Like others have stated, in England this went by the far better title of Sewage Baby. That was a better name because it had that certain special ring to it that any lover of eighties creature features would have found simply irresistible, whereas The Suckling, was just kinda dull. A movie about a poor unfairly aborted baby that gets callously flushed and then returns as a hideous slavering mutant slaughtering its way through hookers and lowlifes hellbent on returning to its mother-what the hell could be wrong with that? A lot!!! After a moderately moody opening and what I found to be an impressively gruesome sequence where the Sewage Baby is "born" everything goes downhill fast in a major way. It doesn't work. Nothing does. If you'll forgive my crudeness, watching this is like watching s**t slide down a wall for eighty minutes... It's so boring! Between the ridiculously gaping-jawed monster bursting out of walls and lashing out of toilets, there's a whole lot of nothing going on with only non-likable ugly bickering jerks to look at. I believe that it's the considerable bore factor that kills this movie. You can forgive monstrous acting effects and possibly plot, but to be boring is the very worst thing a film can ever be. Nowadays it's not really known of at all, and that's not a tragedy, trust me-it's a mercy! :::2::: The toilet of doom... I once found a scene in this film so scary, that it actually rendered me afraid to go to the bathroom-yep, I thought the Sewage Baby was gonna leap out of the bog and get me! It was the scene where the black chick gets her head ripped off. When I look at it now it's dumb. You don't see anything, just kind of a tentacle whipping out and you don't even see the head come off, it's just suddenly stuck in there, while the other lady hilariously blurts out her line:"Bertha!" I was only seven at the time by the way, you understand...: The thing being flushed and mutating via handy toxic waste angle is reminiscent of the opening of the 1980 classic Alligator. That was the only part I liked in this whole dang thing. I liked the humorous cliché of a coat hanger being used as an abortion instrument. The outrageous climactic scene where the monster "returns to mummy" is especially laughable. As it stomps up to her and somehow shrinks back into a regular sized baby thing that looks as if it's made out of silly putty, you can actually see the strings! And the final scene of the movie after that is still poor, but also surprisingly grim, with the girl in a rotten loony-bin, being abused by wardens. At least she'll always have her little "Suckling" to protect her! :::3::: It would've turned out awesome if Frank Henenlotter had been at the helm. In his more than capable hands, I'm sure this would have been a "cult classic". I don't like that term, I don't like the word cult-is everyone that loves certain horror movies from various decades-mostly eighties- supposed to wear sinister cloaks and chant and watch them by candlelight or what? Why don't they just call them what they are, POPULAR! But no, because it's horror it's gotta have some stigmatising word attached to it just to smooth everything over for the people who to this day, just don't get it. F*****g stupid label word. I hope nobody ever lumps this effort with Frank's movies. Because although they might be considered of this type of grungy schlocky monster flicks, his films have a grim quality and fruity flair to them, and fairly well-acted colourful characters that compensate well for any perceived poor qualities. Also, not one of his movies could ever be called boring, whereas this film is just a plain and empty joyless waste. Only watch if you wish to see something truly trashy and brainless that may give you one or two cheap laughs purely because it is so bad. It's the celebrated cult horror that never was. As it stank. Just a terrible movie-abort it!

Talking about a movie with a helluva unique premise. If you don't know anything about The Suckling, you should know that it's also known as Sewage Baby. And that's my cue to tell you what the flick's about.Young to-be Mom and young to-be Dad head on over to a Whore-house/Abortion Clinic to get the works done on their unborn bambino. Through a little bit of arguing and a little bit of forced persuasion, the deal is done and our little fetus is, yep, flushed down the toilet. Into the toxic waste polluted sewers! Though miraculous means, our baby is transformed into a revenge-seeking, mutant, killing machine with needle-sharp teeth and bulging eyeballs. Watch out whores and low-lives! You're trapped in the house, The Suckling is on the loose and you're it's intended victims! The Suckling definitely, definitely fits into the So-Bad-It's-Good category. With ridiculously weak acting and writing the movie is definitely laugh worthy. Though that is always up in the air depending if you dig this stuff or not. Add in the monstrous mutant freak show bashing through sh!t and ripping people's heads off, and you have a decently entertaining B Horror flick. Unfortunately there's a little too much talky-stuff and not enough icky-stuff. But don't fret fans of cheese and horror, this is definitely worth your precious time. That is, if you dig this type of crap. I sure do. I'll eat this sh!t up all day long.

