Big Baby
by Hope Madden
Is a horror film writer’s imagination creating real life carnage? Writer/director Spider One (Little Bites) asks the question in his latest, Big Baby.
Brandon Scott is Adam, an insecure but successful horror screenwriter who opens the film by listening to two dumbasses with a podcast say his latest movie is so bad that he should kill himself.
The point is not whether the movie is bad. The point is that Adam continues to listen. Then to stew and brood, even though his girlfriend Kate (Krsy Fox) reminds him that he’s too good to be bothered by these idiots. He’s kind of being a big baby.
Cue the nightmares: a hulking brute in a crying baby mask axes Kate in half. And the only way Adam knows to deal with this nightmare…and the others…and the waking hallucinations…is to write a script about it.
Spider One takes advantage of Scott’s genuine talent to anchor a film with a lot of insights and jabs. When you write horror, people forever wonder what’s wrong with you. Big Baby digs into this, as characters in Adam’s script show up in his life begging for theirs. He can change their fate. He has the control.
It’s kind of a cross between In the Mouth of Madness and Stranger Than Fiction with the baby mask from Happy Death Day thrown in for good measure. And it’s often fun and more often compelling, again due mainly to Scott’s committed performance.
Fox turns in solid support in a part that generates the film’s real tension as Big Baby nudges toward toxic behavior and domestic abuse. Things get sloppy once the film focuses more deliberately on what it is that Adam’s writing.
Had the script’s story tied into the core story in any way, the final product could have been quite rich. Instead, we get a series of non sequitur murders. While the tension outside Adam’s script amps to a spectacular, yell-at-the-screen level, the parallel story within the script Adam’s writing squanders that energy.
The result is curiously unsatisfying. Even as Big Baby leaves room for sequels, we’ve lost interest in the tale it’s telling.
