It's Alive

A good half of It’s Alive is taken up by empty talking and unnecessary scenes. Cohen was a proficient Hollywood practitioner, and he was able to engage Bernard Herrmann and put together an attractive poster, but constructing an interesting story and engaging the viewer were beyond his abilities. The film has an original idea with a born murderous mutant and parents who struggle with remorse on the one hand and parental attachment to the child on the other hand, but none of this is utilised as a functional psychological motor for the film. And the horror scenes are B-movie cheap. (02.05.2021)

It’s not that bad. Cohen could, of course, have made a stifling psychological horror film about the dark side of parenthood with this premise, but instead of Eraserhead he went for an undeniably softer and grittier whodunit. Although the direction is surprisingly focused and quite engaging in the beginning, gradually Cohen gets narratively unhinged – not so much by what happens on a scene-by-scene level, because that's mostly boring, but by how the story unfolds and how darkly it ends. A murderous toddler unsuccessfully chased by the entire police force, a father with a raging parental existential crisis, and a last sentence that hints at the beginning of Armageddon and the endangerment of civilization. Don't have kids, there's enough of us already and they're gonna eat us! 65 % (22.04.2022)