Nightmare Fuel 2018: Day 68 – It’s Alive

Story time, kids: Back several years ago, I was out at Blockbuster with a girl with whom I would shortly begin a romantic relationship. At the time, though, we were just friends hanging out and watching movies. That wintery night at Blockbuster, we were looking for a specific horror movie a friend of mine (whose place we were headed to afterward) recommended. He told us it was about this couple that has a demonic baby or something. It sounded just funny and weird enough to work. So, alongside Machete, which we would watch with said friend later, we picked up what we thought was the right choice: Grace. After the Machete viewing a couple hours later, we’re all playing some board game, and we mentioned to my friend that we’d found the movie he told us about. Nope, says he, we got the wrong one. We were disappointed, but we determined to watch our rental regardless, which we did on Valentine’s Day with a friend of the aforementioned girl. Grace, in case you were curious, is a garbage film about a woman who delivers a miscarriage and wills the child to life, only to find that it’s become some sort of blood-hungry demon thing. It’s overly dour for its material, and no one enjoyed it, even ironically under the influence of alcoholic beverages. As it turns out, we were supposed to find It’s Alive. I blame my friend, really, for not being specific.

I would later watch It’s Alive with the same girl, then my girlfriend, one night in bed. It was much better than Grace (faint praise that that is), telling a similar story in a more entertaining and effective manner. I still haven’t gotten around to the two sequels (it looks as though the third entry in the series is set on some tropical island?), but they’re on my list. The remake, though, coming thirty-five years after the original, was never on my list, it having been heavily dissed by that girlfriend. Seeing as we’re no longer together and I’m some sort of masochistic nutjob (see as that relationship), I figured I’d give it a go as part of Nightmare Fuel. Why not?

Well, the story centers on a college student who puts her studies on hold in order to have her baby. Due to abnormally accelerated growth in utero, the baby is delivered via C-section, which results in a surprise bloodbath in the OR: the mother and infant are found unharmed in the OR, surrounded by the bodies of the doctors and nurses, but the mother remembers nothing of the event. Allowed to go home, the child soon shows his taste for blood, nipping his mother before graduating to small animals and people. Will the parents have what it takes to put a stop to the bloodshed?

Now, the original film is no real prize, but it was fun and decently well-told. This version is drained of any amount of fun and doesn’t even approach the lowest levels of suspense or creepiness. Blandness is the substitute chosen for shadowy atmosphere, and none of the acting is anything to write home about. Bijou Phillips, who plays the mother, is particularly grating with her annoying high-pitched voice; the rest of the cast didn’t even leave an impression, they were so bland and uninteresting. Director Josef Rusnak refuses to rise above his straight-to-video roots (he had previously directed the Wesley Snipes snoozefests The Contractor and Art of War II: Betrayal) and barely gets anything resembling competence as a result. Larry Cohen, who directed the original trilogy (alongside Black Caesar, God Told Me To, The Stuff, and Q the Winged Serpent, as well as writing Phone Booth and the Maniac Cop series), went so far as to call the film “a terrible picture” and “beyond awful” in a December 2009 Films in Review interview, adding “I would advise anybody who likes [the original] to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada”. I couldn’t agree more. Man, it hurts when you find out your ex was right about something, doesn’t it?