When the Opening Scene is the High Point
You know you’re in trouble when the most memorable part of your horror movie is a nightclub strip act involving Joan Collins and a lecherous dwarf named Hercules. This is how I Don’t Want to Be Born kicks things off—less “creepy gothic horror,” more “Eurotrash fever dream.” Collins plays Lucy, a go-go dancer who politely tolerates Hercules until he lunges for her chest like a vampire bat at closing time. Spurned, he delivers a melodramatic curse: Lucy will give birth to “a monster as big as I am small.” This is the sort of curse that sounds menacing in the moment but, in retrospect, feels like it was lifted from the cutting room floor of a bad carnival sideshow.
The Birth Scene from Hell… Literally
Fast-forward a few months, and Lucy has traded her pole-dancing career for a wealthy Italian husband (Ralph Bates) and a swanky Kensington townhouse. The baby’s delivery is protracted, agonizing, and in pure 1970s horror fashion, scored by an ominous music cue that says, “Something Evil Is Happening.” The newborn greets his mother by clawing her face like a feral cat. The attending doctor, played with supreme British detachment by Donald Pleasence, brushes it off as normal infant panic—because, sure, babies are famous for scratching faces deep enough to require stitches.
Mrs. Hyde vs. Satan’s Daycare
The household staff soon learns what Lucy is already beginning to suspect: her child is less Gerber baby, more Damien-from-The Omen. Housekeeper Mrs. Hyde gets her finger crushed by the little hellspawn and later finds a dead mouse in her tea. You’d think this would be a quitting moment, but Mrs. Hyde soldiers on with stiff-upper-lip resolve, apparently deciding that the Devil himself is still preferable to unemployment in the mid-’70s.
Possession, Death, and the Slow March to Absurdity
Things escalate in the expected supernatural horror fashion: the baby destroys his nursery like a rock star trashing a hotel room, drowns his nurse by pram-assisted shove, and manages to break a grown man’s nose from his crib. All of this would be terrifying if it weren’t filmed with the kind of staging that suggests the director’s main direction was, “Eh, just flail your arms a bit.”
Albana, Gino’s nun sister, shows up from Italy to pray over the baby. Every time she does, the kid howls like he’s passing a kidney stone. Meanwhile, bodies pile up: Gino gets hanged from a tree and stuffed in a drain, Dr. Finch loses his head—literally—to a garden spade, and Lucy herself is stabbed through the heart with a pair of scissors. It’s less Rosemary’s Baby and more And Then There Were None, except the killer is in Pampers.
The Curse Comes Full Circle
In the grand finale, Sister Albana decides it’s time for an exorcism, waving a crucifix in front of the crib while chanting Latin like she’s auditioning for The Exorcist: Low-Budget Edition. As the baby writhes, Hercules—remember him from the first five minutes?—is onstage at the club, suddenly clutching his chest in pain. When Albana touches the crucifix to the baby’s head, the evil is cast out… just as Hercules drops dead mid-performance. The implication? The dwarf and the baby were spiritually linked. The execution? It plays like a bad sitcom trying to wrap up a subplot no one cared about.
Performances That Swing Between Camp and Coma
Joan Collins spends the movie cycling between genuine fear and the kind of wide-eyed overacting that suggests she’s auditioning for a shampoo commercial mid-take. Ralph Bates is mostly decorative, disappearing halfway through. Donald Pleasence cashes his paycheck by alternating between looking mildly concerned and faintly amused, as though he’s wondering why he agreed to this instead of another Halloween sequel.
A Horror Film That Forgets to Be Scary
I Don’t Want to Be Born has all the ingredients for a nasty, effective 1970s supernatural chiller—sex, curses, creepy children, Donald Pleasence—but instead, it veers into camp so often you start to wonder if it’s intentional. The tone is inconsistent: sometimes deadly serious, other times bordering on parody. The kills lack tension, the curse logic is flimsy at best, and the final reveal about Hercules’ psychic link to the baby feels like it was dreamed up on a lunch break.
Final Verdict
If you’re a fan of so-bad-it’s-good horror, this movie has its charms: outrageous premise, unintentional comedy, and Joan Collins being menaced by an evil infant. But as a straight horror film, it fails spectacularly. The scares are tepid, the pacing drags, and the climactic “exorcism via dwarf heart attack” is the sort of thing that makes you stare at the screen and mutter, “What am I even watching?”
This isn’t The Omen. It’s The Omen if the Antichrist had a teething ring and a grudge against domestic help. Watch it for the camp value, not the chills.