I actually enjoyed and admired The Suckling in some ways. The plot and the tone of the film are both absurd and disturbing--two properties that I love in artworks. It possesses one of the most important qualities for a film to have--passion from the cast and crew to do something artistically interesting. On the other hand, The Suckling is marred by horrendous performances and a fair amount of technical incompetence.Humorously, the film begins with scrolling text implying that The Suckling is based on a true story. It tells of an unsolved massacre in a "whorehouse and abortion clinic", and suggests that the filmmakers, such as director Francis Teri, believe the account of the sole survivor of the massacre--a woman whom the authorities believed to be insane. From there, we cut to a surreal sequence where a woman is accosted in bed and taken to a seedy hospital, complete with a topless nurse walking down the corridor with a bloody axe. Sadly, this turns out to be one of those "this was all just a dream" openings. We then change gears to a young couple. We quickly figure out that they are visiting the whorehouse/abortion clinic. The film shows us the "true story" of the massacre.The story is set in the early 1970s. The quality of the film (meaning the physical quality of the actual material this was shot on) and various other visual cues all say "early 70s". However, the film's publication date was 1990, and there are other visual cues (such as some clothing and hair styles) that set The Suckling firmly in the late 1980s. The crux of the story is that the protagonist is visiting an illegal abortion clinic, which explains why the film would be set in the early 1970s--prior to Roe v. Wade (1973), but this emphasizes two very unusual aspects of this film. One, it's a very low budget independent "grindhouse"-styled horror flick that happens to be written and directed as a period film, and two, it very subtly, though inexpertly, captures its period. Those are indications of a concern for a subtler artistry that isn't usually attributed to this film.The abortion stuff could be seen as having a moral/political subtext. Although the graphic scenes are ridiculously humorous in one respect, they're also unsettling. Abortion is shown as a pretty nasty business, but on the other hand, this is an illegal abortion clinic, and Teri could be seen as making the argument that if abortion is made illegal again--even though abortion is disturbing--people are still going to get abortions in places like this. When we consider that subtext, it makes more sense that The Suckling was written and filmed during the Reagan era in the U.S., a time when the "Moral Majority" gave it their best shot to turn the country into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy.The overall tone of the film is often close to Frank Henenlotter's early work, such as Basket Case (1982); it has that same heavy 1970s subculture-grime feel. That's one of the assets of the film, as are the creature and other special effects, which are also reminiscent of Henenlotter, who is fond of twisted, darkly comic and ironic "morality plays".I'm a huge Henenlotter fan. I don't think his films are "so bad they're good", I think they're often legitimate masterpieces. Both Basket Case and Frankenhooker (1990) are among my favorite films of all time. Even though The Suckling does a fair job creating a rough Henenlotter-styled atmosphere, it falls far short of his excellence, primarily because of the performances, the scriptwriting and the awkwardness of many of the technical elements, such as the editing.Not every performance in The Suckling is awful, but too many are. Luckily, some of the worst offenders are in bit roles, such as the short doctor in the bookends. Occasionally, the performances are sublimely bad ("so bad they're good") due to a confluence of actor and script. For example, the blonde prostitute has a natural propensity for a combination of cheese and overacted melodrama, but when she utters lines like, "All these guys want to do these days is shoot their load in your face", the result is (probably unintentionally) hilarious. The script has our "heroes" flabbergasted by a gurgling toilet with a moving but closed lid ("Try jiggling the handle again" says the blonde prostitute), it has a bizarre "comic" S&M scene, and it has a lot of melodrama caused by conflicting macho attitudes from the house pimps and "bodyguards", as well as from the house madam, Big Mama, who is humorously dressed like a clown, complete with Tammy Faye Baker-styled makeup for most of the film.Although Teri is skilled at setting up shots, he runs into problems when it comes to editing them together. The pacing is slightly but frequently off. Worse, there are a couple sections of repeated footage as padding. There is also padding in the plot. It seems like Teri had some good ideas, but had a problem stretching them out to feature length. The middle of the film devolves into a very pedestrian Ten Little Indians knock-off sequence that slows the film to a crawl. The score doesn't help, either. It's hokey at best, annoying at worst.The principal sets/locations are also a bit unimaginative. It's a shame, because a few locations--such as the basement and the sewer--are visually intriguing and work well. Better yet is the bizarre biological stuff surrounding the house. That should have been used more, but it was probably way too expensive to do. The Evil Dead-like stop motion animation should have been dropped instead.Of course, you shouldn't bother with The Suckling unless you have a well-developed taste for this particular kind of low budget, campy but disturbing, taboo-breaking horror. If you like that stuff, there's a good chance you've at least heard about this film. You might not love it, but it's worth a look.

Sewage Baby is a sick little puppy of a film. Repulsive and ridiculous in equal measure. -Possible Spoilers- A boy forces his girlfriend to have an abortion in a back alley house that makes the Texas Chainsaw house look positively inviting. The aborted foetus get flushed, and after a bath in toxic waste it returns as a shape shifting mutant, hell bent on revenge. Yep, I know, and I willingly watched this film. Boy did I get what I deserved. Gobsmacked is not the word. We are treated at first to lots of POV shots of the thing scuttling about (if you've ever seen the Polymorph episode of Red Dwarf, you'll know what territory I'm talking about). Before a couple of cheapo killings. It really hots up when the survivors trek in to the creatures cocoon (or what ever the hell it is), I assume it's supposed to look like a kind of giant womb, what it looks like is the result of two kids let loose in a net curtain shop, really you have to see how poor these effect are. Much 'show as little of the monster as we can to save on budget' shenanigans ensue, before we're treated to one of the most ludicrous ending I've ever seen (girls may wince, though more likely laugh). Truly folks, I'm as partial to a cheesy bit of horror as the next fella, but the words 'scraping' and 'barrel' have never been used more fittingly.