It's Alive 2: It Lives Again!

(1978) ***

Of course, I had to watch this, because JPX said he would be my best friend if I did.  So Octo and I checked it out.

If you look at this entry out on imdb.com and go clicking around on the actors' names, you'll see they all did just about every television show in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even some recent ones.  The performances were all pretty great, and they almost make up for the fact that the baby puppet is just so damned stupid.  The remake of It's Alive is on the way, and I gotta say, this is one movie that CG should help out a lot.  Back in '78, there was just no way to make any kind of computer generated baby, and it didn't look like Larry Cohen tried too hard to make even a good robot or puppet.  So like the original, this movie relies on hiding the monster from us.

Somewhere during our viewing, I starting calling the baby puppets the "It's Alives," as in, "He better watch out!  There's an It's Alive in the pool!"  And that reminded me of Baby Alive, who apparently is also making a comeback long after her 1973 debut.  Unfortunately, the song for the old Baby Alive commercial got stuck in my head.  I just went poking around on Youtube to see if I could find it, but I only found a bunch of less catchy jingles.  Too bad.  It would really be a Horrorthon coup of some kind of I could inject this annoying Baby Alive song into all of your heads.  Maybe you remember it:

Baby Alive

Soft and sweet,

She can drink,

She can eat.

Baby Alive,

beautiful face,

dressed in pink

and pretty lace.

Tell me somebody recalls this one?

Anyway, back to the film.  There are now three It's Alives.  Frank Davis from the first film is on a campaign to save freak infants from the crews of baby killers who arrive at the scene as soon as tests determine a mother is about to give birth to a monster.  Still no explanation as to why women keep having these things.  Probably it's pollution, or something, and oh, maybe these are a new race of humans designed to withstand said pollution.  Whatever.

The thing is that if you have three It's Alives, the obvious scene we want to see is all of them on a rampage together, killing lots and lots of people.  But that's not what happens.

Instead, the movie aims for social commentary and explores themes of how, um, it's kind of wrong to kill infants.  Or...is it???

The emotional draw of the parents--who in spite of everything their monster babies have done, still just want to hold and rock the little dears--got me again in this one.  But the baby killing scenes didn't bother me as much.  Either that's because the puppets of the It's Alives were so ridonkulous, or it's because I'm just getting harder.  Thanks, Horrorthon!

I'd say the entire franchise so far is worth watching, even if it's just for the yuks.

It's Alive III: Island of the Alive

1987 **

Ugh. This one wore me out, and there's two things to sum up why: one is Michael Moriarty, the other is 1987.

Artistically, very few good things happened in the late 80's. The music we like from that decade, the fashions we recall fondly, the good movies, etc. -- if you stop to check you'll find most of those things happened between '80 and '84. The latter half of the decade was a pitiful copyfest, piling on More of the Same and doing it worse. There are exceptions, of course. The Lion and the Cobra, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, these are respectable artistic endeavors. But for every one of those there were twenty of these. (1988, in case you were wondering.)

So it's not surprising that whatever strange appeal I've been able to wring out of the It's Alive movies was all tapped out by the time they made this one. I think my favorite example is the degraded inheritence of that wonderful 70's vintage: Paranoia. Here's what I said when I reviewed It's Alive: "The generalized paranoia of the era is raised to clownish levels, but it's all delivered with the seriousness of a hangover headache."

Well, here's the man with the biggest ears in the world to show me what clownish really is. The five It's Alives have been sequestered on a remote island, and Ears here takes a helicopter and some guys to the island for a throwaway subplot and some needless exposition. Because we finally have a reason for the monster babies, and it's this guy. His drug company was putting the lousy drugs on the market, and when they took them off the market the mutant births stopped.

So he's on his mission to wipe out the little critters so nobody can ever come study them, thereby removing the only obstacle to putting the drugs on the market again, under a different name. This is where Uncle Octopunk stands up and starts yanking on his hair. Because they got away with it! The coverup worked! There's no reason to worry! So why oh why oh WHY would you get away with horrible crimes that would destroy your commercial empire just so you can do them AGAIN??? Why not spend some money making different drugs that, I don't know, don't make mutant babies?

And yes, I get the part of the conspiracy where we all shake our heads at not just the greed but the recklessness, but that's not even what's going on here. In late 80's horror everything is this big joke, and without the "hangover headache" seriousness this conspiracy just goes off the rails.

Sigh. I know I'm ranting here, but like JPX's problems with ___ New Bohemians, stupid conspiracies get under my skin. In the movie C.H.U.D. there's a shadow agenda to dump toxic waste under Manhattan, i.e. one of the world's largest population centers -- instead of any of the numerous New Jersey locations that nobody cares about. That's just stupid. Things like this can be fixed at the script level with the teeniest application of thought.

