Project Horror, Day 23: It's Alive

10/24/2010

A few years ago, the Bravo channel ran a show called "The 100 Scariest Movie Moments."  The list had some great movies on it, and I've gone back to it several times for viewing ideas.  I added It's Alive to my list as part of the Creepy Creatures block partly because it was included in the Bravo list, and it looked pretty good when I saw it featured on that countdown.  Now that I've seen it, I think they could have definitely found a better movie to fill that spot on the list.

I'm not going to lie to you, Internet.  This movie was the first this month that actually put me to sleep.  Not just drowsy, trouble keeping the eyes open sleep, but full-on, drool running down my face, waking up to find that the movie ended quite a while ago sleep.  Now, because I have my project, I got up, had a Dr. Pepper and rewound to the point that I last remembered seeing and watched the rest of it, but I wasn't too happy about it.

The setup and the first scare scene were not badly done.  A couple is expecting their second child and goes to the hospital to deliver.  The wife feels that something is wrong, but up until this point in the movie, there's not really any hint of what's to come.  Only when the husband sees somebody stagger bloodily out of the delivery room and drop dead do you get an idea of something wrong, and then you see the inside of the delivery room, where everybody except the mother has been slaughtered.  It's not a bad scene.

The rest of the movie, though...  Eh.  It had potential, really.  It was just so campy.  The scenes where you catch a glimpse of the mutant baby make it look like a gnarly Muppet.  The cast are not very good actors.  Even the score is corny, which is weird because it's by Bernard Herrmann, the guy who wrote the scores of many Hitchcock movies, Taxi Driver, and Citizen Kane.

Congratulations, It's Alive, you just got mentioned in the same article as Taxi Driver and Citizen Kane.  It's as high a praise as you're going to wring out of me.  You get two prams out of five.
 
UPDATE:  I'm coming back to this entry, because a day later, there's a scene that has stayed with me.  When the dad pleads for mercy on his child's behalf, after spending most of  the movie trying to disown him, it hit my heart on a very Dad-level.  I'm bumping this rating up another half point because of it.

2 comments:

Will Meekin said...

It's stillborn.

Wm.

Danny said...

I love your concise reviews. My favorite ever was about "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage": Some people say it's seminal, I call it fecal.

Post a Comment

Every comment is like a fresh flower, so please write!