Sam Panico The TV commercial for It's Alive terrified me. The music, the slowly turning bassinet, the fact that a demon baby was inside - it was too much for my child brain to handle. I would cover my ears and yell every single time I saw it. The power and memory and latent fear for this thirty seconds created stayed with me for decades, ensuring that I would never watch this film. Until now. Frank and Lenore Davis are excitedly expecting the birth of their second child. They've been waiting for years and properly planned the child's birth, with Lenore using birth control pills until the time was right. However, their infant is a monster, a deformed creature with fangs and claws that is so horrifying, one of the doctors instantly tries to suffocate it. The baby kills the team who delivered it before escaping, leaving a crying Lenore and frightened Frank.The baby goes on a murderous rampage while Frank denies that the child is his, as a parallel is made to Frankenstein and how Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his creation. It turns out that the birth control drugs Lenore was on may have caused the mutation. To protect their bottom line, they want the child destroyed.The baby finds its way home, where Lenore embraces her child. Their first son, Chris, becomes homesick (he'd been staying with Charley, a family friend) and returns home, where he meets his sibling and promises to protect him. Frank discovers that the child is being hidden and shoots at it, but the baby escapes and kills Charley.The police and Frank track the child to the sewer, where the father realizes that the beast is his flesh and blood. Hiding the baby in his coat, Frank tries to escape, but he's caught by the police. Then, his child leaps from his arms to kill the pharmaceutical company representative who is with the cops. The police open fire, killing the child and the man who he is attacking.As the police take the Davis family home, we learn that another deformed child has been born in Seattle.When Larry Cohen completed the film, he learned that the executives who had produced the film were all gone. It's Alive got a paltry one week run in Chicago and a limited release. Three years later, after that team of executives were replaced, Cohen convinced Warner Brothers to re-release the film with the ad campaign featured above, leading to a successful run.It's Alive preys on our worst fears - that our children will grow to become monsters. However, Cohen takes it a step further. These children instantly are monstrous killers.Two sequels - It Lives Again and It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive - followed, as well as a remake. The original - shot at the same time as Hell Up in Harlem by a crew that was doing day and night shoots 7 days a week - is an impressive film. Like all Cohen's work, the idea is stronger than the budget and the final product looks so much better than the dollars it cost to create would suggest.

TheBlueHairedLawyer A pregnant couple (well, the wife, anyway) have a baby in a hospital while leaving their son babysat by their friend. While the wife is in labor, the husband discusses with a group of other men the way urban cities have all kinds of pollutants in the air, water and food... as it turns out in this hilarious yet creepy old b-movie, the baby has been mutated somehow and kills when it gets scared, from the nurses in the delivery room to the family cat. Only the father can seek out his child and accept it despite its unnatural appearance.I think what I liked most about this movie is towards the end, when the father rescues the child. I didn't appreciate the environmental propaganda message behind the movie, and It's Alive has its flaws, but hey, what low-budget horror movie doesn't? That's what makes them so much fun to watch! The acting was fairly decent and the soundtrack was pretty good, all in all it's a great little horror movie.

