It's Alive! - A Review

It's Alive is a horror film about a mutant birth. The implication is that some sort of Big pharma toxin, or maybe toxic waste, is responsible. The film stars John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell as the monster baby's shocked and horrified parents. Ryan is a cool, reserved cucumber of a man with a seething, brutal undercurrent. His wife is perched on the verge of neurotic hysteria. He has another son (Daniel Holzman). When the son is sent to a friend's house because his mutant killer little brother is on the loose, he calls home. Dad hangs up on him. They're that kind of family.

The little tot is born and quickly makes mincemeat of the hospital doctors and nurses overseeing the birth. Ryan and company stagger onto a scene of horror wherein the delivery room is littered with bodies, each having their throat torn out. Before that, a male nurse comes stumbling out into the hall outside and collapses. It is then that Ryan realizes SOMETHING IS WRONG.

Inside, while surveying the carnage, he and the cops make the obvious assumption that some human has come in, killed everyone, and abducted the baby. Somewhere along the line, they are disabused of that notion, slowly, but it takes some getting used to. The baby is never seen, except as a dark, shadowed, huge-headed face with massive claws. This isn't a film like Basket Case, wherein the hideously deformed freakish killer tot is seen right from the get-go. Director Larry Cohen moves at a reasonably slow pace to the inexorable finish line. It isn't as if the film lacks interest for the viewer, but it does seem to take its own sweet time getting to where it needs to go.

Cult Films and Midnight Movies

"From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1

By

Tom Baker

The morality of eighty-sixing Mutant Tot is argued over, and police play a huge role in this monster epic. A fat, sleazy representative of Big Pharma (a.k.a Satan Incarnate) questions whether or not they want it getting out that one of "their products" may have been what was behind this mistake of nature. Of course, the comparison here is with the Thalidomide scandal from decades ago. Here, it was not so long ago in the past, and today, toxic medicines and the actual rates of death and disability from bad drugs are an even more pressing concern.

There is a sort of pitifulness to this creature, a kind of longing for "Daddy" that is the subtext of a film that references James Whale's original 1931 horror epic Frankenstein, starring Colin Clive and the redoubtable, legendary Boris Karloff. In that film (as in the classic gothic novel that inspired it) the Monster is both killer and victim, a pitiable hulk accursed by God (Victor Frankenstein, in his case), or who HAS NO GOD, but is a thing stitched together from Death Itself, searching for love, meaning, acceptance...home. Searching for FATHER.

To that end, somehow, It has the intelligence to visit an elementary school, wishing, apparently, for life like other children. The cops tail it there, and somewhere along the line, Ryan begins to develop feelings for his monstrous son. The conclusion sees him looking for the terror tot in the drainage culvert (a symbolic birth canal) as the cops gather outside. He has begged them not to kill it (the only plot point that really lacks any sense, since the doctors would want such a specimen alive to study).

The film emphasizes the dull, prosaic, suburban aspect of the bourgeois lives of these people, before the birth of something hideous, something ugly and bestial that was brewing just beneath the surface of their white picket fences, well-clipped lawns, and three-car garages. The Butcher Baby (if you'll forgive all of these nauseating nicknames) represents the THING theat was unwanted, the aborted, malformed pregnancy, the result of the falseness of consumerist society, its toxic drugs, and toxic waste. It's a mewling, pint-sized Frankenstein's Monster, and it's come home.

It's Alive (1974)