The happily married couple Eugène and Jody Scott are eagerly making preparations for the birth of their first baby when Frank Davies, the unfortunate father of the first monster-baby adventure, comes to their house to warn them that their child will be a malevolent creature. He succeeds in convincing the parents that the baby should be born outside the hospital, where doctors and police men are going to kill it right after leaving the womb... After a hectic escape from the authorities, Eugène and Jody flee with their to a secret observation institute where already two companions in distress are homed. Larry Cohen's successor to his own mini cult-classic "It's Alive" is a lot more appealing than I first feared! Here, even more than in the original, Cohen gives a human and dramatic angle to the story by focusing on the initially perfect family situation of the Scotts and examining this exact same relationship afterwards! The result is a touching social drama in which the monstrous baby is secondary to the agony of parents left behind! "It Lives Again" only turns into an exciting horror movie half way through, when the 3 ferocious babies break loose and start a murder spree again. Especially in this second half, Cohen proves his brilliant horror-directing skills by suggesting a whole lot...but showing little. The kids' birthday party is an excellent example of this! This sequel is less blackly humorous than the original and it looks like the gore-budget was even smaller than four years earlier. Yet, I found it more tense than the first, with some ingeniously, but simply conceived shock-images such as the babies crawling slowly under sheets. If you're a fan of cheap B-horror and if you're familiar with the other marvelous work of Larry Cohen ("The Stuff", "God Told Me To", "Maniac Cop"...) you should definitely give this a try. I'm going to check out the final chapter "Island of the Alive" soon as well and I hope it equally entertaining.

After the Davis baby is destroyed, others begin to appear around the country. The second film follows a renegade group of people (including Frank Davis from the first film) who are trying to prevent the government from killing the mutant babies. But at what price? Along with Frank, we now have the Scott family: Eugene Scott (played by Frederic Forrest, best known to me as the Nazi Surplus Store Owner from "Falling Down") and Jody Scott (played by the lovely and undercast Kathleen Lloyd). And the Scott family doesn't like it when you try to kill their baby! Oh, and the makeup effects of Oscar-winning Rick Baker again.

This film picks up pretty much where the other left off, give or take a few months. Where the first one pushed the message of chemicals affecting unborn babies, this is more of a family message: parents should love their children regardless of who or what they are. If your child is a criminal or autistic, they're still your child and you should defend and love them, not let the government exterminate them.

There's also a really subtle subplot about child molestation. Although never explicitly shown, there is good reason to believe molestation is occurring between an adult and a child family member. (I won't say who, but you should notice it as hints are dropped multiple times.)

This film is paced better than the first one, and the attacks are a bit more often and slightly more gruesome (though by no means graphic). Going from a PG rating to an R was a good move, though they didn't push the rating as much as I probably would have liked. And a really strange thing happens: Frank Davis becomes known as "Frank Davis". Not "Frank", not "Mr. Davis"... but "Frank Davis" every time he is mentioned. It seems unnatural, as if somehow he is a celebrity that needs to be highlighted, like TV's Patrick Duffy or something.

Although I liked this movie better than the first one, it relies heavily on the first one to understand it, so you're really stuck having to watch both if you want to "get it". The recurring characters and source of the mutants won't make sense unless you see the original. But by all means if you liked the first one, watch the second... and if you liked this one, watch the third.

It's been a while since I've seen a movie that kept me this off balance while watching it and trying to understand the motivations of the characters. The Scott's in particular (Frederic Forrest and Kathleen Lloyd) are alternately receptive to and then repulsed by the idea of loving a mutant monster baby. Though I haven't seen the picture that inspired this sequel, I'm pretty convinced at this point that there's no reason for me to seek out "It's Alive"; the idea that the series produced yet a third picture is even more disconcerting. In fact, I may not be able to view another film with John Marley in it the same way again, seeing as how he made this one after finding a horse's head in his bed.

It's interesting however when a movie almost forty years old brings to mind how things accepted at one time would never be broached in the same way again in more modern times. I'm thinking about that opening scene when Jody Scott (Lloyd) and Eugene (Forrest) are trying to figure out who Frank Davis (John Ryan) is at their baby shower party. Exhausting all possibilities, Mrs. Scott finally asks her husband to go find out if he's queer. Gasp!