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I’m getting a little ticked off with the glut of classic horror remakes that have been storming the market in the last couple of years. For every entertaining remake or reimagining (a popular and irritating catchword) like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) or Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), we get handed pointless tripe like Prom Night (2008) or The Omen (2006). And the list will only get longer. Next year, we have a 3D remake of Piranha and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Unfortunately, It’s Alive falls into the latter stable of pointless and unimaginative wastes of celluloid.
Based on the original It’s Alive (1974) by exploitation master Larry Cohen, this new version jettisons the B-movie cheese that made the movie work back in exploitation’s heyday and settles for cheap scares, underwhelming dialogue, and sluggish pacing.
Bijou Philips (Hostel: Part II) plays Lenore Harker, a grad student who abandons her studies to have a baby, much to her roommate’s dismay. She promises that she’ll be back to finish her studies, but we know this isn’t true. Lenore goes to live with her boyfriend, Frank (James Davis), at his country home by the lake, which he shares with his wheelchair-bound younger brother, Chris (Raphaël Coleman).
Oh, no! you might think, A kid in a wheelchair! What kind of jeopardy can the writers put this little fellow into? If this were a more creative screenplay, maybe a soupcon of peril for the youngster to ratchet up the horrific thrills would have been the order of the day. A cliché? Sure. But also a genre expectation. Not in this case, however.
As soon as Lenore gives birth to her little treasure, via caesarian section, the doctor and his nurse are brutally slaughtered by something in the operating room. But what could it be? Little baby Daniel is brought home, where his adoring mother lets the little tyke chomp on her nipples. And yet the maternal bond prevails. Soon, the precious little mutant scallywag graduates to the family cat and from there to actual people as its craving for blood knows no bounds. All the while, Mommy, who knows about of these attacks, bonds deeper and deeper with her baby boy, to the detriment of her relationship with Frank.
Josef Rusnak’s It’s Alive has—I will admit—some tantalizing thematic elements, but all are cruelly aborted before coming to full term. The characters and the story are just plain bland and uninspired, resulting in a film that lacks much-needed tension and, most of all, humor—intentional humor, that is. Though Larry Cohen is credited as a co-screenwriter, it’s more for his original screenplay back in 1974 than for anything in this version—or at least that’s my hope.
The actors and writers take themselves way too seriously for what is essentially a preposterous story. You can also forget about a gore quotient. I suppose the filmmakers thought they were creating a psychological thriller, and they wanted to say something profound about a mother’s bond, yada, yada, yada, and going for the gore would just unbalance their intellectual progeny. Next time, I say, just go for the gore.
It’s difficult to believe that I watched the unrated version of the movie. It makes me wonder, if this is unrated, how much more vacant and devoid of personality was the rated version? The DVD, meanwhile, like the movie, contains no special features.
It’s Alive never got a theatrical release, and I can see why. This is an ugly child that not even a mother could love.
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