"It Lives Again" (1978) d/ Larry Cohen

Before he got freaked out by tigers in Apocalypse Now (1979), before Nic Cage romantically rendezvoused with Deborah Foreman in his health food store in Valley Girl (1983), and before he dealt in queer-stomping Vietnam jungle boots in 1993's Falling Down, Frederic Forrest lent himself to this second installment of Larry Cohen's micro-budgeted belligerent baby trilogy, 1978's It Lives Again. Also on board here are Kathleen Lloyd, who you'll remember foolishly swore at Satan's sedan in The Car (1977). She also starred opposite seventies teen dream, Leif Garrett, in Skateboard (1978). John Marley, of The Godfather (1972), Deathdream (1974), and even The Car (1977) fame, adds more dramatic validity to this effort than it deserved, really. Still, we press ahead...


"You see Mork leave the planet last night? Nanoo-nanoo, man...", quips Frank Davis (John P. Ryan).
As the Scott's (Kathleen Lloyd, Frederic Forrest) watch the last of their baby shower guests leave the premises, a lone hanger-on named Davis (John P. Ryan) relates his awful story (see: It's Alive (1974) for details) to the couple, warning that they, too, are on the dawn of becoming parents to a homicidal mutant with a penchant for neck-chewing, and the government has been secretly monitoring their pregnancy with full intent to abort the feisty little rascal with a flurry of bullets the second he enters the world. It would seem that Davis is in cahoots with a group of doctors who see untapped potential in the bellicose babies, and have two other gore-geous little bastards caged up for monitoring and experimentation at a location to be named later. Leading the charge of infant-snuffing cops is a fellow named Mallory (John Marley), who seems to derive special joy from extinguishing the mutant babies' lives for some unknown reason, and his zeal unwittingly gets him held at gunpoint by Davis at a hospital full of cops and SWAT team members before he can carry out another death sentence, even clearing an escape route for the rogue doctors' eighteen-wheeler birthmobile. Of course, the Scott's little fanged darling is miffed-in-a-minute ornery from the outset, and never met a throat he didn't want to pounce on and gouge open with his muscular claws n' teefers.


"...I snuck a teething ring in when the c.o.'s back was turned. I'll let you chew on it for a loosey."
When Jody ducks out of a theater (just as Bruce Lee's about to snap Jackie Chan's neck in Enter the Dragon (1973), too. How fuckin' cool is that?) to hop a city bus to meet up with her husband at the aforementioned location, her purse has been bugged by her own mother, who's adamantly anti-monster and working with the coppers, who are zeroing in on the morbid secret nursery coordinates by the minute. Meanwhile, the other two monster babies (Adam and Eve, lulz) aren't much in the mood to crawl through a maze in the hideout basement for analysis, and break the fuck out like the measles, chomping any neck in their path, and causing the usual one or two drops of blood associated with such attacks, by now. The Scott baby martyrs Davis in the woods after he helps the child escape the safe house before they can flood the place with gas, wasting his two mutant siblings in the sudden raid and further polarizing his parents; mom wants to show him love, while pop has sided with Mallory and company, eager to baptize his new son with bullets. How does it all wind up? That's for you to find out when you hunt down a copy for yourselves.


"Scott, this is Kevin...my bike is broken. Can you help me? Ovah."

I picked this one up on a double disc with the even worse second sequel, It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1988). Must be a sliver of masochist in me, after all. Cohen, who offered up blaxploitation gold in Black Caesar (1973) and it's rapid-fire sequel, Hell Up In Harlem (also 1973), would go on to take the chair on efforts like God Told Me To (1976), Q (1982), and 1985's The Stuff, unforgettable stuff, indeed. You'd definitely think FX God Rick Baker had grown too large for a production like this by 1978, having already tackled projects like King Kong (1976) and Star Wars (1977) in the four year interim between the 1974 original and It Lives Again. Apparently not. Still, the man would again give us jaw-dropping, eye-popping stuff in genre classics like Altered States (1980), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ghost Story (1981), and even Videodrome (1983), so let's not make too disparaging an adjudication on him here. On the rating scale, It Lives Again matches the score of the original, an impressive feat if said score hadn't been a single Wop. But it was. And it still is. Approach with caution.


