The TV commercial for It's Alive terrified me. The music, the slowly turning bassinet, the fact that a demon baby was inside - it was too much for my child brain to handle. I would cover my ears and yell every single time I saw it. The power and memory and latent fear for this thirty seconds created stayed with me for decades, ensuring that I would never watch this film. Until now. Frank and Lenore Davis are excitedly expecting the birth of their second child. They've been waiting for years and properly planned the child's birth, with Lenore using birth control pills until the time was right. However, their infant is a monster, a deformed creature with fangs and claws that is so horrifying, one of the doctors instantly tries to suffocate it. The baby kills the team who delivered it before escaping, leaving a crying Lenore and frightened Frank.The baby goes on a murderous rampage while Frank denies that the child is his, as a parallel is made to Frankenstein and how Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his creation. It turns out that the birth control drugs Lenore was on may have caused the mutation. To protect their bottom line, they want the child destroyed.The baby finds its way home, where Lenore embraces her child. Their first son, Chris, becomes homesick (he'd been staying with Charley, a family friend) and returns home, where he meets his sibling and promises to protect him. Frank discovers that the child is being hidden and shoots at it, but the baby escapes and kills Charley.The police and Frank track the child to the sewer, where the father realizes that the beast is his flesh and blood. Hiding the baby in his coat, Frank tries to escape, but he's caught by the police. Then, his child leaps from his arms to kill the pharmaceutical company representative who is with the cops. The police open fire, killing the child and the man who he is attacking.As the police take the Davis family home, we learn that another deformed child has been born in Seattle.When Larry Cohen completed the film, he learned that the executives who had produced the film were all gone. It's Alive got a paltry one week run in Chicago and a limited release. Three years later, after that team of executives were replaced, Cohen convinced Warner Brothers to re-release the film with the ad campaign featured above, leading to a successful run.It's Alive preys on our worst fears - that our children will grow to become monsters. However, Cohen takes it a step further. These children instantly are monstrous killers.Two sequels - It Lives Again and It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive - followed, as well as a remake. The original - shot at the same time as Hell Up in Harlem by a crew that was doing day and night shoots 7 days a week - is an impressive film. Like all Cohen's work, the idea is stronger than the budget and the final product looks so much better than the dollars it cost to create would suggest.

A fantastically focused and engaged socio-horror film from the last golden age of the 1970s. Anchored around a most committed and persuasive performance from John Ryan and Larry Cohen's empathetic and savvy direction, It's Alive might display some raggedness and lapses in style, but it more than makes up for this with searing intelligence, sharp and sad gallows humour and a beating heart on the side of the ostracized and ridiculed. A fine example of what genre movies can really do.

Although "It's Alive" was a respectable hit at the box office back in 1974, I think that most people who watch it today will be puzzled as to why the movie was so popular at the time. The low budget hurts the movie in a number of ways - the sound is often poorly recorded, the sets and locations often look cheap and unconvincing, and scenes seem to be missing. Such things might have been forgiven had the rest of the movie been stronger, but the movie also suffers from a very slow pace, too much dialogue, and too little in the way of horror (the movie only got a PG rating.) On the positive side, there is some witty dialogue as well as some effective black humor. There is also some good social satire, as well as some surprisingly powerful dramatic sequences. So the movie is not a complete waste. However, I would only recommend it to die hard horror fans as well as those interested in the varied film career of writer/director Larry Cohen. Hopefully things will improve when I watch the two sequels.

For a movie about a killer mutant freak child, this is pretty goddamn boring. Though the premise seems very fun and interesting, the execution is about as stale and disappointing as movies get. To me, the most bothersome thing about this horror flick was that there was just no suspense at all. Just, none. Okay, not entirely true, the milkman scene was pretty effective, but that's about one minute of the movie. All the rest is kind of a chore to sit through really, the charm of characters we've barely seen before and barely care about getting killed off-screen kinda escapes me. Even compared with the rather similar and also quite flawed "Basket Case", this just doesn't hold up. At least "Basket Case" had a cool puppet and some hilarious state-of-the-art stop motion effects, this one just has an okayish puppet and no effects. I just couldn't get into this movie at all, though I must admit the climax well, wasn't as bad as the rest I guess. I also liked the lead actor, who's about the only thing that made me keep watching. Good idea, weak movie, that about sums it up for me.