We're back with another life-shredding Sunday Matinee for you this week, this time zoning in on one of the sick, sick, SICK 1970s classics and one defining the "sickie" genre to its utmost degree, the 1973 pinnacle of perversion, The Baby. Now if you've got Nexflix streaming service, you might not know that you;ve already had access to this bad boy, and the fact that it's just sitting there waiting to be streamed in millions of homes around the US is just quite insane, once you get your mind around the little treasures of this film. We can all agree that by the early 1970s, the subject material in mainstream cinema was regularly crossing over directly with some of the most insane creations bursting up from the underground, and topics previously far too taboo for the general public became thrust forward into the light.
Subjects such as infantilism were still very far removed from the mainstream lexicon, and the early 70s was the time to shine for such daring directors such as Ted Post who took The Baby out of the shadows of human decency and pulled it directly out into the open, exposing the audience to one of the most unsettling films to ever be completed and dispersed, let alone with such a high quality level of professionalism. "Baby" if you haven't guessed yet, is an infantile teenager, far past the age of puberty, yet still mentally dwarfed by the actions of his "none-more-bizarre" family of mother (Ruth Roman) and incredible creepy older sisters, who is kept in a child's crib, unable to speak, walk or function as a young adult and kept like an animal to the sick delight of the women who care for him. This film comes with one of our highest recommendations, so by all means kick this into full screen mode, or cue it up on Netflix and watch your life's meaning slip away.
