It's Alive

Directed by Josef Rusnak.
2008. Rated R, 80 minutes.
Cast:
Bijou Phillips
James Murray
Raphaël Coleman
Owen Teale
Ty Glaser
Jack Ellis
Todd Jensen
Laura Giosh

Lenore (Phillips) is about to be a mom for the first time. Unfortunately, her little bundle of joy has some strange prenatal complications that force an emergency c-section. The doctors give momma some knockout gas, snatch junior from the womb and bada-boom, bada-bing, everyone in the delivery room ends up all sorts of dead, except for the new mom and her bouncing baby boy.

The police investigate and logically settle on Lenore as the prime suspect. Meanwhile, the rugrat is developing at an unprecedented rate. Within a day or so, he’s flipping over by himself, crawling shortly after that and devouring whatever small animals he can get his hands on. At his regular feeding time, he flat out abuses mom’s boobs. That pisses me off. What kind of godless creature would hurt a breast? Doesn’t he know we’re supposed to save the ta-tas? Oh…sorry for going off on that little tangent.

Anyhoo, small animals aren’t always enough to satisfy the little monster. This means when people show up at the house, they tend to end up victims of a gruesome homicide. Slowly, but surely mom becomes flat out hysterical about the whole thing. Oh yeah, I haven’t even mentioned dad yet, have I? He’s completely oblivious to what’s going on for most of the movie. Sure, he’s a doting father when he’s home, so proud that “something so beautiful came from us.” Those are his words, not mine. Then again, he’s not home much during the day when the little one is doing most of his terrorizing because hey, somebody’s gotta pay bills around there. And like any good housewife, the little lady makes sure to clean up and put away the corpses before her man gets home. Nope, he doesn’t notice the teeth marks all over his wife’s chest. C’mon, you know new dads don’t get any. Mom is too busy with the baby.

Why is this happening? There’s actually a very clever reason which I won’t spoil. So clever is it, an argument can be made that it is either pro-life or pro-choice. There’s also an interesting ending.

It’s Alive is an interesting flick. It works best when you can barely see the baby, if at all. It’s like the Star Wars series with regards to Yoda fighting. The thought of it was awesome, but when we actually saw it, it was rather silly. The same applies here, except for the one close-up we get of the baby near the end, a very nice jump-scare. It plays like a dumbed down sequel to Rosemary’s Baby. It’s actually a remake of the 1974 cult classic, also named It’s Alive. And finally, it’s so bad, it’s awesome!

MY SCORE: -10/10