A redundant straight to DVD remake from the Boaz Davidson / Avi Lerner schlock factory, this has interesting opening titles that boast 1) a production credit for Amicus Films and 2) a co-screenwriter credit for original creator Larry Cohen. (Interesting because 1) Amicus were a prominent British studio in the 60s and 70s and Hammer’s chief rival for Brit horror flicks and 2) Cohen wrote a remake script that was not used, disowns this project entirely and wants to get his own remake off the ground).
Predictably enough, this 21st century rendering of IT’S ALIVE, while keeping several character names and the basic premise, skews much younger in its casting. Bijou Phillips (is that really her real voice or was she dubbed by a 10 year old girl?) is a New Mexico college student who took six tablets from an online pharmacy to induce a natural miscarriage…but ends up giving birth at Christmas via C-Section. Born three months premature, her baby with James Murray nonetheless doubled in size in record time while dwelling in the womb and causes an off-screen delivery room massacre upon entering this world.
This time out, rather than escaping from the hospital and returning home thereafter, the monstrous baby goes home with Mom and Dad as normal while stupid cops (including one particularly unconvincing sergeant who looks, acts and talks like he came third in a John Wayne impersonation contest) figure they’re chasing some conventional full-sized lunatic. Devoted mom Philips – a la Brooke Adams in THE UNBORN – dutifully puts up with her baby’s vicious nipple biting and disposes of the rats / family pets “it” casually butchers. This leads inevitably to more dramatic attacks like biting the fingers off a shrink and killing folks dumb enough to hang around.
As in the much more interesting 1974 film, the killer baby is kept off-screen save for a brief climactic reveal – though, this being 2009, we get some distractingly fake-looking digitally enhanced gore shots to punctuate the attack scenes. The remake plays the wild premise straight but misses out on the conviction and surprising emotional depth of Cohen’s movie ; it also totally forgoes Cohen’s satirical social commentary (prevalent throughout his oeuvre) in favor of simplistic killer-baby-on-the-rampage plotting.
With the superb John P Ryan and Sharon Farrell absent, we’re left with a central actress who has not nearly the range to pull off one of exploitation cinema’s toughest female roles, and a lead actor saddled with a passively written paternal role who remains amusingly ignorant of what’s going on throughout. Worse still, this “it” has a sullen, paraplegic, GINGER nephew. Who’s the real monster here, folks??!
Capped by a bleak ending that’s spoiled by rubbish CG fire, this movie’s late-in-the-day glimpse of the big-mouthed, pointy-toothed baby prove that 2009 low budget FX can no more convincingly create a scary mutant baby than those of the early 1970’s. (For the record, that film’s old-school Rick Baker FX are better).
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