Not Stunt Ass -- Puppet Ass!

I'll make this sort of a rant sandwich, a positive filling served between two thick slabs of rant. A rantwich.

Thanks to their decision to spent a teeny bit more money and do some stop motion, you get the best look at the monster that the series has to offer (above).

I liked the opening. Having mined a few baby delivery scenarios, they went for the "cop delivers baby in taxi" shtick. I hated the Buster Poindexteresque NYC cabbie and his "awwww, my cab!" bit, but I had a brief moment of thrill when the cop suddenly yelled "Oh my God, it's one of THEM!!! and was pulled bodily into the car.

I must admit there's a very X-men-ish vibe to these movies that appeals to me. The "They can kill!" vs. "They're Children!" themes are quite similar; Larry Cohen's vision is more horrifying because instead of good-looking, malajusted teenagers you're dealing with really fugly, really murderous babies. And upon hearing the premise, I imagined a cool comic book about a few of these monstrosities as adults: super-strong, super-fast, with talons and fangs and huge eyes and big heads that might house psychic powers. I imagined a drawing of one of these characters, horrifying to see but broodingly intelligent, perhaps dressed in some stylish, futuristic combat fatigues or something.

Of course what I got was more crappy puppets lurking in shadows, but this time around I barely noticed that bit of disappointment. It's hardly the worst thing this movie does to its audience.

That would be this guy, Michael Moriarty. I can't stand this dude. Apparently he was on Law & Order forever and won an Emmy for it, but I've only ever seen him in Larry Cohen movies, which has fostered a deep, abiding hatred.

You know how directors will just loooove certain actors and put them in everything? And you know how sometimes it goes beyond that, they won't just cast these people but they'll allow (even urge) them to run wild with the performance? That's what's going on here, in more than one movie. In Larry Cohen's Q, about a giant snake bird eating New Yorkers, Moriarty chews up crazy stupid amounts of screen time as a small time hood who discovers the snake bird's nest. When he's blackmailing the city for money, he's also revelling in the attention he's getting, and saying so. This is one of those ideas that grips performers sometimes: "he's just this shmoe, and suddenly everyone has to pay attention to him! Genuis!" No, not genius. Because the irritation the characters are feeling mirrors my own, I didn't tune in for this moron, I came for the snake bird.

Island of the Alive balloons the Michael Moriarty experience way beyond Q. He plays Stephen Jarvis, father of one of the It's Alives, and after an admittedly tender courtroom scene in which he convinces his monster baby not to kill anyone, his character description turns into Biggest Dick in the World. I think this was Cohen's notion of anti-hero, but all we get is lots of screen time with needless unpleasantness. When the babies are given their own island, Jarvis's lawyers throw him a victory party, at which they mention that a book will be published about all of this to cover his legal costs. When he objects and is told it's too late since he already signed the releases, he reacts by going from party guest to party guest telling "Jarvis baby" jokes in the tone of patronizing sarcasm that will inform his entire performance from that point forward. When we meet up with him later, he's selling children's shoes but being so obnoxious about it that all his customers leave in a huff. When Lt. Perkins (veteran of the other two It's Alive flicks) shows up with important news, he asks Jarvis if he read the paper. "You know I never read the papers!" WTF? I think a "no" would have been fine here.

Perkins and Jarvis join an expedition of well-meaning scientists to go to the island five years later and see how the monsta babies have grown up, and on the way cement Jarvis's title of BDitW. Julie described the boat trip as "some kind of experimental improv fest performed while high and on acid," and that pretty much sums it up. Jarvis hits on the one female in the group with the finesse of a drunk sixteen-year-old, there's a repeating shtick of the scientist who's seasick, and a scene where the hapless woman tries to get the gang to look at a map while Jarvis sings a drinking song louder and louder, eventually getting all the men to join him in it while the woman walks off disgusted. As they land on the island, Jarvis gets in one more leering "I fathered a mutant baby, does that turn you on?" pass, prompting Perkins to say admiringly: "Jahvis, you're always bustin' bawls!" UGH.

The title of this movie is somewhat misleading, as neither visit to the island lasts very long. Big Ears and his cronies get a hot dose of poetic justice and most of the second group are taken out so the It's Alives can steal their boat, leaving only Jarvis alive (gee, thanks). He gets to improv some more and then some other stuff happens and I groan and Karen Black is in it looking more than ever like an alien in a human mask and The End.

