When I write about remakes, I often bring up the word “justification.” What’s the impetus for the remake’s existence? Reinventing icons for a new generation, or benefiting from a few decades’ worth of special effects advancements? Often, there’s a reason that you can acknowledge and say, “Alright, I see what you’re going for.” That holds in Josef Rusnak’s It’s Alive, which tries to reinvent Larry Cohen’s mutant baby B-movie of the same name in what I consider the worst possible way.

I didn’t say it had to be a GOOD reason.

I’ll start with Cohen’s own reaction to Rusnak’s 2009 update: “It’s a terrible picture. It’s just beyond awful … I would advise anybody who likes my film to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada.” A blunt take, but I agree. Rusnak justifies his remake by diverting drastically from Cohen’s exploitation-y flick about a newborn monster killinPreview (opens in a new tab)g Los Angeles residents, but it’s such a bafflingly weak reimagining. Cohen remains faithful to tenets of creature features while tugging at our hearts with commentaries about parents caught between morality and adoration, whereas Rusnak asks, “What if we punished a mother for trying to have an abortion?”

As Cohen says, cross the damn street.

The Approach

It’s Alive (2009) is one of those women-focused horror projects that make you scoff, derogatorily, “This was written and directed by dudes, wasn’t it?” Cohen’s original screenplay isn’t airtight, yet it does well to respect Sharon Farrell‘s “shaken mother of a monster,” Lenore Davis. Paul Sopocy and James Portolese, on the other hand, pen a screenplay that reductively focuses on Lenore protecting her bitey offspring, with a bent-out-of-shape abortion subplot thrown in. That’s not to say Cohen’s Lenore doesn’t display the same protective maternal instincts, but Rusnak plays in a sandbox of lame-duck tropes, dooming Lenore for the supposed sin of a mother’s love.

Teenage party-girl turned actress Bijou Phillips stars as Lenore Harker, a New Mexico college student who quits to live with her architect boyfriend, Frank (James Murray), and raise their incoming baby. She’s ditching pizza nights and girl talk with bestie Marnie (Ty Glaser), moving into the Albuquerque woods, where Frank has a secluded homestead with brother Chris (Raphaël Coleman), who is wheelchair dependent. Lenore goes in for a pregnancy checkup, where she learns her unborn child has doubled in size, requiring a cesarean section birth. So the surgical team opens her up and extracts “Daniel,” only to be murdered by the newborn, found resting on Lenore’s stomach, taking a post-slaughter rest.

The immediate deviation is how Daniel is found nuzzling Lenore in the hospital, and doesn’t look “freakish” at first glance. Daniel comes home with Lenore and Frank, setting up the happy lil’ family dynamic. It’s no longer a conspiratorial hunt-and-hide scenario; the “home sweet hell” take on Cohen’s original. Which, frustratingly, dissolves the core suspense that Cohen achieves. For Daniel to kill, victims have to come knocking on Lenore’s door, which becomes a repetitive cycle of visitors and hidden bodies that remove any excitement and surprises.

Does It Work?

Rusnak earns points for trying something new. Remakes have historically been less willing to put unique spins on existing stories (see: Cabin Fever). But there’s also a question of retaining the essence of the source material. Why remake a movie if you’re going to spin so far from the original that you don’t even need to use the title? It’s the Child’s Play of it all. If you wanted to make a killer AI toy movie, why use the Child’s Play legacy to do so (outside of market familiarity)?

It’s Alive doesn’t fully abandon Cohen’s ideas, but it does feel thinner than expected. There have been plenty of killer baby movies since It’s Alive—Cohen hardly has the concept trademarked. What’s fun about Cohen’s It’s Alive is how Frank chases his mutant kin around Los Angeles, eventually into the sewer system, culminating in the Los Angeles (drained) river. Rusnak directs what’s essentially a one-location thriller that minimizes the scope to meet not only its lower budget, but lesser ambitions. Where Cohen pushes farther, Rusnak pulls back, losing the idiosyncratic quirks of Cohen’s superior It’s Alive.

There’s nothing wrong with a good chamber piece, but the psychological torments Sopocy and Portolese opt for are soft as fresh-out-the-bag marshmallows. So much of the film hinges on Lenore’s cover-up tactics when she realizes her wee one is a maneater, which becomes one-note in the process. Frank wanders around, ignoring red flags, and Chris is removed from the picture for a small bit to keep the massacre going. In both films, Lenore has trouble turning against her child—but Cohen is much more thoughtful about Lenore’s state through it all. Rusnak’s direction is short-sighted, rudimentary, and flat, as it has nothing interesting to say about the fears of parenthood that drive Phillips’ Lenore to nurture the vengeful child she once wanted to terminate.

