Abysmal remake of Larry Cohen's '74 genre classic. The original started like a bat out of hell and kept going from there. It had genuine excitement, scares, tension, a logical script, and characters that behaved like rational, real people. In this abortion of a remake we have a film that is painfully slow and unpleasant (for the wrong reasons), like a snail with diarrhea. It even manages to make the delivery room massacre a lifeless non-event....btw, blood is OPAQUE not TRANSPARENT. It looks like the walls have been hosed down with cherry jelly. Every single change from the original is for the worse. Why add Frank's little brother? He serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever in the screenplay. He has no effect on any of the events in the film and just mopes aimlessly....and what purpose does the character being in a wheelchair serve??? Stupid. In the original the baby escapes from the delivery room and both parents are scared shitless of it....like real people would be. Here, the baby.....who now only looks monstrous at the moment of attack....curls up on it's mother's incised belly and goes to sleep. Stupid. The new Lenore knows that the baby is a monster, but wuvs him so vewy, vewy much that she just covers up the killings. Even mother love only goes so far. Stupid. The baby never attacks when his father and young uncle are around to notice anything. Bad writing AND Stupid. Tiny Bijou Phillips is obviously supposed to have been able to lug multiple bodies down the cellar steps and hide them....all by herself. Stupid. Out of nowhere....and for no discernible reason other that that it's the climax of the movie and they wanted the house dark....the baby suddenly knows how to shut off the electricity in the house. How would it possibly know how to do this and why would it logically want to??? Stupid!!! The movie is only 80 mins., but I could continue pointing out tangible stupidities for days. The baby from the original had a great design and you actually got to SEE it. This is not the case here because the 2 second "good look" you get at the little bastard's face at the climax is rendered in such astonishingly horrid CG that if it had been shown earlier the audience would have hyperventilated from hysterical laughter and mercifully missed any more of the movie. Phillips' decent performance and a nice, but derivative score by Nicholas Pike are the only faint bright spots on this celluloid tumor. I am appalled that Larry Cohen so much as dotted an "i" in this screenplay. He should be mortally ashamed. This "It's Alive" was born dead and rotting.
Review of It's Alive
