It Lives Again

After the Davis baby is destroyed, others begin to appear around the country. The second film follows a renegade group of people (including Frank Davis from the first film) who are trying to prevent the government from killing the mutant babies. But at what price? Along with Frank, we now have the Scott family: Eugene Scott (played by Frederic Forrest, best known to me as the Nazi Surplus Store Owner from "Falling Down") and Jody Scott (played by the lovely and undercast Kathleen Lloyd). And the Scott family doesn't like it when you try to kill their baby! Oh, and the makeup effects of Oscar-winning Rick Baker again.

This film picks up pretty much where the other left off, give or take a few months. Where the first one pushed the message of chemicals affecting unborn babies, this is more of a family message: parents should love their children regardless of who or what they are. If your child is a criminal or autistic, they're still your child and you should defend and love them, not let the government exterminate them.

There's also a really subtle subplot about child molestation. Although never explicitly shown, there is good reason to believe molestation is occurring between an adult and a child family member. (I won't say who, but you should notice it as hints are dropped multiple times.)

This film is paced better than the first one, and the attacks are a bit more often and slightly more gruesome (though by no means graphic). Going from a PG rating to an R was a good move, though they didn't push the rating as much as I probably would have liked. And a really strange thing happens: Frank Davis becomes known as "Frank Davis". Not "Frank", not "Mr. Davis"... but "Frank Davis" every time he is mentioned. It seems unnatural, as if somehow he is a celebrity that needs to be highlighted, like TV's Patrick Duffy or something.

Although I liked this movie better than the first one, it relies heavily on the first one to understand it, so you're really stuck having to watch both if you want to "get it". The recurring characters and source of the mutants won't make sense unless you see the original. But by all means if you liked the first one, watch the second... and if you liked this one, watch the third.

John P. Ryan returns as Frank Davis, the father of the monster baby from It's Alive, this time to warn parents of infants about to be born of a conspiracy of the government to have killing squads ready at the time of birth. It seems that his baby was just the tip of the iceberg - a whole group of these mutant babies is being born all over the country. Though certainly not as effective as the original, I found It Lives Again to be quite an engaging, well-done sequel. Larry Cohen again returns as both writer and director, and he brings back some of the same folks from the original - James Dixon in particular returns as the lieutenant. john Marley does an able job playing a policeman with special reason to seeing these babies die. The other actors give decent performances with Andrew Duggan standing out as a doctor bent on giving these babies a chance. I guess what I really liked about the film was the sense that even though these mutants are destructive, killing machines, they still have a glimmer, a spark if you will, of some kind of inherent humanity. Cohen tries to keep his viewers at least somewhat sympathetic to their plight. As with the first film, don't look for mind-boggling special effects here. We get the same camera blur treatment when we see things through the eyes of the babies. We also never get a real good look at the infants in this one either. Some scenes that I thought were particularly well-shot include the hospital awaiting the arrival of the Scott's and much of the by-play with Marley and Ryan. Bernard Herrmann's music is back as well. Rather enjoyable sequel!

After the first film It's Alive about a mutant baby that's a real killer fresh from the womb, it was decided a sequel was in order. The first must have made a few dollars, that is how these things are decided.

Returning from the first film is John P. Ryan the father who killed his own mutant and now has a mission in life, maybe to save others who are now showing up in the population. Which is why he visits Frederic Forrest and Kathleen Lloyd another expectant set of parents.

After that things get real silly as the all seeing government in the person of John Marley gets into the act. There's also an institute that wants to house and study the mutants that's headed by Andrew Duggan. All these plot elements combine for one bloody ending.

Not that the first film was a world beater, but it's Citizen Kane next to this.

I thought the first movie of this series was a pretty mediocre effort all around, so my hopes were not high when I sat down to watch this sequel. To my surprise, for quite a while I thought that this movie was shaping up to be much better than the original movie. The production values are a lot better, for one thing. Also, the first half of the movie, with the new and old characters, is surprisingly engaging. It was a new angle and not simply copying the first movie.

However, around the halfway point, the movie starts to fall apart and gets more tedious as it progresses. There's a lot less horror in this sequel than the first movie - in fact, the first real horror sequence only happens when more than half an hour of the running time has passed! The real problem is that the movie simply becomes boring and a tough slog to get through. Too bad, since writer/director Larry Cohen did have the stuff to make a better film.

One last thing: "It Lives Again" was rated "R", while the first movie got a "PG" rating. Which I don't understand, because "It Lives Again" has no nudity, no sex, no foul language, and far less blood and horror than the first film!

This is not actually a review of 'It Lives Again', just a quick comment, in case anyone is interested. I had a tiny speaking part in this film. I was part of a crowd of extras in the police/sheriff's roadblock scene (right after the tunnel shot), when the director decided to create a dialogue between the Sheriff's Department and the city police about whose jurisdiction it was.

He picked two of us who were wearing sergeant stripes on our uniforms (we were off-duty cops at the time) and we made up the scene on the spot. My two lines made it into the movie: "This is the Sheriff's jurisdiction and we're stopping the truck"...then, I turned to the other deputies and said, "OK, stop the truck." ...that's it. 35 years later, my family and friends still get a huge laugh out of this.

M. Pettit Tucson, AZ 2002