It’s always fun to go back to B-movie creature features from the 80s to see how filmmakers used to do monsters and gore when they couldn’t just paste them in later with After Effects. Some of that good old fashioned filmmaking goes on today, but it’s hard to pull it off without feeling hokey or overly reverential and derivative. There’s just no substitute for the real thing, and that’s what makes The Deadly Spawn so fun: bad acting, good old rubber monsters, and pools of blood. Unfortunately, it’s the former the entire time, and the latter two for only about 15-minutes. And that 15 minutes is broken up between ridiculously drawn out scenes that don’t really add to a story, just the runtime. The Deadly Spawn could have been cut down to 30 minutes and it would be a sharper, and still equally satisfying film as long as half of that time was the aliens and gore. As it stands, it’s an 80s piece of nostalgia that reminds you how fun films like this were, and then disappoints you by short changing the right parts.
A meteorite crashes down in the woods and brings with it a colony of human-eating worms that grow larger with each victim. After devouring the two hikers that discovered it, the spawn retreat to the basement of a local house where they sustain themselves by eating the string of new inhabitants who move in after the ones before them mysteriously vanished. Eventually, four teenagers catch wise up to the trend and try to put an end to the monsters for good.
The story is there as little more than the bare minimum context to explain a gigantic worm with the mouth of a shark eating people in a dark basement after each explores for about 5 minutes. Everything in between is just a mindless mess that only serves to make us miss the worms and thus rejoice when they arrive back on the screen.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The disc is bursting with extras starting with an intro to the film by Producer Ted. A Bohus, who then reappears on the disc’s audio commentary with Editor Marc Harwood. It’s an odd choice for the audio commentary, and it doesn’t really make for interesting viewing. The film’s casting videos and a gag reel finish out the meaningful video featurettes, with a TV promo being the last. After that you have still extras that include an advance look at The Deadly Spawn comic and an art gallery.
"The Deadly Spawn" is on sale February 7, 2012 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Douglas Mckeown. Written by Ted A. Bohus, John Dods, . Starring Charles George Hildebrandt, Tom Defranco, Richard Lee Porter.
