis, and the film has fun skewering bratty podcasters and nodding to Jordan Peele along the way.
At close to two hours the material though the material is crying out to be developed in additional ways, but instead it becomes repetitive, hitting the same beats a few too many times; they need either more complicated lore or a shorter runtime. The larger question is one of optics: a white writer-director building a film around the raging anger of a Black man who terrorises his blonde white partner with psychotic threats of domestic violence will, fairly, raise eyebrows for many. Take Big Baby as a gnarly, self-aware slasher with something on its mind, even if not every choice worked out quite as intended.
Big Baby played at Tubi FrightFest in London.