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Wide World of Horror: ‘Baby Shower’ – a soap opera pretending to be a horror movie.

Wide World of Horror: ‘Baby Shower’ – a soap opera pretending to be a horror movie.

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Written by Pablo Illanes
Directed by Pablo Illanes
Chile, 2011

Religious fervor has been exploited by the horror genre for years. There’s not much that can be said in the religious subgenre of horror that hasn’t been said already. That doesn’t mean that the people making horror films should steer clear of that particular subgenre. It does mean that when working within the religious subgenre the onus is on the filmmakers to produce something of a certain quality. It need not be the best horror movie ever made, or rewrite the book on religion as a tool of the horror genre. But, any horror buff worth their salt wants to enjoy the time they spend watching a horror movie. They want to be scared, be wowed by cinematography, have their ears assaulted by ingenious sound effects, and so on and so forth. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a movie like Baby Shower. There’s no reason for Baby Shower to exist other than to throw a bunch of half thought out ideas at the viewer and to attempt to exploit the natural inclination horror fans have towards enjoying the religious subgenre of horror.

Baby Shower(2011) sxrwwnaThere is a deep desire in most horror films to be provocative. Horror is a genre that pushes boundaries and often says the things that other genres are afraid to say. Unfortunately horror is also a genre full of laziness. Baby Shower is a great example of the laziness that can, at times, permeate the world of horror. Nothing screams lazy more than a soap opera approach to storytelling. That’s the approach adopted by Baby Shower, and it is not an approach that works for one second. It’s unclear why soap opera storytelling was the main course of choice for Baby Shower, but the results are about as grating as watching a soap opera. Who needs character development when a woman can be called a slut? What need is there for tension when there’s arguments to be had about who slept with someone’s husband?

The soap opera approach of Baby Shower clearly owes a debt to Latin American soap operas. The way that Baby Shower is filmed, the gratuitous sex scenes, and the actors choices all point to soap opera. Unfortunately the soap opera aesthetic doesn’t lend itself to horror, at least it doesn’t lend itself to horror in Baby Shower. The overacting is hard enough to deal with, and when the story reveals that its main thrust is that of infidelity, let’s just say even the most open minded horror fan will roll their eyes. There’s no bite to Baby Shower, and all the suspense a horror film can produce is sucked out of Baby Shower by the obvious tactics of its soap opera storytelling.

There’s nothing positive to be said about Baby Shower, laziness doesn’t deserve good marks. Hopefully Chile has better offerings coming down the horror pipeline, because Baby Shower is not the film for any country to hang their horror hat on. Obvious, overblown, slothful, and poorly produced, Baby Shower never fails to disappoint. Although, disappoint may not be the best word. In reality Baby Shower doesn’t disappoint, it fizzles out before it ever has a chance to disappoint, kind of like an actual baby shower.

-Bill Thompson

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