There are a lot of slasher films out there. They can be said to date back to The System of Doctor Goudron directed by Maurice Tourneur. Tourneur used extreme violence (gouging out an eye, slitting a throat) to try and bring the audience out of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and into the cinema. Arguably though the extreme depiction of, as Alex DeLarge might put it, ultra-violence can be traced back to English Renaissance theatre and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
In short, people have been throwing buckets of Kensington Gore or similar around since at least the sixteenth century. Nowadays it is all usually down to the efforts of a serial killing psychopath and doesn’t require much more in the way of exposition. Womb is undoubtedly in the slasher genre but it lets the side down by actually having a story to hang all that stabbing and slashing on to. Even more, it is based on an actual series of events. Maybe more along the lines of “something similar happened” rather than “we’ve had to change the names to protect the innocent”.
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We Can’t Go Back Out There
Womb is set in the relatively rare region of foetal abduction. I found the name slightly confusing because I always think of a foetus being a small undeveloped bunch of cells. I know that, technically, the initial stage is the zygote shortly followed by the embryo which develops into the foetus at around eight to ten weeks and that’s it until birth. Anyway, a foetus is a foetus from around the second month until birth. So, with that in mind, the term foetal abduction becomes a bit more obvious.
It is, quite bluntly, a forced, non-consensual caesarian with the baby being taken away from the mother. The opening, pre-titles sequence demonstrates the offence quite graphically. Well, graphically by US standards; there’s no problem with showing gallons of blood but god forbid you show too much skin. Why else would you perform a caesarian on a woman through her street clothes? I know there’s no concern about infection from bacteria on the clothing but, surely, the job must be easier if you can see where everything is!
He Wants My Baby
Anyway, let’s park that little niggle to one side. Pre-opening credits is a scene of a young, heavily pregnant woman walking through a park or suchlike. There are trees all around, grass under foot, and no buildings to be seen; could be the local public gardens or out in the middle of Wyoming. She does have a tracker on her ankle so I’m guessing that she can’t be too far into the wilderness. Her young daughter is running around like they do. A camouflage clad chap appears out of nowhere and commits the assault. The rest of the film is the main character trying to avoid a repeat incident.
It is a fairly typical “hide from the bad guy in the middle of nowhere” film but very well done. Hailey (Taylor Hanks) is the heavily pregnant putative victim and I can’t say much more about the rest of the cast because it would be too easy to let cats out of bags! Suffice it to say that there is plenty of tension right up to the very end. I thought I’d guessed who the villain in the camouflage was…but I was wrong! One thing, I am so glad that they dropped the original title…Womb Raider! Womb gets a digital release on 28th April 2025 courtesy of Reel 2 Reel Films.
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