TheRedDeath30 If you haven't read the synopsis, or previous reviews it seems customary to give you some summary. The movie revolves around a couple who have given birth to a murderous monstrosity. In in the initial stages of the movie, this couple (especially the father) do everything they can to distance themselves from the creature they have created and even participate in the hunt to track and destroy it, but eventually attitudes change.I found this to be better than I expected and very much above the average for a early 70s B-horror movie. I recently wrote a review on another film where I stated that it had failed the "Val Lewton Test" to me. In other words, had you removed the monster's scenes from the movie, what you would have had left was not a very effective movie at all. This movie is almost the polar opposite. What I found was a fairly effective chiller, with some moments of real tension built up, but ultimately I kept being pulled out of the experience by the ridiculousness of a "killer baby" scenario that wasn't helped along any by the awful hokey creature effects on the baby itself. Each time I found myself being absorbed into the movie, I was yanked away by cheap effects and gags that I was never quite sure where being played for laughs, or just the work of a budget not good enough to achieve the desired effect.If you can forgive the bad effects, though, what's left is actually pretty good. John Ryan is excellent as the father struggling with the emotions of this situation he's been thrust in, and the outcasting from society that results. Sharon Farrell shines in the birth scene as a mother facing most parent's worst nightmare of a difficult birth. As the movie progresses, she begins to lose her grip on sanity and comes off a little bit Renfield.The movie has a lot to say about society. We have the boss playing as if he cares about his employee's family turbulence, while secretly shoving him out the door to avoid scandal. In the same manner, then nurse under the guise of caring for the mother, while secretly planning to exploit them for writing material. We see the ways that society shuns those who birth deformities as once upon a time society shunned those who birthed disabled children (maybe not so once upon a time?).Of course, there are doctors who want to examine and study the child. The pharmacy companies want to make it go away to avoid any potential bad publicity. The authorities just want to massacre it, which I found realistically odd. I mean, not to get to technical, but even the worst mass murderers get a trial, right? Then a baby with no knowledge of the evil of what it's doing just gets slaughtered? Perhaps, I'm putting way too much thought into that.In the end, if you like 70s b-horror, then by all means give this one a shot. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

MBunge As a horror movie, It's Alive is fairly terrible. As a look at environmental and reproductive attitudes in the 1970s, it's somewhat interesting. As an expression of the concept of social norms, it's bewildering.Frank and Lenore Davis (John Ryan and Sharon Farrel) are having a second child. One night, Lenore says "it's time" and they head to the hospital, though they're both so calm and unhurried you'd think they were going for brunch somewhere. Lenore has her baby, who turns out to be a three-fingered killer mutant who slides out of the birth canal and slaughters all the doctors and nurses before escaping from the delivery room. Now, you'd think this would be kind of a big deal, but everyone in this movie acts as though killer mutant babies are an expected though unfortunate occurrence. Watching this film I imagined a conversation like this…"Hey, Frank! You hear about that mutant baby that killed 5 people last week?""Really? That's more than the giant lizard ate last month.""Yeah, but it's not as many people as that gelatinous blob from Mars disintegrated last October."As the cops search for the monster infant, Frank and Lenore return home. Oddly, their biggest concern isn't something being wrong with them or with their other child, Chris (Daniel Holzman). No, they're mostly vexed by the social stigma and personal shame of being the parents of a killer mutant baby. At one point, it's compared to being the parent of a retarded child. Yes, apparently in the 1970s you could compare mentally challenged kids to murderous creatures and no one made a big deal about it.Somehow, the killer mutant baby makes its way back to its parents, where Lenore wants to protect it and Frank feels responsible for destroying it himself as a way to prove to everyone that he and his family are normal. Frank and the cops pursue the monster infant into the storm sewers of Los Angeles, where we find out the sewer tunnels are big enough to drive police cars through. That leads to a conclusion where I think we're supposed to learn something about parental love in the face of societal pressure, but what we really learn is that people are irrational when it comes to their own children.There's very little actual violence in It's Alive. Almost all of it happens off screen or behind a bush or something, where you hear a scream and then see blood or a body. It's probably for the best because this is a really cheap movie and the mutant baby looks like a pretty crappy special effect, even by 1970s standards. The movie is mostly just watching Frank looking stunned and Lenore becoming more and more unbalanced.I remember this film from when I was a kid. I don't know if it was much a hit, but I do recall it made something of an impression. It's Alive is an example of a bad movie that comes out at just the right moment to connect with cultural unease and anxiety. In the wake of Roe v. Wade and the Thalidomide cases of the 50s and 60s, this story did freak people a little bit. It has no cultural resonance today so, unless you enjoy looking at ugly 70s fashions (like wearing a plaid jacket with high-waisted Sansabelt slacks), there's not much to recommend about it.