It Lives Again

1978 *** 3/4

There's a scene in this movie that got me meditating on the nature of bad movies, Horrorthon, and the 70's. There's a mutant baby on the loose in the SoCal suburbs. Cut to a joyless backyard birthday party, attended by not just bad actors, but by the worst actors. I'm talking about children who can't act, who march through their lines with the one emotion they can nail down: slight, annoying whining. The birthday girl gets a set of horror makeup from her older sister, they carp at each other, the older sister bitchily declares it's hide 'n seek time, and that b-girl is it. "Why do you always ruin my birrrthday?"

So the little girl stomps around alone in the scrubby hills that pass for woods in CA, hears a noise in a bush and starts angrily poking a stick in there. Then, in rapid succession: it's a rattlesnake! and it hisses at her menacingly! then a SWAT guy lunges in and pulls her away from the snake! then he says to the like hundred SWAT guys that are suddenly there "get these kids out of here!" and then the sisters embrace "I'll never tease you again!" "I love the gift you got me!"

And while we're sitting stunned from that sequence of events, we see a slow pan over the empty birthday party, and everything is in shreds and there's a big mutant baby clawprint in the cake. (This was the title pic for Julie's review.) Which means that next year, when her sister doesn't tease her and they're all partying happily, they will be right there when 1979's monster comes rampaging through.

Between the bad acting, magical SWAT men and that little mixed message, I counted three "Wha?"s directed at the movie in about ten seconds' running time. But that's just what happens watching 70's movies during Horrorthon. You are always in danger of being slapped with an sudden "Wha?" from nowhere. In fact, I think this movie is pretty much strung together between varying degrees of "Wha?"

And yet somewhere in there, once again, is a strange sincerity.

Frank Davis, the creepy and lovable dad from It's Alive, is now on a campaign for the worst pro-life argument ever. The movie starts when he crashes a baby shower and lurks in the corner until the party ends and all the guests leave. Nice! But that's how this movie works, by a tug of war between "it's a monster/it's a baby." While that tugging results in many "Wha?"s, it does produce some potent images: an expectant mother's house is watched by the feds, she's driven to the hospital and is greeted by a horde of cops, she's forcibly separated from her husband, the doctor who heads the government team conceals a gun beneath a towel in the OR. It's hard not to feel something for these people.

Did we mention that the babies have terrible eyesight?

"Hey, my dad's the dad from Valley Girl!"

Fortunately Frank saves the day with his magic mutant-baby-delivering-OR-in-a-truck. The kid is born and only slashes one guy a little. (There are actually two times in this movie when someone gets slashed by a baby they're holding and trying to protect, furthering the confusion on the whole Monster/Baby issue.) The baby is moved to a location in LA where there are two other mutant babies, and for a while we get an extra big dose of watching people watching the babies, but not actually watching the babies. After the Monster/Baby thing, these movies' other big thing is You Don't Get To See The Monster Baby. Which is annoying and silly but at the same time maddeningly effective. As with the original Thing, the monster effects are so unconvincing they had to get clever to work around it. So in addition to the quick glimpses, there is a praise-worthy effort to work it into the dialogue. "Did you see it?" "What did it look like?" Nevertheless, I was reminded of a Benny Hill sketch about a filmmaker whose movie is lauded for switching from color to black-and-white after the main character's dog dies, but really it's just because he ran out of color film.

"You know what, honey? If someone were watching us right now, they sure wouldn't be seeing our baby!"

The plot unspools from there, both the govenment and angry mutant babies throw wrenches into people's plans, and about this time Julie started using It's Alive as a noun, which tickled me to death. At one point the parents are used as bait, and when they are reunited with their little monster they can't help but love him, and they're so busy playing Happy Families nobody notices that the cops have covered the entire house in a fumigation tent.

"Good thing we found those ninja fumigators."

There's still a few flip-flops left, and a variation on the moral of the first movie: You probably would shoot your own mutant baby if he threatened someone's life, but you would feel guilty about it afterward. Which makes an odd kind of sense. I can't say It Lives Again isn't something of an endurance event, but I will say it's the best of the series, and sometimes it does make an odd kind of sense.

Mostly, however, I stand my original statement.

Wha?