Rosemary is back, and birthing again!
In this version of the story, poor virginal Mary Elizabeth wakes up after a
bad dream one morning and steps on the bathroom scale, which reveals that she
has gained 15 pounds overnight.
That can't be good.
One look at her stomach reveals the source of her weight gain. In the
course of one evening she has become approximately three months pregnant -
with her hymen intact.
That can't be good either.
I'm sure you can guess that the new arrival is not going to be the second
coming of Jesus, but rather a demon created by a mystical form of rape. The
virginal Mary Elizabeth begins to suspect a problem when she finds green goo
oozing out of her privates, and she becomes quite convinced something is wrong when her
ultrasound shows that content of her womb looks like the complete cast of Gremlins after
a post-midnight buffet.
To make matters even uglier, the demon who impregnated her is also her
brother. And maybe a cardinal. And maybe a psychiatric patient. That last part
makes more sense when you realize that the psychiatrist is ... (wait for it)
... Lucifer, as played by ... (wait for it) ... Joan Severance.
Pretty silly.
You see, the semi-human demon didn't even know that his shrink was Satan. I
don't know how a demon given human form would pick a shrink. I assume he just
picked a psychiatrist out of the phone book ... and it just happened to be
Satan. Darn the luck!
The plot gets very intricate in the second half of the film. Several of the
people who seem to be innocent turn out to be in league with the demons. Some
of the demons even double-cross other demons! (Oh, that Satan! What a kidder!)
It's a plot that gets so muddled that the writer ended up writing extra lines
to explain why some things didn't make a lot of sense. At one point, a priest
being used as an unwitting pawn of the demons turns to the
brother/cardinal/demon/patient and says what I was thinking, "But why did you
need me? I'm not integral to your scheme." The demon responds, "Because I'm
the torturer of the 13th level of hell. I fuck with people. That's what I do."
Fair enough. At least the writer was aware of the problem.
The film can be lurid, over-the-top fun. There's a demon who cusses like a
sailor and thinks he needs a psychiatrist (and Tony Soprano's shrink thought
she had a difficult patient!). Then there's a pious and
well-intentioned priest who used to be a professional assassin and finds to
his regret that he still loves killing. There's also the virginal Mary Elizabeth, who
turns in a surprising, scenery-chewing tour de force performance, as she performs a good portion of the film
by having conversations with
herself in two different voices (the demon in her womb uses her vocal chords
to communicate). When she's not conducting one-woman dialogues, she frequently
is possessed entirely by the demon
inside of her, which means that the actress is seen either
slaughtering people and eating their hearts, or perhaps just humping away in
wild sexual frenzy. If the film had nothing else at all, I would still have
enjoyed it for Alison Brie's unrestrained and unabashed performance. You might
even call Miss Brie refreshingly cheesy.
It's a trash film, of course, a typical 1980s-style B movie, meandering,
tacky and sleazy, and yet there are times when the screen is filled with such
lavish tongue-in-cheek absurdities and so much silly lunatic energy that the
film entertains with sheer nonsense. I like a bit of that, but this film goes
on for 118 minutes, and that's a little too much nonsense for my taste.
