Big Baby review – a screenwriter’s nightmares become reality in a meta-horror misfire

In this slasher directed by Michael Cummings, AKA Powerman 5000 singer Spider One, Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott) is a screenwriter who spends too much time fretting about what the film reviewers he claims to despise think about his work, and not enough time writing. It’s a little hard initially to get a handle on exactly where this writing really sits: are we meant to believe he’s a misunderstood genius, or are the reviewers, in fact, correct? When Big Baby opens, Adam’s most recent film is being negatively reviewed by a couple of blowhards on a horror podcast, then he later gets grouchy with his all-too patient and supportive girlfriend (Krsy Fox) when she dares to imply he may never win an Academy Award. It emerges he’s aiming for a career something like Jordan Peele’s, but figures he’s not above trying for something more in the Sean S Cunningham oeuvre.

For the first half of Big Baby, a pattern develops: Adam attempts to write, or search for inspiration, only to be haunted by a vision or dream about a slasher villain in a baby mask. Scott, as it happens, is a decent actor and does good work in the dialogue-free scenes, but the words themselves are a problem: it’s would-be smart material that hangs the character out to dry as a self-aggrandising, touchy killjoy and it’s hard to see why most of the people in his life would want to stay in touch. Scott’s charisma helps, but can’t completely counteract an unprepossessingly drawn character.

In the horror movie roadmap, Big Baby lives a few degrees south of the likes of meta-slasher Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and a little west of John Carpenter’s delirious In the Mouth of Madness. This is the kind of horror where in-universe script and reality bleed into each other. Unfortunately, it’s not sharp and tightly delineated enough for the former, while not sufficiently insane for the latter.

For its first half, Big Baby is too often bogged down trying for character development: close to 90% of every conversation is about Adam and his anxieties, while the girlfriend character, played with a certain spark by Fox, doesn’t seem to have anything much going on in her own life. It’s a frustrating film, because there are flashes of something great here, but in the final analysis, Big Baby crawls rather than walks.