Just so you know, this NSFW trailer is about as red band as a trailer can get, with massive amounts of cursing, breasts and general depravity. If anyone catches you watching it, tell them the devil made you do it.
While I absolutely love the sketch show The State and Reno 911!, cast members Robert Garant and Thomas Lennon have not written many films that I enjoy, with Night at the Museum probably coming out on top and The Pacifier drowning beneath it. But with the upcoming low budget comedy horror Hell Baby, they’re entering into what I hope will be a renaissance period of flicks made for themselves rather than the studios. And this is obviously a film that showcases their brusque, over-the-top sense of humor to its fullest.
The red band trailer seen above, from Yahoo! Movies, completely took me by surprise for some reason. After watching the film’s first trailer, I expected a bunch of horror-inspired zaniness that didn’t get filthy with its language and subject matter. I have clearly been completely brainwashed by PG-13 comedies. This trailer takes on the same 1980s throwback aesthetic that Hell Baby seems to embrace, and is much more in tune with The Exorcist than The Last Exorcism, albeit with more Rob Huebel.
Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb play Jack and Vanessa, a couple who move into one of the most haunted houses in New Orleans, which soon takes Vanessa hostage to satanic possession, complete with a rapid pregnancy for a demonic baby. In order to combat the evil that this baby will rain down upon Earth, the couple enlists the help of the most elite exorcism team – played by Garant and Lennon – that the Vatican has to offer, who also happen to smoke like an assembly line of chimneys.
There isn’t a lot of explanation as to why these other characters are around, but Keegan Michael Key inserts himself into their lives with his backstory on the house. Huebel and Paul Scheer play a couple of bumbling cops. Comedian Riki Lindhome (of Garfunkel and Oates) and her boobs also star. Kumail Nanjiani appears as an internet installer who gets stoned. Michael Ian Black also pops into the film at some point. It looks like it’ll fit into the same comedy block as the so-so post-apocalyptic comedy Rapture-Palooza that premiered last month, if only because it shares some of the same cast and antichrist elements.
I’ve got a lot of… faith… that this movie might be one of those guilty pleasure classics that I put on as expletive-laden background noise when I’m working. Though I probably won’t be near one of the theaters that releases Hell Baby upon its limited theatrical release on September 6, I’m pleased its VOD release arrives more than a month earlier, on July 25. (Though I’m located close enough to New Orleans that I can admit the setting is driving part of my anticipation.)
Check out the motherly new poster below, with its positively awful tagline “The Devil Got a Baby Mama,” and the film’s green band and fuck-free trailer below the poster.