"I'll whack you execution style if you don't turn off Anne Murray already...", warns Scott (Frederic Forrest).

"The Children" (1980) d/ Max Kalmanowicz

I do believe I've chainsmoked enough cigarettes by now, so let's kick off another week of shenanigans with another review, already, shall we? Tonight's feature, an obscure little bit of drive-in horror/camp filmed in Massachusetts, comes from a fellow whose only other credit in the director's chair is a 1984 fantasy about "dream travel" shot in Wisconsin, and serves as a harsh reminder that everything you found creepy as an eleven year old watching late night television in the parlor may not hold up under the scrutiny of adulthood. As if the claymation six fingered hand that introduced Chiller Theater on WPIX-11 wasn't enough, I spotted the thirty second tv spot for Children during a commercial break, and most likely spent the early morning hours scouring our tree-lined backyard for peering creeps afterwards. Then, the movie completely disappeared for me, until the advent of home video a few years later, and any unease the teaser trailer may have left me with as a boy was replaced by howls of unintentional laughter, as a teenager.


"...and then I jumped on stage and hugged Peter Murphy like this, while they played 'Bela Lugosi's Dead'...!"
If there's a more repugnantly dim town of Jimmy Carter-era cinematic adults than the goofs that populate the normally cozy New England burg, Ravensback, I'm not sure I've ever seen it... so when a stray gaseous, yellow cloud of radioactivity that escapes the local nuclear plant (yeah, oops.) envelops the town's school bus with a handful of pre-teen urchins aboard, wide-eyed and eager to learn, effectively transforming them into little, grinning zombies who cook human flesh with a toxic touch of their black fingernails, is it really any fucking wonder? The sheriff (Gil Rogers), who's enlisted to find the now-missing children, couldn't find his own asshole with a full search party and bloodhounds, and his deputy (Tracy Griswold), who's more concerned with carousing the local jailbait than locating missing youths, somehow can't follow the growing trail of barbecued adults to the ghoulish, murderous pedo-perps.


Charles Bronson and Jill St John on a Krokodil bender? I dunno.
Little Janet's mom, Dee-Dee (Rita Montone, of "Maniac"(1980) and "Bloodsucking Freaks" (1976) fame), doesn't seem overly concerned with her missing child, burning spleefie topless by the pool, while her meathead boyfriend also has few fucks to give on the subject. Another hug-happy mini-ghoul's parents are sedated lesbians, and then there's the straight arrow Freemonts, John (Martin Shakar, Travolta's priest brother from "Saturday Night Fever" 1978) ) and his pregnant spouse, Cathy (Gale Garnett), who apologizes to her swollen womb when she smokes a cigarette. I'll give you one hint as to who eats radioactive hug-spawned death, and who makes it to the final reel, and it's none of the alternate liberal families, as these pint-sized killers have an ultraconservative homicidal agenda, it would seem. Conventional zombie-dispatch lore is ineffective, as bullets do nothing to the killer kids, whose sadistic spree can only be stopped by bladed amputation of their poisonous mitts. Yeah. They have to cut their hands off. Go ahead and think about that for a second. I sure hope Cathy's forthcoming baby is only born addicted to nicotine, and not toxic hugs with gothy fingernails of death. Yeah, you can fill in the blanks.


C'mon in, kids, the Circus Peanuts and candy cigarettes are on me, today!"
Distributed by World Northal, a company primarily known for stateside theatrical release and television syndication of just about every chop socky kung fu movie in the late seventies, and showcasing a score by no less than Harry Manfredini, whose soundtrack work in another independent horror movie around the same time would immortalize him in genre circles (ki ki ki...ma ma ma...), the film also interestingly boasts of an appearance by Gale Garnett, who provided the sultry voice for femme fatale,  Francesca,  in 1967's Mad Monster Party? and won a Grammy (!) for her folky one-hit wonder, "We'll Sing in the Sunshine" three years prior. I've got a funny feeling that if you asked her, her work on The Children might not stand as her proudest cinematic accomplishment to date. Still, it's a fucking hoot if you're sitting around drinking beers and tearing up bad movies with your buddies a la those snarky sci-fi guys with the robot puppets whose names all elude me, at the moment. On the scale, I couldn't possibly give Children more than the woeful single Woppo. The three Wop movie streak is officially over. Approach with caution.


