Nova CarltonCINEMAS

Some horror movies have one great title. This one has four. THE DEVIL WITHIN HER. Sharon's Baby. I Don't Want To Be Born. The Monster. Whatever you want to call it, there's really only one important thing you need to know: Joan Collins gives birth to a homicidal 12-pound baby after being cursed by a horny little person whose sexual advances she rejected. Welcome to British horror in 1975. Former stripper Lucy Carlesi thinks she's left her old life behind when she settles down with her Italian husband Gino and gives birth to their first child. But little Nicholas isn't exactly a bundle of joy. He scratches his mother bloody, possesses seemingly superhuman strength and soon begins disposing of anyone unfortunate enough to wander too close to his cot. Lucy becomes convinced it all goes back to Hercules, a performer from her stripping days who promised that after rejecting him, her firstborn would be an evil monster. Turns out he wasn't fucking around. Directed by Hammer veteran Peter Sasdy (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Countess Dracula), THE DEVIL WITHIN HER is a wonderfully unhinged slice of post-Exorcist British horror, somehow assembling a first-class cast including Joan Collins, Donald Pleasence, Ralph Bates, Eileen Atkins and Caroline Munro for a movie about a murderous newborn baby. Pleasence plays the doctor tasked with finding a rational explanation for the increasingly irrational carnage, while Atkins plays an Italian nun who has a rather different diagnosis. THE DEVIL WITHIN HER is shocking, lurid, frequently sacrilegious and built around a premise so extraordinary its relative obscurity may be the most bizarre part of the entire film.