At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Heading off to the hospital, a pregnant woman about to give birth is horrified when the ravenous, bloodthirsty mutant that was born runs wild and escapes into the city forcing the team tracking it down to realize where it's going and try to stop its mission.For the most part, this one was a rather tough one to get through. When this one works, its mainly due to the rather fun idea of the killer mutant infant running around doing the killing. The celebrated birth sequence, where the off-screen birth coincides with the scream and then rushing in to find the trail of destruction and bloodied bodies as it escaped earlier makes for a rather startling and horrifying introduction during the time of a person's life they should be exceptionally happy. That, in turn, leads to the main fun to be had with this one where it features the series of attacks committed by the creature around the neighborhood, from the short attacks on the lone woman in front of her car and the delivery person on the streets. As well, the finale where it arrives back at the house and engages in the confrontation with the family there before the stellar series of encounters in the sewer system where the group tracking it find the creature in the area which is quite chilling to add some decent enough action to the proceedings. As well as the fine makeup designed for the mutant babies, these here hold it up over it's few flaws. The biggest threat to the film overall is the bland, disjointed pacing that crops up where this one just becomes dull after a while. The fact that it starts off rather strong with the hospital attack, but then after that we have nothing until the final half of the film which is punctuated only with dry, dull scenes of the investigation going through the city trying to find the cause of the strange accident at the hospital before tying it into the rampage around the city. That leaves the film incredibly dull with very little interest or action in what's happening during this investigation as that holds this to a strict tempo which isn't all that exciting to see play out. The other flaw to be found here is the exceptionally dull issue of the lack of explanation for how the creatures appear and what they're intending to do once they're loose, as this one never gives any kind of rationale about their sudden appearance which doesn't make any sense here. These are what hold this one back overall.Rated PG: Violence, Language and themes of children-in-jeopardy.

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.

This piece of schlock appeared in 1974, six years after the phenomenal success of "Rosemary's Baby." "It's Alive" was profitable enough, I suppose, to generate a couple of sequels and a recent remake, all of which is just further evidence that democracy will never work.John P. Ryan is an executive at a public relations firm. His wife gives birth to some sort of mutant -- it looks like a baby but is huge -- that leaps out of the birth canal and slaughters everyone in the room except its mother, Sharon Farrell. Then it escapes from the hospital and is on the loose. After that, the movie turns into another slasher flick with gallons of blood, the screams and shivering feet of the victims, and brief inserts of this ugly infant's mouth with canines longer than Dracula's. There's a moral lesson here. Never trust babies. They know a lot more than they're letting on. As for their grotesque appearance -- those enormous heads and tiny pudgy fingers -- it's not "natural" at all but rather a disease, "childhoodosis", that they eventually remit and grow out of. There are intrigues as the search for the mutant goes on. A cute incident has a representative of the pharmaceutical company that supplied the mother's medication. The professors may want to capture the thing more or less intact for further study, but this huckster whispers to the attending physician that it would be better if the thing were completely destroyed. I mean, we don't want autopsies that might find our medication was responsible. And, by the way, we have an opening on our Board of Directors.The film is too terrible to be worth much scrutiny. There is a shock every five minutes. We get the usual monster's point of view. You can tell it's the monster's point of view because the screen gets a little blurry, as if this infant had periocular issues. But, then again, sometimes the screen goes fuzzy and creeps along the carpet towards someone's legs and it's not the baby at all. It's the victim's wife, who simply taps him on the shoulder from out-of-frame, while the sound track emits a percussive eructation. Bernard Herrmann did the score. He seems to have recycled much of "The Twilight Zone" first episode.That's the kind of cheap shot that covers the movie the way smallpox covers the skin. They're both ugly, but at least smallpox isn't insulting.I can't handle any more of this. Let me just say that one of the best performances is given by Guy Stockwell, Dean Stockwell's brother, as the boss who fires Ryan for bringing bad publicity to the firm. He invests the role with some originality, which no one else seems able to do.Ryan can't accept this freak of nature as his own creation, while his wife and his older son embrace it. The conflict is resolved at the end in such a way as to open the gates for all those sequels and remakes. The producers, anxious to squeeze another nickel out of this format, are now free to carry on with a franchise that should have been stillborn instead of alive.

All is happy in the Davis household as parents John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell are expecting the arrival of a new baby. But after a difficult labor Farrell gives birth to something out of Alien. It kills the delivery team in the hospital leaving mother alive, but shattered beyond belief and not knowing really what's going on. A beautiful Bernard Hermann score is really wasted on a cheap horror exploitation flick that spawned to sequels itself. Although Farrell as the mother should by all accounts be the protective one even though this thing which we never quite see, it is Davis as the father who tries to save it in the end. Even though Davis is only the father in the sense that Joseph is the listed father on the birth certificate in the Nazareth Hall of Records. In fact we're never really sure what caused Farrell to bring this into the world.Fans of gory horror films will love It's Alive, not sure how others will take it.