“From the makers of ‘Reno 911!’”, which Hell Baby purports to be, is a bit of a mislead. The long-running Comedy Central show about witless police officials was a collaborative effort between an expansive cast of improvisers with varying styles and voices, aiding the show with a certain dynamic germane to its success. Hell Baby is spawned by two in that ensemble – Tom Lennon and Ben Garant – whose prior team-ups Night of the Museum and its sequel, The Pacifier and the Queen Latifah/Jimmy Fallon joint Taxi would be more suitable comparisons for this aggressively laughless horror lampoon.
Expectant couple Jack (Rob Corddry) and Vanessa (Leslie Bibb) move into a haunted house and become the playthings of the fixer-upper’s demonic infestation, which soon extends to their omnipresent neighbor F’Resnel (Keegan-Michael Key), Vanessa’s therapist (Michael Ian Black) and two cops (Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel) on the trail of the couple’s damnable doings. The Vatican responds by sending out its resident exorcist duo (Lennon and Garant) to combat the evil. Hilarity stubbornly refuses to ensue.
Hell Baby is puff of heaping waste. Lazy, smug and somehow overlong at 98 minutes, every joke, scene and the momentum of Lennon and Garant’s career as comedic filmmakers possess zero momentum. The lack of effort in every frame of Hell Baby does little to differentiate it from other insipid spoofs of the genre. At least this year’s odious A Haunted House had facial expressions. Hell Baby is so bad that it would actually benefit from a Wayans stopping by to spunk things up.
Instead we have performers who have all been funny before, embarrassingly wading through nearly every minute of screen time. Key’s energy is a kick above the rest of the cast, but his shtick is essentially reduced to black stereotypes. So much so that Garant, in what is undoubtedly an ad-lib, says about Key’s character, “I like the way black people talk.” Bibb does have moments; there are faint glimmers of a gifted comedic actress in how she lets loose once the demon tightens its grip, but she is too underutilized to truly break out.
Two scene stand out, but for the wrong reasons. Vanessa’s Wiccan sister Marjorie (Riki Lindhome, one half of the comedy-folk duo Garfunkel and Oates) is introduced head-to-toe nude in a scene that otherwise serves no purpose. Lindhome is so consciously on display for an ogling audience for so long that the scene is bound to become the film’s centerpiece, which is a testament to the rest of Hell Baby’s tedium. It’s a bizarre feat to render the sight of a naked woman’s body dull, but leave it to Lennon and Garant to reach new heights in clockwatching.
Later, the usually reliable Kumail Nanjiani appears as a cable guy who inexplicably gets roped into partaking in a séance led by a finally clothed Marjorie. The scene is an excuse for the cast to play as high as Lennon and Garant seem to anticipate their audience is, and is capped with an almost-amusing moment where a supremely stoned Nanjiani sidles his truck away from the house, but only manages to do so at a snail’s pace. It’s one of those gags that gets funnier the longers it’s drawn out, but Lennon and Garant are quick to cut away. Perhaps if the cable truck were a nude twentysomething pixie, the joke might have actually worked.
Lennon and Garant seem to be of a mind that no matter what set piece or situation they come up with will be funny enough without any tweaking or further development. There is a germ of fun in the idea of the house quaking only on the inside, but Lennon and Garant handle it with the tonal aplomb of a strawberry Pop-Tart. They ramp up the raunch at every opportunity, only moving on when it appears that their blood and vomit budget has run out. But the problem with Hell Baby isn’t that its humor is juvenile, or even infantile. It’s just plain sterile.
