Pregnancy can be a burden at the best of times, but it’s so much worse when what you’re pregnant with is a kind of demonic umbilical chord with a tiny monster head, and it needs blood to survive, and if it doesn’t survive then guess what…you’ll die with it, too! That’s the burden unwittingly imposed on Alessa (Lauren LaVera, of the Terrifier sequels) when her boyfriend Chris (Julian Curtis) fails to tell her that the condom has split, during the sex scene that – very classily – opens the film.
Soon enough, Alessa becomes aware of what has happened, for her strange biology means that pregnancy can be detectable even 24 hours after conception. Not sure what to do next, she makes Chris join her for a miserable weekend with her blind father, played by horror legend Bill Moseley (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Repo! The Genetic Opera), whom she hopes will hold the answers to her predicament. And he does, in a way, insisting that she simply let the fetus feed, for the alternative is her death, which is unacceptable to him. In the meantime, there is feuding a-plenty between boyfriend and dad in a sort of sicker, gorier Meet the Parents fashion – with a little of Teeth and Rosemary’s Baby thrown in, I suppose.
This is all fun and games, but once the film begins to move towards a climax, explaining just what’s going on with Alessa’s biology and why her mother left her life long ago, the interest level tapers off, something not helped by visibly cheap effects – the kind that are easy to look past in a silly creature feature, but harder to take seriously when there are real emotional stakes. Ultimately, The Fetus gets more wrong than it gets right, which is a shame, because it’s a genuine pleasure in places.
★★☆☆☆