Critic Reviews

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

The movie is delightfully crude in places (including an instance of relay puking) and just plain silly-clever in others.

Its modest (if occasionally gross-out) stabs at genre parody rarely insult our intelligence and even allow for the kind of retro deadpan silliness Mel Brooks used to underline his louder punch lines.

Functions exactly like a sketch movie, using its meager, essentially irrelevant plot as a clothesline upon which to string a series of self-contained bits. At least half of the bits are pretty damn funny, though, and that’s arguably all that matters.

Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.

Hell Baby works as a joke factory first and foremost, a collection of tropes (some mocked) second, and a movie a distant third.

Given Garant and Lennon’s background on “The State” and “Reno 911,” their scattershot approach as filmmakers isn’t especially surprising; for every oddly specific Shakespeare reference or detour to the local po-boy joint, there’s an ongoing parade of puke and an awful rubber suit with which to contend.

Like bad houseguests, the creators of Hell Baby overstay their welcome.

The birth of the titular infant — what the whole movie’s leading up to — is just an anticlimactic mess.

Hell Baby is what happens when you try to parody a parody. The result is a film that's less than half as funny as its predecessor, and a sliver as clever as the original.