“We told the casting director: ‘We need X number of adult babies and they’ve got to be fat and preferably bald’. Unfortunately, as soon as some of them knew they had to be in a nappy, they weren’t interested – and you can’t blame them really.” Joanne Mitchell laughs as she recalls the extras who refused the chance to appear as the titular man-toddlers in her film, Attack of the Adult Babies.
It’s their loss, as Attack of the Adult Babies is the most fun I’ve had watching a British movie in ages (read my review here). A comedy horror, the film is directed by Dominic Brunt, but the original story idea and treatment was Mitchell’s, who also stars in the film as the murderous Nurse Clinton (“It was so much fun playing a psychotic monster”).
The film is a riotous combination of toilet humour, slapstick violence and sharp social commentary. It’s about the greed and perversity of the British ruling classes and what rich, powerful men get up to when they think no one is watching. In the wrong hands it could have been horribly heavy handed but, instead, comes across like a punk-rock mash-up of Benny Hill, Viz comic and Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste.
Full of laughs
“We wanted to make it fun and a roller-coaster journey full of laughs and all those things but, at the same time, if you wish to see the social comment in the film, it’s there and plainly obvious,” says Mitchell, who British TV viewers may well have seen pop up over the years in the likes of Emmerdale, Heartbeat and Waterloo Road. “But we’re not doing it with a serious, moralistic tone. We wanted to do it entertainingly.”
And entertaining it certainly is – relentlessly so. The film came about when Brunt encountered a bump in the road career-wise. He took several months off from his day job, as village veterinary surgeon Paddy Kirk in aforementioned British soap Emmerdale, after being offered a Hollywood film role… which then fell through at the eleventh hour. However, this seeming bit of ill fortune actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the film.
“It’s just one of those things that can happen in this industry but, luckily, we had Attack of the Adult Babies going on in the background,” recalls Mitchell. “We were out with a friend, who’s an investor and producer, and he said, ‘Why don’t you make Adult Babies?’, and we said we can’t because we haven’t got any funding, and he offered to back it for us there and then. It was just one of those things that happens by chance – luck was in the right place.
“If we’d had two years to prepare for this movie, I don’t think it would have been made, because everyone would have talked us out of doing it. We only had 14 weeks to get it off the ground but, for some reason, it all just fell into place. It was not a stressful shoot either – it was a joy and we had a really good time.”
Gory and Ghastly
Mitchell is becoming an increasingly influential figure in British horror. She acts and writes and, along with husband Brunt, runs a production company – Mitchell-Brunt Films. Attack of the Adult Babies is their third movie after character-driven zombie flick Before Dawn (2013) and brutal revenge thriller Bait (2014). On top of all that, Mitchell has also just directed a short film – another chiller, called Sybil.
You get the distinct impression she is building towards something and I suspect it won’t be long before she helms her first feature. London-born Mitchell has always been a horror fan, but it was attending FrightFest, the UK’s annual celebration of movies both gory and ghastly, that opened her eyes to what the genre is truly capable of.
“It was really FrightFest that opened my mind to everything,” she tells me. “Just watching all the films there and their diversity. There’s so many different platforms within the genre, which I found fascinating. I think you can go anywhere with it – it’s a brilliant platform for storytelling. (Horror) audiences are always looking for something different, something new, and that’s where your imagination can just go mad. With drama you’re constrained a bit, but with horror you can just be let loose.”
Completely blown away
Unsurprisingly, Attack of the Adult Babies’s gross-out thrills have been a huge hit on the festival circuit. And its scabrous appeal has even proved – in these Brexit blighted times – resistant to Brit-bashing Europeans too.
“It’s done really well regionally, almost better than it did with a London audience,” says Mitchell, whose favourite horror films include The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Babadook. “We showed it in Leeds, Manchester and Derby, and maybe because its set in Yorkshire, northerners really get it. We showed it in France as well and they absolutely loved it. I was a bit worried because it’s all subtitled and I wondered if they’d understand it. But, honestly, I was completely blown away by the French audience, they absolutely lapped it up. I was surprised because they probably don’t like the British much.”
There are many reasons to love Attack of the Adult Babies, including Olivier award-winning actress Sally Dexter’s terrific performance as the sinister Nurse Margaret, and memorable cameos from Human Centipede sequels star Laurence R. Harvey and British cult comedian Charlie Chuck. But it’s the movie’s final 20 minutes that I suspect will be talked about most; a phantasmagoria featuring claymation (courtesy of Bait’s Lee Hardcastle), a giant pig monster, a trippy special effects sequence (from Inbred’s Alex Chandon) and, from out of nowhere, a spaceship.
“The film originally ended with two of the characters kissing in a car, but it just didn’t feel right – it didn’t feel like a proper climax to everything,” explains Mitchell. “So, Dom stuck in a spaceship and everyone went, ‘What the f*ck?!’ We thought, ‘Well, we’ve taken it this far, so let’s just take it that little step further’.”
What is your all-time favourite British comedy? Let us know in the comments below.
Attack of the Adult Babies is released on Limited Edition Blu-ray and digital on July 9, and on DVD on July 23.
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