I Don't Want to Be Born

1976 "Pray for the Devil Within Her...before it preys on you!"
4.1| 1h35m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 01 February 1976 Released
Producted By: The Rank Organisation
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Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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A woman gives birth to a baby, but this is no ordinary little tyke. The child is seemingly possessed by the spirit of a freak dwarf who the mother once spurned. Cue a spate of strange deaths, the one common factor being the presence of a baby in pram at the scene...

Genre

Horror, Thriller

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Director

Peter Sasdy

Production Companies

The Rank Organisation

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I Don't Want to Be Born Audience Reviews

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?
Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
JoeB131 This has all the hallmarks of an Italian Horror film. Flat line delivery, lots of scenes shot by the Second Unit, and an inability to be anything scary.Sorry. Babies aren't scary.The plot is that Joan Collins is an ex-stripper who gives birth to a baby that oddly has a bad temperament and can terrify everyone around him. Because back when she was a stripper, a midget cursed her to have an evil baby.So most of the movie is an attempt to make a baby scary. Babies aren't scary. So most of the scenes are just kind of silly.And this had good actors. Not only Collins (between Star Trek and Dynasty) but also Donald Pleasence before he started hunting Michael Myers.
Scott LeBrun Sex, scandal, strippers and more mix in this unintentionally funny horror flick that's an absolute must for people who treasure bad genre movies.This one is in the vein of "Rosemary's Baby" and "It's Alive". Joan Collins plays Lucy Carlesi, a woman who comes to fear that her newborn is possessed. And she could be right: almost every person who comes into contact with this infant meets a horrible death.You have to hand it to British actors: they can sell just about anything, and make this train wreck more entertaining than it has a right to be. Collins does a remarkably sincere job, and is well supported by Ralph Bates, as her husband Gino, Donald Pleasence, as Dr. Finch, Caroline Munro as her sister Mandy, Eileen Atkins, as her sister-in-law Albana, Hilary Mason, as the grumpy Mrs. Hyde, John Steiner, as sleazy Tommy Morris, and George Claydon, as malevolent dwarf Hercules. Although their performances are fine, the "accents" affected by Bates and Atkins - who are playing Italians - are downright hysterical. Just get a load of the way that Atkins says the word "devil".The best moments in this thing have to be the kill scenes, which should inspire some pretty hearty chuckles. People get shoved into a river, decapitated with a shovel, and hung before this is over. There are some fleeting breast shots for voyeurs and a fairly decent dose of gore. The movie can boast *some* style, particularly in a nightmare sequence. The score by Ron Grainer is most amusing, sounding more like porno music than anything else.Picked up by A.I.P. for distribution in North America, "I Don't Want to Be Born" is a real hoot and a half. It might not be "good", but it's fun schlock.Five out of 10.
Seb Poor old Ralph Bates looks miserable in this movie and it's not hard to see why, it really stinks.Joan Collins plays a stripper and proves she dances as well as she acts. It's really bizarre, I think it's supposed to be erotic but it looks like she is having some kind of slow-motion embolism. Correctly deciding that she isn't cut out for being a stripper she leaves to marry her Italian lover played with a comedy accent by long-suffering Ralph.Before she goes though she gets cursed by a dwarf who she spurns. She promptly has a baby that has unusual powers. Oooer, spooky - you'd imagine they might give it demonic powers or something but no, it has sharp nails.Time and time again we see actors stagger back from its cot screaming "it scratched me, with its sharp nails" - cue closeup to harmless baby without sharp finger nails.This atrocious plot goes nowhere and throughout it all there's a soundtrack of a baby crying, for goodness sake. What were they thinking of? It's impossible to watch this movie without getting a blinding headache. It's almost worth it to hear Ralph Bates trying to be Italian though, it really is the worst accent I've ever heard in a movie.Dreadful from start to finish and with a supporting cast that are just ludicrous thrown in for good measure. A final special mention to Caroline Monroe who plays her friend, her acting is so bad that I genuinely thought at first that her wild overacting and astonishingly funny dubbing was part of the plot and that she'd been possessed or something. You can see why they had to rename it about 50 times, I pity the person who was tricked into seeing this film twice.
