31 Days of Halloween - Day 4 - Movie 3

Larry Cohen continues his mutant baby saga with It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive (1987). Births of the monstrous babies are a regular occurrence and are now being dumped quarantined on a remote undisclosed island. Michael Moriarty stars as the father of one of these quarantined infants who joins a scientific expedition to the island to see how the babies have developed after five years of accelerated growth. The babies, now as big as adult body builders kill the scientific team, and force Moriarty to sail them towards Florida, where his son, and infant grandchild seek Moriarty's ex-wife, Karen Black.

In concept, this third entry makes for an interesting development in this ongoing story, but in execution it appears that Cohen had a lot less to say with this film than the others. The island occupied by the mutant babies is featured for a very short amount of time, and while the baby monsters get a slight bit more screen time via some stock footage close-ups and some pretty nifty stop-motion animation, the mature mutants don't end up doing a whole lot, and are wisely shown very little. Moriarty is terrific, but the film feels incredibly padded out with lengthy passages on the boat that don't move the story foreward, and even an unnecessary lengthy street brawl which is only there to drive a fleeing girl and her would be rapists into the hands of the mature mutants. This was a real let down considering the promise shown with the first two It's Alive movies.