IT'S ALIVE (Cohen, 1974)

Perhaps I should preface this review by proclaiming my eternal hatred for kids. I find them petulant and spoiled and hopelessly self-centered, and one of the primary causes for the complete boring direction the country has taken in recent years. We spent our time worrying about the children, taking toys off the markets and putting warning labels on cigarettes and CDs. Our culture is awash in the fear of sexual predators, school violence, and teenage pregnancy, and so the government is more than happy to seize control away from us (us, all of us rational, thinking human begins, fully capable of making our own choices), all in the name of making things safer for kids.

Fuck kids, and fuck the suffocating, anti-freedom landscape they've helped to develop.

Now then. Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE starts off as a delicious deconstruction of the American family and, while it veers off the tracks towards the end and we get a Changed Husband Who Realizes The Importance Of The Family Bond, we also get to see the post partum mother and a baby killing adults with razor sharp teeth and claws. Children are something to be feared. This is completely different from the usual portrait of the child in the American picture. Horror films have always been among the most daring in terms of presenting terrifying little kids to us (from THE OMEN to THE RING), but IT'S ALIVE for a short while seems as if it's going to be one of the few to take that extra little step and Kill The Kid. The Davis baby ultimately survived for a couple more sequels, but things get truly dark for a while and it seems as if we're going to have the father murder his own son. It doesn't quite turn out that way, but the fact that Cohen is willing to almost go there is respectable, if not ultimately disappointing and a cop-out.

There are references to toxins and pollutants mutating the Davis family baby, but it's not really an environmentalist film. What IT'S ALIVE is is a meditation on the nature of evil and what role the creators have in the development of our society's monsters. Is it the parent's fault that their kid came out of the womb a demonic killing machine? If not, then who else? After all, the baby is nothing more than sheer instinct, completely devoid of societal conditioning. If we're never told what's right and what's wrong, how can we be expected to know the difference? Society and commerce is more than ready to hold the baby accountable for his crimes, condemning it to death and ordering its destruction so that it won't affect the sales of the drugs that the mother took that perhaps lead to its monstrous state. The father of the freak takes it upon himself to slay the monster, referencing Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN and slapping around his disrespectful wife.

Again, IT'S ALIVE in the end has a daring father fighting to save his deformed, mutant child (called a "retard" at one point in a gloriously un-PC moment), but we realize that it is futile and pointless. Even if it lives for the sequel, does anyone remember IT LIVES AGAIN?