The Result

In It’s Alive (1974), Cohen makes a point of referencing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as John P. Ryan’s Frank recalls having the epiphany that Dr. Frankenstein is the villain, not his creation. It’s what drives Cohen’s screenplay, as we learn how the doctors tried to kill the original baby, since its deformities made it look like a melon-headed, fang-toothed freakshow. There’s none of that in Rusnak’s remake, which diminishes the creature’s origins and motives to anger. It’s an uninteresting modification because the point of Cohen’s picture is to question what makes a monster, and how its creators process their hand in the chaos. Rusnak’s not interested in such explorations, except when the screenplay shoehorns what foolishly appears as an anti-abortion undertone when we learn about Lenore’s sketchy internet baby-be-gone pills.

Even worse, the technical merits of Rusnak’s It’s Alive are unfortunate. Credit to the original’s cast, because Ryan and Farrell bring dramatic acting chops that accentuate their film’s tragedy; a legitimate heartbreaker. None of Rusnak’s cast are hitting on such a high caliber of talent, especially since there’s nothing meaty about Sopocy and Portolese’s character designs. It’s very Horror 101: ignore the obvious, act gobsmacked when the obvious happens, and bring it home. Phillips has been better in films like Bully and Hostel: Part II (maybe even The Wizard of Gore), while Murray is your average 2000s straight-to-video throwaway boyfriend. The rest of the supporting cast, sadly, barely even register.

There’s a charm to Cohen’s monster SFX, whipped up by Rick Baker—but also an opportunity. Cohen decided to use this three-mirror-blur vision, seeing through the baby’s eyes to show the beast as little as possible. If Rusnak wanted to make a stronger impact, he could have gone all-in on Daniel’s appearance to say, “Hey, at least we developed a rad creature!” But, alas, Rusnak might show even less of Daniel. When he does appear in the basement, or leap out of a trash can in the film’s climactic finale, it’s CG augmentation that distorts a puppet reportedly crafted by SFX superstar Tony Gardner. Cohen accomplishes infinitely more by putting his then-girlfriend Elaine Parkyn in a full-head monster mask, a pair of pointed gloves, and a partial body suit that benefit from optical tricks—because practical always wins.

The Lesson

It’s not hard to wonder why Millennium Films lost faith in Rusnak’s It’s Alive and opted for no theatrical release. In a time when horror remakes were all the rage, Millennium buried It’s Alive so deep that it’s not even watchable or rentable on streaming (ain’t even worth Tubi). No hyperbole, this remake stinks with the stinkiest of ’em. It’s slight on innovation, filled with awful genre generics, and is a slap in the face to what Cohen accomplished. There’s something so fresh about a killer baby flick that focuses on the suit-and-tie-wearing father, who is forced to challenge the stern, macho gender roles of the 70s, and something so disappointing about a 2000s horror movie that falls right back into outdated mindsets.

So what did we learn?

• Yes, for the hundredth time, some of those 2000s horror remakes are as bad as the haters made them all out to be.
• Ex-David Lee Roth, Ozzy Osbourne, and Alice Cooper bassist Todd Jensen plays Lenore’s doctor for some reason (which I wouldn’t have known without the internet).
• You can appreciate a remake for trying something different, but you can also detest a remake for how poorly it does something different.
• Why does Daniel look like a baby shark (doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo)?

Watching both It’s Alive flicks back-to-back gave me whiplash. When John P. Ryan (as Frank) confronts his cowering, terrified child-monster in the bowels of Los Angeles, I nearly shed a tear. That whole scene really, as Ryan realizes he’s become the Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, and his miserable, deformed boy craves his father’s affection in a time of need. Then you have Rusnak’s film, which brutally kills the pro-abortion character, insinuates Lenore is being punished for trying to abort Daniel early in the pregnancy, and deserves to die with her demon spawn engulfed by the worst CG flames this side of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I just … kudos to Cohen for richly developing a sci-fi curio with a tremendous sense of emotional understanding, and nothing but thumbs down for Rusnak’s remake, which comes off as plenty boneheaded and hella halfhearted in the process.