It's Alive

It takes a lot for a movie to make me actually angry. And I don't just mean in a "holy crap, that was awful" kind of way. I mean for it to make me sit there with a face full of scowl for the whole thing. Yet It's Alive has accomplished that. To be fair, I should have known what I was getting into. There are very few homicidal baby movies that have ever been executed to even an acceptable degree.

There's really not much going on here. A girl takes a break from college to have a baby and weird stuff starts happening. Now this might be forgivable if...say...mommy and daddy had no clue what was going on. But mom knows damn well and seems totally cool with it. I understand most parents will forgive their children just about anything, but there's got to be a limit. So Bijou Phillips, who needs to pick a new, less ridiculous name, spend the whole movie ignoring the fact that her baby is evil incarnate and even enabling it from time to time. This (sort of) gets explained about 3/4 of the way through, but it's such an awful explanation and the movie so horrible that by that time you won't care.

There is nothing redeemable here. The acting is capable but still somehow annoying. The kill scenes are fun in an over the too kind of way, but there's not nearly enough of them to justify the rest of this trash. Ummm...they didn't kill any puppies? Is that something you can applaud a movie for? Seriously, I have trouble thinking of a single good thing to say about this film. I'm not going to whine about it being the worst movie ever, but I absolutely hated it it.

"I would advise anybody who likes my film to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada." - Larry Cohen

Nothing instills confidence in a remake more than the original filmmaker bashing the new version. Grad student Lenore Harker (Bijou Phillips) quits school in order to have her baby and live with her beau Frank Davis (James Murray) in an isolated house. Complications happen when she goes into labor at the six month mark and her doc mentions the baby has nearly doubled in size in just a few short months. Before you can scream, "It's alive!" the baby has massacred everyone except mom in the delivery room and the cops are on the case.

By no design of my own, this is the fourth film I've seen from Millennium Films in just over a week. I had no idea their remake game was so strong. And, like the earlier viewings, it completely fails to capture the shock value of the original or even update it appropriately. If there is any concept that could have thrived in a remake, it is this one as we've seen leaps in technology in the 25 years between the two films. According to the interview the above quote was taken from, Cohen supplied the filmmakers with an updated script for a new take on his 1974 horror film. Instead of heeding his advice, they said, "We're good" and rewrote it to make this dull take on the mutant baby classic. It is a total slog as Lenore slowly discovers her baby Daniel is a killer (thanks to some Plan B pills she took) as he quickly makes his way up the food chain from birds to cats to humans. My favorite bit is where a pushy police psychologist is attacked in his car. As he fastens his seatbelt, he goes "Ow!" and then raises up his hand to reveal three of his fingers have been bitten off. Ow? OW!? That was all you could muster when losing three of your left hand's digits? Like Day of the Dead (2008), Millennium shot this in Bulgaria and tried to pass it off as the United States. This time it is New Mexico and it results again in their horrid dubbing of the supporting cast (in addition to the terrible baby voice that Phillips has). Scott Coulter's Worldwide FX also provides the horrible digital baby and fake-looking blood and it is no match for Rick Baker's early creation. A dumb move in a series of dumb moves. How dumb are these filmmakers? They don't even have the brains to recreate the iconic "monster claw coming out of a baby cradle" artwork. I will give the film credit for a super downer ending, but by that point I had stopped caring.

This rather dumb, I even daresay downright imbecilic, flick is a prototypic example of why people righteously hate horror movie remakes. And yet, I started watching it with a very open mindset and actually hoped for a pleasant surprise. Why? Because, for once, it's not just another redundant remake of a bona fide genre classic that totally doesn't need an update version. Like "Nightmare on Elm Street" or "Friday the 13th", for example. Why should they be remade? The original "It's Alive", on the other hand, was an extremely low-budgeted and often clumsily put together obscure cult gem from the early 1970's! That's an ideal film to bring to the attention of wider horror audiences through a remake. Unfortunately, it turned out a total failure of a film, with an insubstantial script, a total lack of tension and atmosphere and embarrassing gore/splatter effects. Bijou Philips gives birth to a baby 'only a mother could love'. The offspring immediately slaughters all the hospital staff in the delivery room and, since it's so exceptionally large and overdeveloped, it also regularly needs extra snacks like psychiatrists, bimbo blond friends and stoner boyfriends. Mommy carefully cleans up the mess junior makes (and doesn't even seem to worry that much) and daddy doesn't seem to have clue of what's going on. The monster baby is mainly kept off-screen, maybe for the best, and all the CGI butchering effects are pathetic. "It's Alive" couldn't even scare an infant. The cute Bijou Philips tries hard to make her character plausible, but the script is simply too idiotic. Larry Cohen, writer/director of the original as well as numerous other cult classics, co-wrote the script of this inferior remake, strangely enough. Perhaps he deliberately sabotaged the whole thing, hoping people would take the effort to check out the original again instead. Good job, Larry, it worked!

Being a huge fan of the original might have made this remake doomed from the start for me. Don't get me wrong there were some aspects of the movie that i dug, but for the most part, it was really slow-paced and pointless at times. Unlike the original it totally failed to create any mood or suspense. It was if you were just waiting for something to happen that never does. I'll also agree with other reviews that the location of New Mexico was really hard to believe along with James Murray's American accent. So please don't expect to much it's just another drop in the tidal wave of horror movie remakes. Watch the original.

I understand IMDb's ten line minimum for posted reviews, but there are times when ten lines are hard to fill. There are even those times when ten words are pretty tough. This terrible remake of Larry Cohen's minor-classic of 1974 is one such occasion. It is pure tripe and little more really needs to be said beyond a sincere admonition to avoid at all costs. But in the service of a minimum line count, I will add that it is typical Millennium fare - shot in Bulgaria with a multinational hodgepodge of cast and crew, working from an amateurish script for a director with no discernible talent. It never ceases to amaze me how so many people can have so little pride in what they do.