Bijou Phillips is pregnant about six months but the infant inside is growing at an abnormal rate and must be taken out due to the pain inflicted on the mother. Shortly after its birth via C-section, the entire hospital staff is slaughtered by the baby, but Phillips cannot recollect (or has simply blocked the whole incident out) what happened much to the disappointment of the police who need answers. James Murray is the father, Raphaël Coleman his crippled brother(a car accident which killed their parents, he barely survived), Ty Glaser Phillips' school friend, Owen Teale the police officer(Sgt Perkins who suspects Phillips knows more than she is letting on), and Jack Ellis the psychiatrist( attempting to jar Phillips' memory as to what happened that day in surgery)round out the cast. To be honest, I'm not a Bijou Phillips fan and she once again did little to change my opinion of her. Except at the beginning, before entering the hospital for her son's birth, Phillips remains vacuous and aloof. I do understand that her character is tired and mentally deteriorating due to her baby's ferocious appetite for blood and human flesh(killing people and the difficulties of breastfeeding, not to mention, the constant crying for more cannibalistic nourishment don't help matters), but I had a damn hard time sympathetically aligning myself to her. I do think the point of the first film, the desperate attempts by a mother to protect her beloved child no matter what damage it causes or people it harms, is present in the remake, but a lot of the original's personality is missing from the newer modern take. I enjoyed Larry Cohen's "panic stricken public" and how the killer infant was considered a terror to the city, while this remake localizes the monster baby's antics to Phillips and Murray's New Mexico home. Those who come to talk sense into Phillips usually wind up lunch for the baby who even eats rats and cats. While acknowledging her baby's activities in horror when she comes across the grisly remains of what it has done to people it feeds from, she nevertheless continues to protect it, consequences be damned. We know that eventually protecting the baby will become impossible and she will have to take drastic measures to keep it from killing her husband or his brother. I didn't find IT'S ALIVE particularly satisfying, especially the underwhelming CGI of the baby(it is hardly ever on screen and when it is, the effects are quite noticeable)and the gory attacks are often hard to decipher due to the director's insistence on not showing the murders in elaborate detail. I'd just say stick with the original unless you are just a monster baby movie completist. How the baby can lock its father in the basement, hop around like a squirrel, and create such bloody crime scenes defies common sense. The film's explanation for the abnormalities of the baby derived from pills off the internet which are supposed to cause a miscarriage!
Review of It's Alive
