I was returning Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets to Videodrome the other day and there were a couple films I saw in horror section that caught my attention. One was The Deadly Spawn, which I remembered coming across uploaded to YouTube earlier. As an ethical matter I want to pay creators for their work and I was already there, so I rented it.
Now to review it...
The Plot
A meteor crashes to Earth, bringing with it a predatory alien (according to a prequel comic in the DVD extras it's a bioweapon) that chows down on some campers and then hides away in a basement. It proceeds to snack on anybody who comes down while spawning (hence the title) lots and lots of little monsters. The family living in the house above goes about their day, but it becomes increasingly obvious there's a problem.
The Good
*The concept of a family going about their day (a visiting uncle is preparing for a psychology conference; the older brother is having friends over to study) while being completely unaware there's an alien monster lurking in their basement is clever. I also liked the atypical protagonists--a bunch of college science students and retirees rather than typical dumb teens just waiting for Jason to kill them.
*The filmmakers, especially early in the film, are pretty clearly following the Jaws principle of never showing their monster. There are shadows, silhouettes, and partial glimpses, as well as blood spattering from kills, but it's not until around a third in that we see the big kahuna. Given how cheap the creature ends up looking, that's wise.
*Although they didn't have the resources to make a decent-looking monster, the creature design and concept is pretty cool.
*There are some interesting character dynamics, like two characters who are conspiracy theorists and another who's a skeptic--and did I mention there's an incipient love triangle? They play well off each other.
*Not going to go into more detail for reasons of spoilers, but it does have an epilogue showing just what happens after the events of the film that's slightly amusing.
The Bad
*The acting simply isn't very good. In the opening sequence where a couple campers get mauled, they don't seem to be putting much effort into emoting or delivery. The main cast is better, but not by much, and lesser characters who appear later in the film (an old ladies' luncheon from hell) are about as bad as the campers from the beginning. It's not impressive at all. Taking a look at IMDB, most of the people didn't seem to have been in anything else, or only in a small number of films. It would have been a lot better if they'd just consolidated the cast.
*The main characters aren't really built up well, so I didn't really care much about whether or not they ended up monster chow or not. Note that I don't use any of their names in the review--there's a reason for that. :(
*The movie takes too long to get anywhere, despite its relatively short runtime of 78 minutes. There are many overlong shots that are increasingly-obvious padding, especially toward the end.
*The monster-puppet is cheap-looking and not very good.
*The lighting isn't very good. Half the time one can't see anything at all, especially at night or in a darkened basement. Done well, shadows can be spooky, but this just looks cheap and poorly made. There are several occasions where the film is straight-up blurry, which doesn't help.
*There's a major moment relatively early in the film where a character would be literally dead meat if the monster acted like it did earlier, but it was uncharacteristically unaggressive. This is intended to reveal the creature is blind and hunts by sound, but I didn't get that at the time. And what seems like a prolonged standoff lasts so long that one wonders why nobody noticed the character is missing.
*There's some really weird camerawork and editing.
*The monster is pretty big, but not only can it move very quickly, but also very quietly as the plot demands.
The Verdict
Some good ideas, but very poorly executed. Don't bother unless you really like cheap 1980s horror films. If you really want a good creature feature from that era, watch the original Gremlins or Slugs instead. 3.5 out of 10.
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