If, like me, you fall under an annual compulsion to watch a series of questionable sequels to the end of the run, you'll find Island of the Alive one of the tougher credits to attain. I'd advise watching the first two and pretending this one didn't exist. That's what I'm gonna do.

The First Omen

(2024) ***1/2

When I first saw the title of this most recent installment in The Omen anthology, I thought about Julie's review from back in 2008 of the sequel to It's Alive in which she says, "I started calling the baby puppets, the "It's Alives,"as in, "he better watch out! There's an It's Alive in the pool", and I wondered whether there were people out there calling Damien himself, "The Omen", like "that woman better watch out! She might get impregnated by Satan's semen and give birth to a The Omen". That just me? Nobody? Okay, whatever.

I went into this skeptical, just waiting for some sign that this was going to turn out to be mediocre, and though my skepticism spiked right around the time the filmmakers swiped the "it's all for you!" bit from the original film (modifying it only by adding gasoline and fire to the equation), by the time the movie was half over, I realized I didn't hate it at all. In fact, there's a key philosophical difference between this one and all its predecessors that aligns more with my own morality that kind of makes me feel like if I'd seen this first, it might have been my favorite. I have more to say on this, but it's hard to talk about without spoiling the plot, so I'll give you a chance to tap out now. I'll just say that the only reason I don't feel like giving it 4 stars is that the original is one of the films listed as an example of a 3.5 star film in Thonscore and I don't want to rate this higher cause I feel like I already used up my Golden Buzzer in my review of Pearl. This is rather good though. It's shot and edited beautifully; Nell Tiger Free shines in the lead role and also has the name Nell Tiger Free which I'd award 5 stars in the yet to be published namethon.blogspot.com; and all the things that are supposed to be scary land where they're aimed. If I were giving it a straight thumbs up or down, it's thumbs up for sure. 

I guess in the '70s people just took it on faith (literally) that, in a movie about the Church confronting Satan that all of the Church people were worthy of our trust, and that their foes were Evil with a capital E and were here to do nothing more than kill only good people, and take over the world and that would be...bad, somehow? Certainly nothing like the ends and means of the unimpeachable Catholic Church, here to protect us from all that Evil lurking about. And then time passed and stories made their way into public knowledge of Catholic priests using their power to unsavory advantage, and their clout to cover it up.

Similarly The Omen is just about a shitty little kid who is destined to become Evil incarnate and will be protected in the meantime by mean-looking people and some large dogs. We never stop to think that anyone responsible for bringing Damian to the Thorn household would be any different. The First Omen decides to be more nuanced, presenting two conflicting factions in the Church itself, one more Humanist and one purely Liturgical, and shows preoccupation with fulfilling the word of the Bible can sometimes, even at best, lead to self-defeating and cruel practices, and at worst do the Devil's work for him.

All told, The First Omen is a reinvigorating addition to the series that does everything you'd hope a sequel will do while falling short in none of the ways sequels often do. Solid piece of work; worth a look.

 

It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive

(1987) ** 1/2

As you can see, I don't have time for screen shots, but at least you get a good look at the baby puppet here. The third installment of the It's Alive series was the worst, but I got myself through it knowing that at the end, JPX would be my new best friend.

We get to see the babies much more, because they are stop motion puppets! Whoo hoo! Stop motion provides us with sustenance! In addition to bigger baby action, there was a ton of swearing in this flick, which I guess was a major upgrade in 1987. Swearing plus 80s hair.

And oy with the social commentary this time around. Okay, I get it, we're all monsters. Yawn.

This movie suffered from a whole lotta not making sense. The It's Alives have been on an island for five years, but somehow they learned to read--maps. They can point out where in the world they want to go. Of course, they want to go home to their parents, and this is an extension of the ridiculous premise introduced in the first film: the infants have a superior homing instinct. And they're psychic.

This film finally lost me on the parental love score. The babies are just too awful to be loved this time. They're not redeemable. Maybe that's the point, and humans are supposed to look like idiots for hoping these mutants will come around and be nice.

There are a couple really amazing digressions in this movie. It's as if Larry Cohen just felt like since they shot this footage, they better use it. The whole boat trip to the island seems like it was some kind of experimental improv fest performed while high and on acid. Kudos, Larry. Then our main character goes to Cuba, where he is detained for a bit, and it's a major, huge, impassible obstacle. For like a couple minutes. Then, presto, the Cuban dudes have a change of heart and let him go and even give him a lift and a gun.

Whatever. It was all worth it, because number 1, JPX and I are now BFF! and number 2, I am totally inured to watching monster babies get shot or blow up in helicopters.