When a seemingly harmless dinner of beans and franks goes terribly wrong...

"Bloody Birthday" (1981) d/ Ed Hunt

Anybody know if there was an eclipse on October 5th, 1969? The vein of earlier killer kiddie classics like Village of the Damned is well tapped in tonight's review,  from the director who sent Christopher Lee into the far reaches of outer space long before George Lucas did, with 1977's Starship Invasions. Watching this movie is like hitching a ride in Mr. Peabody's WABAC Machine for somebody like me who's somehow matured into a reasonable adult after a similar childhood to the demonic little scapegraces on the screen. If you happen to be from my old neighborhood during this era: Eff you, I cop to nothing. If deviously remorseless ten year old's ( portrayed by Billy Jacoby/Jayne (who's older bro Scott was Bad Ronald), Elizabeth Hoy, and Andrew Freeman, respectively) hunting down the likes of Susan Strasberg and Julie Brown like game animals in eighties gear doesn't appeal to you, then you're probably on the wrong website.


Remember MTV's two Julie Brown's? I always dug this one's wubba wubba wubba's over "Downtown" Julie's.
In 1970, three babies are born synchronous to a solar eclipse in California, with Saturn's astrological blockage leaving each child void of any real emotions or remorse. After nearly a decade has passed, we revisit the children as their tenth birthdays approach only to find that they've added insidious homicide to their play habits, as a young couple trying to enjoy cemetery sex soon find. Voyeurism is also a favorite, as we see Debbie earning pocket change by allowing Curtis and Steven (Wait, one's even named Steven? Spoooky.) to peep on her older sister, Beverly (Brown), as she mirror-dances with her buhhuhbas out. Timmy, a young peer, figures out the trio's propensity for wrongdoing after they lure him into a nearby junkyard and lock him in a discarded refrigerator. Debbie's father, the sheriff, is marked for a fatal accident on the steps, but when he steps over the strategically placed skateboard, Steven brains him with a baseball bat, instead. Their teacher, Ms. Davis (Strasberg) begins to catch on to their destructive vibe, but Curtis puts a slug in the woman's back in an empty classroom, for her interference.


"No, I don't know what a skull fracture feels like, honey, why do you ask?"
Timmy's older sister Joyce (Lori Lethin) suspects the kids, but at their collective birthday bash, they fool her into thinking they've laced the party cakes with ant poison(!!), thus, making her seem like the unhinged one to the whole neighborhood. When Beverly stumbles upon her little sister's scrapbook of newspaper clippings concerning their growing list of crimes(!!!), she eats ocular arrow-driven death for her nosiness. Finally, Debbie asks Joyce and Timmy to babysit her, an elaborate trap that fails, getting Curtis and Steven subdued for the police while the devious little girl manages to escape. At home, Debbie tearfully implicates her partners-in-crime to her mother. At the crime scene, we see Curtis shoot a disturbed look at his failed last victims from the back of a police cruiser as it pulls away. Elsewhere, we see Debbie's mother rehearsing her daughter's new alias with her, unaware that she's already dropped a car on a local auto mechanic nearby, killing him...


Take it from a former little bastard: These are little bastards.
You may remember Lethin from her genre work in fare like The Prey (1984) and 1987's Return to Horror High.When Julie Brown wasn't shaking her nude melons for ten year old boys, she was making funny music videos like "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun".At least, it seemed a lot funnier before antisocial water heads started shooting up schools on a regular basis. Still, there's always Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), right? If you're plum tuckered out by the vast number of by-the-numbers 80's slasher flicks out there, this one might just provide the spark to enliven your appreciation of the sub-genre, all over again. Three wops, and a recommendation, say I.


"C'mon, Julio, this is no time to fall asleep under the rear axle with preserves on your face..."