Tropical Teenage Mutants

The mutant claw babies from It’s Alive (1974) and It’s Alive 2: It Lives Again (1978) go on spring break to a tropical island paradise and have many madcap adventures, like the time mutant claw baby #2 gets drunk on tequila shooters, throws up on a palm tree and passes out. His buddies duct-tape him to a Ski-Doo™ and give the keys to a mischievous monkey. Um, sorry – I was paraphrasing from a script I wrote for the first It’s Alive sequel.

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) begins eight years after the first “incident” (people ripped into Shredded Wheat™) with a court trial arguing to let the mutant claw babies (now mutant pre-teens) the right to not be shot in the face, and live on an island away from society and its “rules.” The judge agrees. Yes! The system works if you let it.

But that hard-core baby-hater Lieutenant Perkins (from the first movie) wants the mutants eliminated and goes to the island under the false pretext of helping one of the dads find his claw son. His real plan: to shoot them all in the face. What Perkins doesn’t know is the mutant claw babies know the island like the back of their, uh, claw, and turn the paradise retreat into an…ISLAND OF BLOOD.

Even with various face-ripping, gut-ripping and shirt-ripping, III is not nearly as good as the first two It’s Alive movies. Nevertheless, I’m somewhat impatiently waiting for It’s Alive IV: The Claw Is Family. In outer space. Hey, everyone likes outer space, so it could be BIG box office.