It’s Alive (1974)

Directed by Larry Cohen [Other horror films: God Told Me To (1976), It Lives Again (1978), Full Moon High (1981), Q (1982), Special Effects (1984), The Stuff (1985), It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987), A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987), Wicked Stepmother (1989), The Ambulance (1990)]

It’s Alive suffers from one of the most common problems that haunts 70’s movies, being that it’s dry. It doesn’t help that, like some of Cohen’s other movies (The Stuff and God Told Me To) it has a wider scope, so we’re dealing with more than just the husband and wife of a deadly and murderous mutated child. Because of that, a lot of the movie seems to drag, and doesn’t seem able to ever pull itself out of that.

I certainly enjoy aspects of the film fine, which is the same that I can say for most movies from the 1970’s – I like the vibes they had, and it always interests me to see how far we’ve come in terms of technology. During a scene, the main guy reaches into a refrigerator, and then once he closes the door, there’s what looks like another refrigerator right next to it (spoilers: it’s a freezer). That’s a small thing, and of no consequence whatsoever to the movie, but I like little things like that.

What I didn’t care for was much of It’s Alive, though. It could have ended around an hour and 12 minutes, and I think that would have been welcomed, but it keeps going for another twenty minutes, and I just don’t know why. It’s not like there’s that much here that’s overly interesting anyway, and like I said, it just felt like it was dragging for most of the film.

Never having seen this, I was sort of expecting something like I Don’t Want to Be Born (1975), but you know, as bad a rep as that film has, I thought it was both a lot more fun and a lot more memorable than this one. Here, you have no performances at all that stand out, almost no scenes that stand out, and just an overall lack of interesting content. Maybe I’m missing something, but for the time being, this one just failed hard.

5/10