Pro-Life (2006)

Strong and Moving!

A Major Disappointment

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A pregnant girl arrives at the abortion clinic and insists that her pregnancy is terminated immediately. Soon after arrives her pro-life father, a religious fanatic, accompanied by her older brothers, and attacks the clinic to save his grandchild. The film begins as a redneck drama, but soon turns into a supernatural horror, in John Carpenter's recognizable style. A good story, convincing atmosphere, striking music and decent acting, and if they just refrained from explicitly portraying the "baby" and her father, this would be a solid seven. But in the end they just had to ruin it with well-done, but completely ridiculous and unconvincing monsters and replace eerie tension with "wtf is this crap" moment.5,5/10

Young Angelique (Caitlin Wachs) is pregnant with Satan's baby. In a casting irony, Hellboy, Ron Perlman is the father of Angelique and is part of the Pro-Life movement. The abortion clinic where she is at believe Ron Perlman, her father, raped her. They can't perform the abortion without his permission and they can't let her go back to him. The story oozes and drips with irony and role reversals.F-bomb, no sex or nudity, exploding head.

"Pro-Life" actually reminded me a little bit about all those pathetic late 80's/early 90's made-for-TV movies based on real-life tragedies. You know the ones I'm talking about… They usually always starred former sitcom stars (like from "Beverly Hills 90210 etc…) and dealt with topics like unwanted teenage pregnancies, rape and forced abortions. "Pro-Life" features some of those elements as well, but naturally lengthened with totally bonkers and over-the-top grotesque horror ingredients à la John Carpenter. His episode "Cigarette Burns" already was one of the highlights of season one, and "Pro-Life" definitely ranks amongst the finest efforts of season two. It's a fast-paced and incredibly gory short film with a handful of original ideas and truckloads of disturbing imagery, but sadly also an underdeveloped screenplay. Perhaps John Carpenter needed to make this a long-feature film, so that he could elaborate on some of the potentially very intriguing aspects of the story. Two doctors working in the private abortion clinic ran by Dr. Kiefer pick up a young and tremendously confused pregnant teenager by the side of the road. The girl claims to have been raped by a demon from hell that attacked her one week earlier in her backyard. The doctors naturally don't believe the story, but have to admit the fetus grows at an incredible rate and shows many signs of being pure evil. Meanwhile, the girl's father and brothers are outside the gates of the abortion clinic. Dwayne Burcell is a reputed troublemaker and religious fanatic who came into conflict with Dr. Kiefer before. Now he's determined to get his daughter out of the clinic and, especially, rescue the baby because God ordered him to. Qualifying as a genuine Masters of Horror installment, "Pro-Life" contains a lot of truly grueling images (like close range shotgun kills) and flamboyant special effects and monster designs. There are also some very icky moments, like when Dwayne uses the surgical instruments to perform an abortion on a male patient. Yikes! As said, the screenplay is sadly underdeveloped. Carpenter borrows terrific elements from previous horror classics (including some of his own work, like "The Thing") but it's all very incoherent and lacking logical sense. But since sense isn't the most vital elements I expect to find in a Masters of Horror episode, I can still safely say I loved "Pro-Life". Watch this if you want extreme gore and a stellar performance from Ron Perlman.

It's about 2 Doctors who find a scared girl, they take her to the hospital where they work and they find out she's pregnant. Later her father is there too, he wants to stop a possible abortion 'cause god told him so....This is amazing it where just 53min but man it's one really tension-filled masterpiece that it's better than a lot of action movies.I think this short-movie is a combination of classic John Carpenter atmosphere mixed someway with Tarantino-like style and it's got a little touch of Resident Evil(not the bad Jovovich Movies, I mean the games). So if you like tension-filled action-flicks with horror-atmosphere or just like Tarantino/Rodriguez Movies you gotta watch this ! It's really awesome.