Ok, this was a movie I saw on the late show once back in the early 80s. From my hazy recollection, it seemed to be very late 60s / early 70s-ish. In fact, it was a fairly blatant “Rosemary’s Baby” rip-off, so it must be post-68.
The most memorable scene is the beginning. A woman (perhaps a stripper) does an act in a seedy ‘gentleman’s club’ with a dwarf who is madly passionately obsessed with her. She gives him the brush-off though and has sex with the club’s owner. As the woman is leaving the club late at night, the dwarf surprises her by jumping up on the stage, pointing at her and uttering some curse upon her about “YOU WILL A BABY (blah blah blah) POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL HIMSELF!!!”
Flash forward a couple of years, and the stripper has snared herself a rich husband, lives in a tone townhouse (in London I think) and sure enough has a "problem child’ baby. The baby looks like a regular cooing, gurgling baby but whoever is foolish enough to lean in and tickle him gets savagely beat down. Before long, the baby is crawling around the house brutally attacking & killing everybody in that gets in its’ way. The woman and her husband both get killed. Eventually a Catholic nun (I can’t remember why she was even around) manages to exorcise the baby by placing a crucifix on him. Just as the demon leaves the baby, we cut back to the seedy club from the beginning, and the dwarf drops dead on stage.
If this sounds like a terrible movie, well take my word of it - it’s worse. Infinitely worse. Yes, it’s a “so bad, it’s terrific” movie of the MST3K variety. It goes so far beyond being awful that it actually seems like some kind of surrealist masterpiece. And now that I it has floated back into my consciousness again, I keep thinking about it. Does this ring a bell with anybody?
By the way, Don Draper, your memory is uncannily accurate regarding the plot details given that you’re going by one late-night viewing 30 years ago. Color me impressed.
Ask me anything that went on in the world last week, I probably won’t remember too much. Ask me about a grade Z movie I saw or comic book I read 35 years ago, and I can recite it for you practically shot for shot, word for word. Just innate geek-ism I guess.
From the write-up at the link Miss Mapp provided, it reads as if this might be the one. And to be fair, it was the type of godawful train-wreck that tends to stick out in one’s mind. I didn’t remember either Joan Collins or Donald Pleasance being in it though.
Yeah, we’re definitely talking about the same movie here. The best part of the film is the German-accented Italian nun repeatedly pronouncing the word “devil” as “day veal.”
Ok, I did a little research based on the imdb page you supplied Bumbershoot (thanks for your help BTW) and found a trailer for the flick on youtube (under the alternate title “The Devil Within Her”) complete with the dwarf leveling the curse. Check it out!
And sunovabitch! That IS Joan Collins! And Donald Pleasance! I would’ve never connected them with this flick at all.
I recall seeing a movie, in the early 70s, where a group of people (women i believe) used long poles to drown another woman - thats the only scene I recall from the movie.
IIRC, it was in black and white - so the movie itself may have been much older - but seems it was at a drive-in when I saw it.
