It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpent and then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.

The Descent (2005)

If there is any consistent thread you can find throughout the most well-regarded monster movies that premiered after the new millennium, it’s an attempt to bring a classical sense of economy and imagination to a subgenre that had been overtaken by bloat and complacency. While the possibilities of digital filmmaking are utilized, special effects are kept practical, both in the sense of being generally handmade and in that they are cost-efficient and serve a purpose other than showcasing soon-to-be-outdated CGI rigs—that also means budgets are low enough that actual risks can be taken in the subject matter and tone. Neil Marshall’s The Descent is generally held up as one of the best examples of that: here is a horror film based not on impossible effects or haunted house thrills, but a general ratcheting of dread to the point of physical discomfort, one that builds from a grounded place and then introduces its monsters as a form of escalation. This is a return to some of the most unsparing horror of the seventies and eighties, while adding some of its own stylistic touches that mark it as part of a growing movement of bold experiments from genre experts.

Quatermass and the Pit

The original Quatermass Experiment TV serial in 1953 was followed up by two sequels that aired on the BBC throughout the 1950s, all of them written by series creator Nigel Kneale, and all of them eventually adapted into film by Hammer Film Productions (unlike the original, though, both sequel TV serials have been fully preserved, meaning I can actually provide a proper examination of them.) Quatermass and the Pit was the third serial (I’m sure we will eventually return to the second one, the aptly titled Quatermass II), originally airing in six parts from December 1958 to January 1959, near the tail end of the fifties Sci-Fi boom; studio disagreements kept the movie version, also written by Kneale and eventually directed by Roy Ward Baker, in limbo until 1967, when it was released in North America under the title Five Million Years to Earth. There was a different atmosphere for this kind of genre work in the late sixties (2001 would be released a year after this)—but while the time difference led to this being the only Quatermass movie in colour, the story remained intact.

As he did in the original Quatermass serial, Kneale uses the fantastical elements to posit some deeply unnerving questions about the universe we inhabit and the relationship we have with it—what makes us what we are, and can it be altered by forces beyond our control. The extraterrestrial body horror of Experiment is rendered less physical but all the more existential in The Pit, where our understanding of human history, both in cultural and evolutionary terms, is essentially unravelled. Rather than the encroaching aliens seen in the other Quatermass stories, the aliens here have already encroached—an invasion that took place in the distant past, its presence secretly looming over all mankind, until the day when it isn’t secret any more, and we are forced to confront what seems to be a monstrous part of our own nature.

It Lives Again/It’s Alive II (1978)

This month, I’ll be focusing on sequels to movies I’ve written about previously—and while there’s a really tendency in horror movies especially to push out a series of cheap follow-ups made by workman creatives to capitalize on even mild amounts of brand recognition (which was accelerated during the heyday of the VHS market), sometimes you’ll find sequels that have more going for them. Larry Cohen’s 1974 killer baby classic It’s Alive is the kind of simple shock concept that an exploitative producer may want to turn into cheap grindhouse fodder, but both sequels were written and directed by Cohen himself, which indicates to me that the B-movie auteur still had ideas worth exploring. Larry hasn’t led me astray yet!

Even so, the surprisingly human-focused and emotional story of the original It’s Alive seems like a trick that you can only pull once—and I can say that It Lives Again/It’s Alive II does not equal its predecessor on that front. Despite that, Cohen is doggedly intent on actually following up on the implications of the original’s ending, where we learn that murderous mutant babies are being born across America. As one would expect from Cohen, this new story goes in some weird directions, sometimes logically considered and sometimes pure nightmarish grotesque, and the ways it parallels the beats of the first one continue many of its themes while presenting them in a slightly different light. Although escalation is certainly at play here, it’s not as simple as just multiplying the number of monster babies and car chases.

The Mutations/The Freakmaker (1974)

As I was saying before, British horror became increasingly salacious as the years wore on, as evidenced by The Mutations (known in some places as The Freakmaker)—by1974, a typical mad scientist yarn was given additional sensationalist subject matter and multiple gratuitous scenes of topless women. On top of that, it attempts to mash up a storyline swipe from a thriller classic with a barely compatible monster movie plot, just like It!/Curse of the Golem (and, hey, Jill Haworth is in this one, too!)—in this case, that would be Tod Browning’s 1932 cult favourite Freaks, with its cast of real sideshow performers providing authenticity to a bit of drama set at a travelling carnival. Some of the lifts are really quite blatant, too—but a little lack of originality was apparently worth it to make something that could capitalize on the spectacle, and seems to revel in the truly downbeat and icky feeling of seventies exploitation films, even while saddled with a Sci-Fi element pulled right out of the fifties.