YMMV / It's Alive

• Awesome Music: The original film's score is by none other than Bernard Herrmann.
• Broken Aesop: The killer babies aren't to blame for their condition, but the theme of innocence must be protected loses its meaning when you consider that the babies are still extremely dangerous and unpredictable on the same level as a rabid or otherwise dangerous dog which have to be put down for the good and safety of everyone around them.
• Narm Charm: "What's wrong with my baby!?!"
  • In the teaser for the second film, a narrator who sounds bored out of his life utters "The It's Alive baby is back again . . .only now there are three of them."
• Nightmare Fuel: This 30-second TV spot with a quiet, matter-of-fact delivery by a soft-voiced narrator is plenty unsettling, even though all you see is a rotating bassinet with a little claw hanging over its side. Although, for some viewers, the narrator concluding the spot with "Rated PG" may be a bit of Nightmare Retardant – when the film came out in The '70s, a PG rating was a sign that you were going to be seeing something at least a little bit edgy, whereas nowadays it's more typically a warning that nothing of interest to an adult viewer actually happens in a film.
• Paranoia Fuel: Stay away from the maternity ward.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Frank and Eugene in the sequel. Frank is trying to warn potential parents of the government's plan to kill the mutant babies in an effort to atone for failing to keep his baby from being killed by the police. After he dies, Eugene takes up his mission in atonement for killing his own child. As well-intentioned as they might be, however, it doesn't change the reality of how dangerous the babies are.
• The Woobie: The baby. It's neither a sadistic serial killer nor a remorseless monster, but simply a frightened infant, mutated by corporate greed into a vicious beast and robbed of any semblance of a normal human life by science gone wrong.

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