Who else remembers when 1974's IT'S ALIVE was the must-see scary flick that everyone in America had to see?
Aging about as well as those bell bottom jeans we all work that decade, this is surely one of the dumbest horror movies ever made.
Hilariously bad but very well hyped, it became a box office hit and somehow generated two sequels.
Sharon Farrell (Night of the Comet) is Mrs. Davies, very pregnant and excited about her new baby. Veteran character actor John Ryan (The Right Stuff) is her husband Frank, sitting out in the waiting room with the other expectant dads, well before it became fashionable to be in the delivery room.
Well Frank got lucky, because his new baby is like a little gymnastic, murderous oompa loompa, killing all the doctors and escaping deftly through the ceiling.
It you find the logistics of that event troubling, you're really going to struggle with the rest of baby Jason's slaying escapades.
B-movie writer/director Larry Cohen has said that he was making a complicated, subversive statement about parental relationships and society. Really what he's made is a schlocky, cheap, impossibly silly movie that generates a lot more unintentional laughs that jolts.
Poor Ryan thinks he's in a serious flick, hamming it up as he tries to stop everyone from trying to shoot his creature baby.
Make-up genius Rick Baker (American Werewolf in London) does his best with his budget, going for the starchild from 2001, but ending up with a tiny version of those giant brained aliens in "Mars Attacks".
The only touch of class in the whole mess is the music score by Bernard Herrman (Vertigo, Citizen Kane) and what he's doing working on this mess is unexplainable. His next film was "Taxi Driver", so he didn't dwell in the cellar very long.
There are plenty of B-movies that are so bad they're good. Not this time, it's just unwatchable. Although I did laugh a lot every time I got a glimpse of the baby, especially when it's clearly just a doll that someone is bouncing around the shot!
IT'S ALIVE is DOA and gets an F.
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