IT'S ALIVE

Will this decade's obsession with remaking 70s horrors ever end? Not just yet it seems, now that a second tier of "cult classics" have started to attract unscrupulous producers' eyes (THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT; EXPOSE, etc). The latest in this fast-food chain of overhauls is Larry Cohen's 1974 potboiler IT'S ALIVE ...

This time around, Lenore (Bijou Phillips) is a High School senior who decides to quit school and travel out to the sticks to raise a family with her boyfriend Frank (James Murray). She meets him at the house he's inherited from his late parents, where he now lives with younger brother Chris (Raphael Coleman).

Lenore is delighted to find upon arrival that Frank has fully kitted out one room in the house as a nursery for their imminent baby.

Moments later, Lenore collapses in the shower with agonising stomach cramps and Frank rushes her to hospital. Frank waits in the corridor as Lenore is hurried immediately into premature labour. It's not long though before a medic walks into the labour suite and finds the doctors and nurses dead and covered in blood - only Lenore and her newborn baby are still breathing.

The cops are called in to make sense of the butchery, while Lenore and her baby are separated to undergo medical tests. Shortly afterwards, Frank is permitted to drive his girlfriend and son Daniel home.

Lenore is blissfully content with motherhood for a while, albeit a little over-protective of Daniel. But almost immediately, strange things begin to happen: Chris comments on how huge the new baby is; Daniel has freakishly long nails with which he scratches Frank; animals are found chewed to pieces outside the house; Daniel takes a chunk out of Lenore's tit while she breastfeeds him ...

When people start getting killed too, the cops take an interest in Daniel's family ... and encourage Lenore to sit in with psychiatrist Baldwin (Jack Ellis) who hopes to encourage her to remember what happened in the labour suite. But when the odd flashback presents images she doesn't want to accept, Lenore refuses to entertain them any further.

After catching her child with a dead bird in his mouth, you'd think Lenore would finally accept that there's something seriously fucked up with him. But no, she becomes even more fiercely protective of him and hides any concerns she may have from Frank.

No-one, it seems, has an inkling of what could really be happening. Which leaves it up to young Chris and Lenore's concerned friend Marnie (Ty Glaser) to unearth the truth ...

Whereas Cohen's original film played up to 70s paranoia's such as fear of authority and kicking against a system that doesn't care, along with the very intimate fear of fatherhood, this remake is told very much more from Lenore's perspective. It adds an element of maternal denial - the blind love many mothers are guilty of ladling upon their little horrors - as well as inevitably echoing ROSEMARY'S BABY in terms of feminine anxieties.

What it does have in common with its source material though is a trashy go-for-broke sense of glee about it, and a healthy body-count that doesn't shy away from the red stuff. Darker in tone than the original, IT'S ALIVE 2009 (actually, it was made in 2008) does however remain faithful to Cohen's original vision - he co-wrote the new screenplay with Paul Sopocy and James Portolese (whose previous writing gig prior to this was the Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller UNTIL DEATH ...).

Performances are committed and convincing throughout, with Phillips in particular shining through as the heart and soul of the film. Her vulnerability adds a plausibility to a frankly nuts premise, while Murray rises about some poor dialogue to offer solid support. He's a much more likeable male lead than his predecessor John P Ryan ever was. British TV veteran Ellis even turns up as the psychiatrist just begging to meet a sticky end.

Production-wise, the film feels perhaps a little too glossy for it's subject material. Part of the allure of 70s films is their gritty, low-budget feel - a sense that psychotic minds were responsible for the rough-edged nervous energy on screen, possessing little talent other than the craving to scare the pants off you. The new IT'S ALIVE is positively tame in comparison. It's technically better than it's predecessor on every level (editing is more fluent; it's better lit; Wedigo von Schultzendorff's cinematography is often beautiful; the script is largely much more akin to how people would naturally speak in these times - far less corny than the original script; pop songs on the soundtrack add a commercial element not previously enjoyed), but all of this conspires to make a film that can't hope to attack you in the same manner as Cohen's schlocky '74 effort.

That's not to say this film isn't effective in it's own way. It's briskly paced, grisly and never strays from propelling its central story forward - there's little subtext here and no needless sub-plots, just a "heads down, see you at the end" approach to delivering the terrors.

Best of all, the film's tone builds impressively darker as events unfold, even though a middle-section explanation for the baby's murderous ways - Lenore dabbled in experimental drugs while pregnant - hits a bum note when followed immediately by badly timed lovemaking. Even so, you can actually feel the downbeat ending before it arrives ...

The film is presented in a very attractive anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer. Colours are stable and bright while blacks are rendered in solid fashion throughout. Grain is minimal, though the smooth presentation is never at the expense of finer details. It's a pleasingly clean, sharp picture.

English audio is offered in 2.0 and 5.1 mixes, both of which provide a fair amount of wallop. The latter is perhaps not as well balanced as it could have been, and dialogue occasionally suffers as a result. The 2.0 mix was the more consistent of the two, but overall there's little to whinge about.

An animated main menu leads into a static scene-selection menu allowing access to the main feature via 12 chapters.

The only extra related to the film is a 2-minute trailer presented in anamorphic 2.35:1. While the trailer does a fair job of making the film look creepy, it's rife with those annoying flash-edits that Asian horror films have been far too fond of over the last decade or so.

The disc is defaulted to open with trailers for the excellent NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, MARTYRS and EDEN LAKE.

IT'S ALIVE has been passed with a "15" certificate by the BBFC, but the DVD cover states "18". I assume the certificate has been raised by the inclusion of the above trailers.

Undeserving of it's direct-to-DVD status, IT'S ALIVE is actually much better than people can rightfully expect it to be, what with so many shit remakes having been thrown at us in the last five years.

This revamp of IT'S ALIVE is not a bad film, despite it's flaws - the main one being the ill-advised use of CGI in a couple of scenes. And, where oh where is the infamous "milkman" scene?! Reservations aside, this stands as an above-average remake on a sorely lacking disc.

An "unrated" Region 1 disc is also due out on 6th October 2009. My guess is it'll be the same version of the film as is presented here, but I'm unable to ascertain at present whether that disc will be better furnished with extras.

It'd be nice to at least have Ellis on disc, justifying the American 'accent' he adopts in the film ...

Review by Stu Willis