THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE PHASE ONE: It Lives Again (a.k.a. It’s Alive 2)

For me, the best Larry Cohen films are those that use their genre conventions--and man, did Larry love his genre conventions--as a fulcrum with which he could explore darker subjects.  The reason his first horror film, It’s Alive, works so well is because it is not about a mutant baby on the rampage; it’s actually about how a couple react to a pregnancy that does not go as planned.  The genius of that story is how the baby is basically reacting like an actual baby, allowing for Cohen to focus primarily on the Davis family and what having a ‘special’ child is doing to them.

It’s Alive was a surprise hit, so it stood to reason that--much like Black Ceasar begat Hell Up In Harlem--Cohen would have a follow-up in that legendary car trunk of film scripts he tooled around Hollywood with.  It Lives Again showed up in theaters four years after the original, had a similar ad campaign (instead of a baby carriage with a claw hanging out of it, this one-sheet featured a birthday cake with a claw print in it) and extrapolated on the hint at the end of the first film that the Davis baby wasn’t an aberration, but the beginning of something more profound.

And yet....

After watching this sequel, something I haven’t done until now, I don’t think Cohen was as enthused about exploring this new world he was hinting at in the very last scene of the original.  I didn’t feel the creative fire I feel when I watch his best work.  In fact, the bulk of the film sort of meanders aimlessly, ending up in a place I would not expect a Larry Cohen movie to end.

Not that you’d know it from watching the first half hour.  That is one tight, focused and suspenseful bit of filmmaking.  We’re introduced to the Scotts (Frederick Forrest and Kathleen Lloyd, who looks remarkably like Sarah Silverman's sister) at their baby shower--and there, in the same spot in several shots, is Frank Davis (played once again by character actor John P. Ryan).  After the party is over, Davis tells the couple that the expectant mother, Jodie, is going to give birth to a child like his...and that the government has been systematically slaughtering these mutant infants. Luckily, Frank has allied with Drs. Perry and Forrest (Cohen mainstay Andrew Duggan and Eddie Constantine), who have set up a secret facility to rescue the babies and study them.

So the first act, which sets up this premise, sets up the villain (played magnificently by John Marley) and gets our protagonists to the secret facility, is pretty damn good.  But once all our characters are situated in and around the facility, it seems like Cohen doesn’t have an interest in what happens next.  The film stops being about the ideas raised in that first act and starts being about ‘Well, I have to play to the fans.’  Nothing makes this clearer than the way he forces James Dixon’s Lt. Perkins into the story roughly halfway through; you could literally cut out all of his scenes and have the narrative unchanged, but because he was in the first film he has to be in this one.  Hell, it actually takes away from the arc of our main villain, who is set up to be a dark mirror to Frank.  And there are other things that mark this as a sequel with nothing new to say--the presence of extra mutants, killing off the main character of the last film, creating an absolutely pointless tableau involving a birthday party just so he can get an iconic image for the poster....it’s just wearying.

The sad thing is It Lives Again is just a lazy film from a filmmaker who is generally anything but.  That’s brought home when you realize Cohen preceded this with God Told Me To and followed this up with...okay, Full Moon High is far from my favorite.  But both films showed a lot more flair than this.

As much as I recommend almost all of Cohen’s work both as a writer (he’s still the only person who seemed to understand what Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct was actually about in the two screenplays he wrote in the 90‘s for NBC) and as a director, I would not recommend you see this until you’ve seen a number of his much better work--especially his 'New York’ films (God Told Me To, Q, Special Effect, Perfect Strangers, The Stuff and The Ambulance), which are more indicative of how he worked.

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