Wednesday, January 16, 2013

It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive

Larry Cohen – 1987 – USA

Don’t ask me to explain the title.  Yes, it’s the third film in the series, but how the mutant babies began to be called “the alive” instead of just described as being “alive” is a mystery that the film doesn’t explain.  But who cares about all that?  This film is so joyously insane that it’s hard to hold anything against it.  In a perpetual state of lunacy, Michael Moriarty plays the father of one of the sharp-clawed, razor-toothed, blood-thirsty babies that gets sent to a leper-color-like island with others of its kind.  Some years later, it’s time to return to check on the monsters’ progress, and Moriarty goes along because he feels a strange compulsion to take responsibility for his abandoned offspring.  Naturally, much more mayhem than harmony ensues as the party invades the island in search of specimens.  What I mostly like about this movie is that it extends the theme brought up in the earlier films, albeit in a much more satirical way.  The mutants are suspected by scientists of being an aggressive development in human evolution, partially induced by pollution and/or atomic radiation.  The new race not only appears spontaneously in normal human wombs, but also murders as many humans as it can get its hands on immediately after being born.  We are doomed.

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