Magnum Force among other big time Hollywood productions, The Baby follows Mrs. Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) and her bizarre family made up of her two foxy daughters, Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Suzanne Zenor), and her son, Baby (David Manzy), who is not quite right and who wears diapers and lives in a crib. He crawls around the house goo-gooing and ga-gaging and drinks out of a baby bottle… but he is a fully-grown man. Oddly enough, his mother and two sisters are fine with his current state and don't show any interest in trying to get him any help or getting him any treatment, this in spite of the efforts of a few well-meaning social workers who have come and gone over the years.

The latest social worker to be assigned to the Wadsworth case is a kindly young woman named Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer), who feels that Baby deserves a better life than he's getting at home and who wants to take him to a clinic for therapy, but of course, there's no way Mrs. Wadsworth is going to allow that. In fact, when Ann persists, Mrs. Wadsworth basically kicks her out of the house and tells her never to return. The old lady softens up after some time passes and invites Ann to Baby's birthday party, to which she arrives only to find some very non-kid-friendly activity going on. It turns out that Ann's been set up, however, as she soon finds herself drugged and tied up in the basement of the family home. She makes her escape and makes it out of the house alive, with Baby in tow, and Mrs. Wadsworth soon finds out that there's more to this social worker than she first expected.

Surprisingly sleazy for a PG rated movie, and far darker and considerably more twisted than it probably should have been, The Baby is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to put it into words. First off is the character of Baby himself, played freakishly well by Manzy but frequently dubbed by the sounds of an actual infant crying. Then there's the presence of Ruth Roman, best known for work in more mainstream fare such as Strangers On A Train, here wallowing in exploitation sickness and seemingly all the better for it. Her performance is a determined one, she definitely gives her all and makes a surprisingly believable matronly type, as damaged as she and her children might be. Throw in Marianna Hill and Suzanne Zenor as two well-constructed but ‘off' young ladies and the presence of a pot smoking Micheal Pataki as one of their boy toys and you can easily see how Anjanette Comer's Ann has definitely got her hands full.

The story itself is compellingly tasteless at times, the best example being Ann's trip to a class for mentally handicapped people or the scene where Baby tries to breastfeed one of his babysitters. The film features minor drug use, tends to get violent in spots and definitely gets sadistic in the last half but as trashy as it all is, Post manages to get some great performances out of his cast and to squeeze some genuinely unsettling atmosphere out of the story. The house where most of the action takes place has got some great gothic style to it while the seventies fashions and hairdos combined with a truly odd score from composer Gerald Fried just add to the film's very substantial weird factor.

Video:
The Baby so soon after Severin Films released the film a few years ago, Arrow gets credit where credit is due. Not only do they offer the option to watch the film in either 1.85.1 or 1.33.1 (open matte), but they present the film with noticeably stronger color reproduction and much better black levels. Detail is also a bit better and there's more depth and texture to the image. There are no noticeable compression issues or digital tweaking to complain about, this is nice and film-like in its presentation.