IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE (1986) Signed archive

Warner Brothers. Softcover/Paperback. Just About Fine. Larry Cohen (screenwriter, director) Consisting of: Vintage original film script. Revised 1/26/86 Printed wrappers, 11 x 8.5" (28 x 22 cm.), brad-bound, mimeograph, 117 pp. (with many pages of undated revisions on blue paper). Boldly signed by Larry Cohen on front wrapper. Just about fine. Approximately 50 pp. of letters sent to Cohen about the production of the film and its subsequent marketing, and 2 letters sent by Cohen, one of them with a proposed cast list, several boldly later signed by Cohen. A reprint of Tony Williams' interview, "Cohen on Cohen", autographed by Cohen. The original IT'S ALIVE (1974) was the biggest box-office success of writer/director Larry Cohen's career, one of the highest grossing films Warner Brothers distributed during the 1970s. Inevitably there were sequels, both of them written and directed by Cohen, IT LIVES AGAIN (aka IT'S ALIVE II) released in 1978, and IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE, released in 1987. The fascination of the mutant babies in IT'S ALIVE ("There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby … It's alive") and its sequels lie in the filmmaker's ambivalent attitude toward them. On the one hand, they are super-strong "monsters", grotesquely fearsome-looking, and homicidal when they feel threatened. On the other hand, they might represent the next necessary step in human evolution, genetically equipped to survive the increasingly polluted world that gave birth to them. The story arc of both IT'S ALIVE and IT LIVES AGAIN is that of initially repelled parents who eventually learn to accept and love their children, even though they are "different." (And that "difference" could be a metaphor for any way in which a child is different from his or her parents, be it skin color, body type, sexual orientation, or religious or political beliefs.) In the first film, there was one mutant baby who was killed at the end. In the second film, there were two mutant babies born to two other sets of parents. As for the third film: "I thought if I was going to make a third movie, I had to follow this story through to some kind of new and satisfying resolution. So, I asked myself some questions: what are these babies like as adults? What is the monster going to look like when it physically develops and ages? I thought those were important questions to answer and deal with. Otherwise, there was no point in making the movie if I was just going to have a load of monster babies running around again, killing people. The second film was, to a degree, different from the first because the protagonists were trying to save the monsters. In the third film, we got all of the monster birth stuff out of the way in the prologue and gave the audience their horror. The rest of the movie was more of an exploration of Jarvis' character and the progress of the monster children. I thought that differentiation from the events of the previous pictures made Island of the Alive a worthwhile project." (Larry Cohen interviewed by Michael Doyle in his book, Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters. BearManor Media, 2015.) Cohen's ISLAND OF THE ALIVE screenplay begins with one of the most conceptually brilliant set pieces to be found in any of Cohen's movies, a courtroom scene whose resolution will affect the fates of all of the mutant babies, born and yet-to-be-born. On one side, we have the Special Prosecutor Ralston (Gerritt Graham) arguing for the State's right to execute the dangerous mutant children -- as it has been doing -- on sight.