The final entry in Larry Cohen’s trilogy of mutant killer baby movies, It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987), escapes its fate as a straight-to-video Warner Bros. afterthought when it screens at Nitehawk on glorious celluloid tonight. The film is funnier and looser than its predecessors, but no less insistent that we take seriously (for the most part) the emotional plight of new parents whose bundles of joy enter the world ravenous for blood. Among Cohen’s many gifts was the ability to credibly house affecting character studies within outlandish concepts seemingly cooked up with single-paragraph synopses of the Leonard Maltin variety in mind. Answering Cohen’s call is baby-faced Michael Moriarty, who reaches Cage-ian levels of nutso intensity playing a father collapsing under the weight of protecting a child who terrifies him. Cohen dutifully supplies dismemberments and some fairly unconvincing jump scares, but Moriarty’s long night of the soul is the film’s undeniable center.
The hook here is that the “It’s Alive babies,” as the VHS box art calls them, are not only back, but are now reproducing. To back up a bit, It’s Alive (1974) concerned a mutant baby (designed by make-up effects deity Rick Baker) rampaging through the suburbs while his parents struggle to survive the collision between their nurturing instincts and violent disgust. In It Lives Again (1978), an epidemic of mutant births is spreading. Expectant mothers become fugitives in order to bring their babies to term and underground networks of scientists help families navigate the trauma and elude the authorities. Now, in part III, the babies are hunted and incarcerated while the courts figure out what to do with them. The prosecutor makes the state’s case clear: “Let’s not ever mistake them for human beings.”
The courtroom is where we meet Moriarty’s Stephen Jarvis. He lost his career, his marriage, and his anonymity after his son was “born that way,” becoming notorious in the press as the father of a monster. This was the fame that eluded him as a struggling actor, a bitter irony that has turned him into a nasty prick slowly losing his mind. He circles around cocktail parties malevolently repeating jokes he’s heard about his own son. When he aggressively hits on a government scientist, he suggests that his monstrous son is all the proof she needs that he’s an animal in the sack. Cohen and Moriarty take the depth of his pain seriously, even when it is scabrously funny. When his son is brought into the courtroom as evidence, Jarvis is encouraged by an advocacy group to bravely approach the snarling, befanged tot as a show of affection that proves the baby monster’s inner humanity. His reluctant performance (“I don’t want him to die, but I’m scared shitless of him”) pays off and the judge orders that the infants be shipped off to an undisclosed, uninhabited island where they rapidly mature and begin having their own offspring. Big Science and The Government can’t stop picking at the scab, however, and intrude upon the prison-sanctuary with gruesome results. If that isn’t enticing enough, the synopsis leaves out a punks versus preps street brawl, nakedly pro-Cuba propaganda, telepathy, monster self-baptism, and an exploding helicopter.
In the tradition of great monster movies, there are countless threads to pull in this choose-your-own allegory. A sex worker’s concern that Moriarty has transmitted to her whatever condition caused his son’s monstrosity baldly invites the collective reaction to HIV into the discussion. The colony of monsters become starving migrants hunted by the state. Stephen and Ellen’s emotional journey follows the cycle of ambivalence and dedication that haunts parents of disabled children. In terms of his series’ big concept, Cohen is concerned with our shameful need to define and destroy undesirables. On a smaller scale, he probes the warped mirror relationship between parents and children in which your creation is both you and not you, and takes seemingly everything from you so that it might project some hint of you beyond your inevitable death. No wonder Moriarty spends the film at the brink of madness.
It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive screens tonight, August 26, at Nitehawk Prospect Park on 35mm as part of the series “Ridiculous Sublime.”
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