In this film ‘Baby Blues’ Mom (Colleen Porch) is struggling like for real. She’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to, saddled with three young children, a newborn, and a husband who makes his coin as a trucker and as such he’s rarely there to lend a helping hand. What Mom needs is a Calgon moment to take her away but what she gets is more laundry to clean, more food to cook, more counters to wipe down, more diapers to change, hallucinations and a scarecrow out in the field who seems to be feeding her some really bad advice.

Now little Jimmy (Ridge Canipe), the oldest of the four children, knows that something just isn’t quite right with Mommy over there, but she is Mommy and she does a keep a clean house, she keeps he and his siblings nice and spiffy and she makes a mean pecan pie but still Jimmy can’t shake the feeling that Mom might be a little off her rocker. He was about to present these concerns to his Dad (Joel Bryant) as he was preparing for another, albeit shorter haul upstate, but how exactly do you phrase ‘Dad, I think Mom may be a homicidal maniac and there’s little chance we’ll be alive when you get back’? So Jimmy lets it slide believing that perhaps he’s just imagining things.

He wasn’t. Mom is certainly off her rocker and in the worst way. There’s Post Partum Depression and then there’s what Mom has. Let’s just say that we’re happy for the baby because it didn’t know what was going on as it sucked down its last breath. However for Jimmy, his little sister Cathy (Kali Majors) and his younger brother Sammy (Holden Thomas Maynard), they are in for a really long night as Mom has access to kitchen knives, pitch forks, shot guns, machetes and a tractor armed with rotating blades and she has bad intentions. Did I mention that they’re living in the middle of nowhere and that Dad is gone and won’t be back for a little while?

A very effective little horror / thriller this movie ‘Baby Blues’. It’s very short, with a running time at around eighty minutes or so, and it doesn’t spend a heckuva lot of time developing its characters and as such since Mom is pretty much on the nut by the time we meet her, and Jimmy already knows something is wrong even as Dad is heading out the door. Thus the majority of the movie consists of Mom dutifully going through the brutal tasks of hunting down and murdering her children, or anybody and anything that gets in the way of her tasks of murdering her children. To that end, directors Lars E. Jacobson and Amardeep Kaleka have crafted this simple hunt, run, chase, scream and die treatise in uncomfortable child brutality with flash and style.

A few things help set ‘Baby Blues’ apart from the genre, with probably the most obvious being that young children are dying horribly in this movie, which is never easy to watch. Horny fornicating teenagers who play loud music? Them we don’t miss too much. Children who haven’t had the opportunity to become horny fornicating loud music playing teenagers? Not cool. The directors however did handle the horror that the children experienced in clever ways so the audience didn’t have to be directly subjected to their grisly ends, but yet still got the full brunt of how they brought it. Another thing that helps ‘Baby Blues’ is the excellent cinematography and lighting effects that permeate throughout the films relatively brief running time. The clever use of light created an atmosphere that always felt like something was wrong and gave you a constant feeling of uneasiness. Finally, pretty actress Colleen Porch sure did make for one of the best Karazay mom’s since Faye Dunaway skewered Joan Crawford. Hearing Mom saying ‘I love you baby’ while slicing an Achilles tendon was quite eerie, and young Ridge Canipe is about as fine a child actor as you are ever going to watch work.

If there’s a problem with ‘Baby Blues’ it would be that it is a standard slasher style horror flick with a lot of the similar jump and scare stuff that we’ve seen time and time again. And though Mom may be about 5’4" and might weigh around 115 pounds, let me assure you that Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers don’t have much on her in the unstoppable, invincible killer pool.

Still, this is a slasher film at heart and those afore mention events are pretty much par for the course, so we won’t complain too much. This is one of those movies that claim to be based on a true story… though we hope that it is actually ‘inspired’ by true events and not actually tightly based because it’s bad enough as it is. Well done, well shot, well acted, short, sweet and packed with plenty for thrilling stuff. ‘Baby Blues’ was a pleasant surprise.