The Baby Shredder Song (?)

Director: David Avallone
Star: Mark Nutter

Everyone is happily chatting away at the table except the guy at the end of the table who obviously doesn't want to be there. They're happily talking about babies and Abbey Road and going to Tuscany next Spring, but he doesn't care. He's only happy when he leaves the table in a dream sequence and starts playing the piano. Now he comes to life and sings about, well you can guess that from the title. He's invented one, you see, and he wants to patent it.

This is basically a music video. 98% of the film is taken up by Mark Nutter either sitting at the piano singing his song or acting out the words in a scene with Cynthia Carle as a patent clerk. So, as grand plots go this ain't on the scale. But this one is fun and it would have to be as it could only ever play out in two ways, at opposite ends of the spectrum. Either it's going to be so nasty and offensive that you feel soiled for watching or it's going to be a pleasantly sick and twisted riot that you want to show to all your friends.

Luckily it's the latter all the way. It's utterly fun and it's precisely what I'd want to pay money to go and see in a shorts selection at a film festival. The audience would love it and it would brighten up their moods after the inevitably far more serious and depressing twenty minute short that ran before it. Mark Nutter is the man responsible for this song, writing and performing it though David Avallone directed the film. It's the song that makes the film, with its perky fingerwork and clever phrasing, but it's Nutter who brings it to life, singing about shredding babies while looking as innocent as you could comfortably imagine.

This is a gem for anyone who's had to sit through conversations about other people's babies. If only I could memorise it and sing it in such company with the panache of Nutter.