It's Alive (1974)

I was watching Larry Cohen's 1974 killer mutant baby picture It's Alive recently and thinking that I was amazed that no one had remade it as a cheap direct-to-video release.   As it turns out, somebody did, in 2009.  A remake so bad and obscure that it completely passed me by.  It seems, based upon what I've been able to glean about it, the remake made the cardinal mistake of straying from the original concept, with its killer baby apparently not a mutant, just a cannibal.  It also tried to play the subject matter as a straight horror film, whereas Cohen's original was, like most of his output, was as much black comedy as it was horror film.  Indeed, the concept underlying the original film is so patently absurd, that black comedy is the only way that it could be played without the film becoming completely ridiculous.  Because, on the face of it, the whole idea of a murderous mutant baby that can kill grown adults and terrorises an entire city, crawling around the sewers to avoid detection as it attacks milkmen, stealing their deliveries and slaughtering armed policemen sounds like a parody.   Yet, Cohen manages to turn It's Alive into a reasonably effective and very memorable, shocker, with the outbursts of black comedy effectively 'normalising' some of the film's more absurd aspects.  As expected from someone as adept at producing exploitation films as Cohen, It's Alive taps into several popular themes of the era, most obviously the idea of possessed or evil infants popularised by Rosemary's Baby, but also contemporary concerns about the role of drugs and other external factors in a rise in birth defects.  In particular, the whole Thalidomide scandal was breaking at the time of the film's conception and production.

Killer children, of any age, are, of course, a perennial favourite horror trope, bringing with them, as they do, all sorts of moral questions when it comes to dealing with them.  Virtually all films on the subject make great play upon the fact that, in most societies, the harming of children represents a major taboo, posing the question of whether this taboo can be overcome by adults when those same children become an existential threat.  It's Alive is no different, with the film focusing on the parents of the murderous newborn and their reactions to the creature - for the mother, maternal instinct triumphs, whereas the father finds himself torn between acceptance of the danger the infant poses and his growing protective instincts toward his offspring.  At first, he goes into denial, refusing to accept that the child is anything but a dangerous aberration, but later accepting a degree of parental responsibility, trying to protect the child from the authorities and urging them to confine and study it rather than destroy it.  As with most Cohen films, there are times when the moral dilemmas and questions about the nature of humanity threaten to bog down the film and It's Alive develops into the usual uneasy mix of schlocky action and sometimes pretentious talk that characterise the director's work.  It also features the usual patches of clunky dialogue, surreal twists, uncertain plot development and patchy production values (I don't think any of Cohen's films could ever be described as 'slick', all having the rough and ready feel of an independent B-movie).  Nevertheless, Cohen also gets some good performances from his cast - particularly John P Ryan as the father - and creates some suspenseful sequences around the baby's various attacks, with lot's of low angle shots from the infant's point of view.  The mix of the mundane (such as the scenes at Ryan's office or the interaction of the expectant fathers in the hospital waiting room), with shock sequences like the massacre in the delivery room help give the film the pleasingly off-kilter feel typical of Cohen's work, with the audience never quite sure where the film is going to go next.  

Cohen sensibly keeps the mutant baby off screen for most of the time, using point of view shots during its attacks, combined with brief glimpses of an articulated model created by Rick Baker.  The end result is surprisingly effective, with the baby never seen enough to appear entirely risible.  Now one of Cohen's best known films, It's Alive had a chequered release history, with a change in management at Warner Brothers resulting in it getting a very limited initial release in 1974.  Another change in management saw the film given another chance, with a heavily promoted re-release in 1977, which proved financially successful - to the extent that the film spawned two sequels, both written and directed by Cohen.  As with much of Cohen's directorial output, It's Alive is a film with some interesting ideas at its core, some well executed scenes and good performances from its cast, but which ultimately feels as if its ability to develop these elements to their full potential is compromised by its lack of resources.