It’s Alive! (1969) is, I fear, dead on arrival. Featuring stilted dialog, overwrought acting, a flashback sequence devoid of dialog and encumbered with awful music and the occasional deliberately blurry scene (the whole flashback cost me a significant portion of my lifetime), a protagonist with no sympathetic characteristics (and, in fact, I initially had him tagged as the antagonist), and a monster so absolutely awful that it’s worse than the skeleton monster in the deliberately bad (and recommended) The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001). Add in a plot hole involving how the hostage of the antagonist can easily sneak into the cage of some recent prisoners, yet they cannot follow her out (what?), and this movie is only worth alcohol and laughter.
Yet, to be fair, the true antagonist of the movie, a farmer and exhibit owner (where did he get the monkey in the middle of New York?), is actually not bad. From his predilection for sadism, both emotional and physical, across his ever so slightly misshapen face, to, finally, his absolutely wretched hair, he is both evil – and believably evil. He’s no Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi, and sometimes his acting gets away from him, yet this was a character I’d really rather not run into in a dark alley.
Oh, but the killing of the first protagonist … oh oh oh … so awful.
