It's Alive (1974) Review

CLAYTON'S CREEPY CINEMA!

WEEK 2: MUTANT MAYHEM

It’s Alive (1974)

Rounding out this week of mutant monster movies is this seventies scare-fest that aims at delivering a message about the state of society through a horrific story about a deformed infant. It’s a promising concept, but the execution isn’t too good, unfortunately.

The Davis family is about to welcome their little bundle of joy into the world, but their unborn child is more a bundle of terror than joy. In the delivery room, it is discovered by the nurses and doctor at hand that the infant is mutated and deformed, with grey skin, a giant bulbous head, claws, sharp teeth, and apparent super-baby strength. The infant kills everyone in the delivery room except for the mother and escapes, leaving the traumatized new mommy screaming for her baby. A hunt begins for the killer kid, with the father joining in on the pursuit. The baby kills whenever threatened, so this happens fairly often because of its distressing appearance. The father later discovers the child is simply frightened, and he takes the crying, messed up offspring into his arms and tries to escape the police.

I first found out about this movie from the TV special Bravo’s The 100 Scariest Movie Moments, recounting the most frightening moments in cinematic history. It’s Alive ranked number 43, and the scene in question was when the infant was born. Despite this one scene and the DVD cover boasting the clever but unsettling tagline, “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby...” the film fails to conjure many scares. The biggest issue I have with it is the mutant baby itself. It’s only seen in glimpses for most of the film, which is fine, but there are a few moments where you can tell a full-sized actor was wearing the creature makeup and crawling around a set designed to appear small-scale. For example, the infant is crawling around on the floor under a table with toy blocks all around, but it’s extremely obvious that the set is full-sized, as is the infant. However, the infant does look fearsome, thanks to Rick Baker’s consistently reliable makeup effects. The film doesn’t go for all-out terror, instead offering some humour mixed in with the horror. There’s one scene where the baby attacks a guy in a milk truck to get the milk, and a mix of white and red spills out of the truck. It’s more funny than scary, but the birth scene is definitely the scariest scene from the whole film.

It’s Alive is a campy seventies horror flick which tries to include social commentary, and it manages to be partly successful. The mutant baby underperforms at times, but the story is compelling enough and it’s fairly unpredictable. I don’t have much more to say about this one. It has its moments, but overall isn’t anything particularly scary.