The_Secretive_Bus Well stone me, what a farce. I actually enjoyed this film.It certainly is, as somebody a long time ago said, a game of three halves. The first half hour or so is laughably bad, and had me chuckling throughout. Then the tone shifts slightly and you find yourself actually getting vaguely interested into what on Earth's going on and where it could all possibly be leading. And then the last thirty minutes are genuinely disturbing, with some rather scary bits in there and a few set pieces that you won't have seen coming. All in all, rather absorbing.The plot itself sounds like something cobbled together from "The Exorcist" and "The Omen" (despite the latter film being released the year after, but stay with me). Joan Collins (?!) plays a woman (good show) who's given birth to an "evil" child, who spends the film apparently viciously assaulting people whilst those of the religious faith find it all terribly intriguing. The scenes of the aforementioned child attacking people are usually quite laughable, usually comprising of somebody leaning close to it, recoiling in horror clutching their cheek and moaning "It bit me!", followed by a shot of a not particularly frightening little child looking frankly bewildered at the fact that he's in a film. Ah ha, but the baby has "Surprising strength for his age," we are told, so that's all right then.The rationale for all this, given to us as a flashback about 10-15 minutes in, is one of the funniest bits of the film. Joan's character used to be a stripper, and performed her acts with a small dancing midget who apparently fancied her like mad. On her last day of work, the midget toddles along to her dressing room and tries to feel her up, whereupon she screams and a spiv wanders in and tells the midget to get lost. The midget toddles away again and Joan and the spiv (her old boyfriend, and manager of the strip club) begin to make out, Joan switching from "horror-struck and upset" to "giggly and horny" in the space of three seconds. The whole scene looks like it was shot in one take, and is played so languidly to defy belief. Later that evening, as Joan leaves the club, the midget leaps out at her from the shadows and rather improbably cries "You shall have a devil child!!!" before scampering off again.Quite why Joan (recounting the story to a bored-witless Caroline Munro) should assume that this is the only explanation for why her child has anger-management problems I have no idea. And quite why she turns out to be right is even more startling. Soon she starts seeing the baby transform into the very same gurning midget in the blink of an eye, and most of the deaths are accompanied by such supremely seminal camera work depicting the hands of the midget (hmm, now there's a title for a Hammer... "Hands of the Midget") groping around and punching people.And this is just the basic premise of the story, all given within the first twenty minutes. From then on it's a whirlwind of the good and the bad. For the former we have Donald Pleasence giving a superbly understated performance as the doctor whom everybody seems to be seeking advice from (he actually seems like a doctor, somebody the makers had hired out from a surgery to appear in the film rather than just an actor, and it works wonderfully). The spiv, though a complete bounder, has a few amusing lines - "Said you'd come to me so I could cheer you up. I've got another six Irish jokes since we last met." Joan Collins, despite being a bit wooden at the beginning, actually gets better as the film progresses. And I was positively delighted by a cameo from Stanley Lebor, better known as lovable Howard in "Ever Decreasing Circles" (and, hurrah, a sitcom actor who actually survives the film - that's a rarity in the 70s). And then there's Pleasence with "I thought today was going to be normal routine, I didn't think I'd be discussing mysticism with an Italian nun." And then there's the laughably bad bits, including the rather shaky ground surrounding the "Midgets are evil" thing, the most unconvincing birth scene ever, in which Joan looks more as though she's being orally pleasured than having a child, and the gratuitous stripper scenes peppered about every so often which don't serve to do anything much at all ("Am I boring you?") In fact, various scenes of steamy romance and general sauciness seem to be chucked in just to give the film a higher rating - that's the only reason I can think of for a rather touching courting scene between Joan and blank-faced husband Ralph Bates (nice accent, Ralph) being followed up by the two of them having sweaty, fumbling sex whilst the melodious seedy music that we've been subjected to throughout the entire duration reaches a new low. And eyebrows will raise when you glance at the credits and see that this entire musical travesty (it really just sounds like porn music, I'm sorry) was composed by Ron Grainer, the man who composed the "Doctor Who" theme tune. Go Ron. You do your funky thang.But yes, to sum it all up, "The Monster" (where "I Don't Want to be Born" comes from I have no idea, as it's not the title on the print) is at times a rather lopsided affair which manages to actually remain consistently entertaining throughout, whether by accident or by design. It's probably all a matter of taste, and maybe I just ended up liking it as it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it'd be, but it's a rather fun feature that does end on a few shocks. 7/10

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