5. I Don't Want To Be Born (1975)
Lucy (Joan Collins) is a stripper who does a nightclub act with a dwarf called Hercules. After their performance, the dwarf gets fresh with her in the dressing room. She screams out and stage manager Tommy shoos him off and shags Lucy. As she leaves the theatre that night, Hercules tells her she will have a hideous evil freak child some day. Putting her stripper days behind her, Lucy is married to a wealthy Italian called Gino. They have a child - a big bruiser of a baby that claws his mother in the face when he is born. When he is bought home, the baby bites the housekeeper who then comes to the conclusion that he is a little turd and she ends up with a mouse in her tea. Lucy finds it very difficult to bond with the devil spawn. He wrecks his nursery and when Gino's nun sister comes to stay, she says a prayer for the child and he nearly squeals the whole house down. Feeling the strains of motherhood, Lucy hires a nurse. The baby engineers the nurse's death. Lucy goes back to see Tommy at the strip club and intimates the baby may be his. When he looks at the sprog, he gets a bloodied nose! Gino takes Lucy out to lessen her woes. It is a successful night until the baby kills him with a noose (I kid you not). He also decapitates the doctor with a spade and finishes his killing spree with aplomb when he sticks a pair of scissors in his mother Lucy's heart. The nun returns psycho baby to normal with an improvised exorcism. Late night television classic that made me and my best friend howl with laughter when we caught it on BBC 1 one awesome night. The film is just so stupid, so daft, so over the top the only response is to cream yourself laughing. Quite how the actors in the film agreed to take part in this farrago will forever remain a mystery to me. And the whole thing is filmed so seriously! Peter Sasdy is responsible for this hokum and he is a good director to boot. Floella 'Play School' Benjamin plays one of the nurses delivering devil child. The little s**t is so evil, he makes Damian from the Omen look like one of Ned Flander's sons. The film is very plodding with a lot of talking about the same thing, over and over again. Caroline Munro turns up, just for the purpose of looking beautiful. Donald Pleasance is actually really good in his appearance as the doctor but whoever thought that casting Alan Bates as an Italian was way way off the mark. Obviously an attempt to rip off Rosemary's Baby, the afore-mentioned Omen and The Exorcist, I Don't Want To Be Born is a comedy classic, not the scary supernatural horror it pathetically attempts to be.