‘‘Busted Babies” Bouncing on Blu-ray!
n an alternate or surreal reality, skin-spotted, demon-like humanoids with wings live normally amongst regular humans as construction workers or cinematic directors. One female of the demonic kind purloins and collects babies that turn into glass. When she accidently trips and falls at the BBQ Salon, she inadvertently affects herself and her same-specie brethren with the chemicals inside the glass babies busts open, resulting in a bad case of immortality. As she attempts multiple suicides to end her existence, some more radical and gruesome then most, her immortality doesn’t allow her to die so easily, and she starts to run out of ideas of how to succumb to the sweat air of death yet there is one way to permanently end it all. Simultaneously, mysterious dancing human men in black suits seek the glass babies for the immortality for unknown reasons but the babies won’t be given up so effortlessly for the sake of all species.
What in the fragile baby hell did I just watch? The above synopsis is the closest best guess to a comprehendible and coherent storyline one could possibly get out of the 2024 released Blood Sick Production entitled “Busted Babies.” The Kafkaesque film with nonsensical dialogue and a disjointed narrative shot in an East Coast stretch from Philadelphia to Ft. Lauderdale is the inaugural directorial project of Kasper Meltedhair, alternative indie actress of “Cannibal Cop” and “Coven of the Black Cube,” but is Meltedhair’s sophomore penned feature behind 2017’s “Hooker with a Hacksaw,” cowritten alongside with good friend and constant collaborator in underground indie horror director Donald Farmer (“Cannibal Hookers”). Meltedhair, her artistic pseudonym by the way, releases her lo-fi, SOV film through Brewce Longo and Michael DiFrancesco’s Blood Sick Productions with Nicholas DeGideo also as executive producer and X Menzak and Charles Smith as co-producers.
Meltedhair stares as the principal humanoid who inadvertently drops a glass baby in front of her Salon-going friends, creating immortal beings. “Busted Babies” is one of a few of films that don’t name their characters so there’s no way to specifically identify easily other than from their moniker placeholders, such as Movie Star or Wood Chipper, but alongside Kasper Meltedhair as the spotted, winged, and horned humanoids are Erin Caywood (“A Corpse for Christmas,” “Coven of the Black Cube”) as an involved filmmaker and Cody Brant as some kind of city or construction type worker. They pursued by cultish G-men types who seek to obtain the immortalizing glass baby goop through off-beat dance moves and dadaist dialogue. Blood Sick Productions founder Brewce Longo and “The Dark Military’s” Josh Christensen suit up as the men-in-black with Donald Farmer the quasi-leader sporting a different colored attire but still spews the same absurd loquaciousness amongst his men. Interaction between the groups is minimal and only come to a head in the finale, creating a great fission of distinction between the two until that point in the story where desperation set through bizarre dialogue. “Busted Babies” cast fills out with Andy Heck Boyd, Brent Grant, Nicholas DeGideo, Elizabeth D’Ambrosio, Mason Roberts, Carla Dickie, Eli Elliott, and Josh Schafer.
Trying to make sense of Kasper Meltedhair’s debut is beyond futile between the dada plot, an anti-establishment storytelling, and its runny absurdism dialogue that’s almost like a language only the character’s can comprehend. The analog SOV aesthetic adds to the surrealism with its fuzzy details and rugged color reproduction, elevating an already unusual piece of art to esoteric levels that’s perhaps only understood by Meltedhair’s inner circle. I won’t pretend to know what’s happening on screen, but you have to applaud Meltedhair’s going against the traditional cinema grain and making the approach her own in an auteur rebellion against conventional storytelling. However, full auteurism usually creates distance between movie and viewer and that disconnection will ultimately hurt “Busted Babies” down the line with the various reviews that can’t quite explain the film and anything too weird is usually pre-treated with avoidance spray. There’s no explanation of the demonic look her character and others have, there’s no exposition about why the babies are glass and why they have inside an immortalizing substance, there’s no laid out reason why the men in suit dance and talk in arrhythmic prose; there are just too many questions left unanswered and trying to process it is a struggle that carries over also to getting through the 87 minute runtime but what I tell myself is this, and this perspective gives comfort and resolution, that “Busted Babies” is 100%, undiluted, all-natural art meant to be personally interpreted like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Blood Sick Productions releases “Busted Babies” onto an AVC encoded, single-layer Blu-ray, scanned in 2K from the original VHS tape elements. The obvious psychotronic VHS shooting leaves quality detail matters in the hands of the commercially VHS-shot gods. Safe to say, details don’t matter but the interlaced look does for a film of this caliber that embraces the warm coloring of magnetic tape and compression malformations of a jaggy-edged blocking, as if one’s watching a movie through the bottom of a colored Coke bottle. “Busted Babies” is also a 2024 film and I’m guessing they used a retro tape camera to obtain the desired and intended quality. The English LPCM 2.0 Stereo favors an interference-laced design but not to the point of incoherency. The unpolished dialogue track captures naturally, meaning you can hear and feel the space around their vocal interactions that go hand-in-hand with the video rather than recorded separately and then manipulated for cinematic effect. Special features include Kasper Meltedhair short film “Rorph Cranker,” a behind-the-scenes featurette, outtakes, feature trailers, and the Donald Farmer viewing experience, a couching rambling from the indie SOV filmmaker about his experiences and the film itself amongst other areas that interest him. The standard Amaray incased Blu-ray houses flat coloring composition of the title, the glass babies, some stills, and the production company, all of which are still very colorful in a yellow border but still very flat in pop and depth. The disc is pressed with a cartoon rendition of the demonic angels There is a double-sided insert of Erin Caywood in character with the reverse side being a written review snippet from Caroline Kopko. “Busted Babies” is region free and is not rated.
Last Rites: Kasper Meltedhair’s debut, “Busted Babies,” will target a niche audience, and I have a sneaking suspicion that is purposeful, as the concept and execution is abstract absurdity at all times in an analog setting.
