THE DEADLY SPAWN

Directed by Douglas McKeown. United States. 1983.

I adore campy sci-fi horror films. I grew up on them. If I wasn’t gobbling up slasher films and kaiju mash-ups, I was devouring every scrap of cornball 50s and 60s sci-fi I could find. If there were cardboard UFOs on strings, I was happy. Men in rubber suits terrorizing the cast? I was ecstatic. I could subsist on a diet of alien invasions and giant insects run amok. Toss a rubber-headed monster into any cheap-o potboiler, and I would fall in love. Sure, some are (far) better than others, but sci-fi, horror, and a healthy helping of cheese go together wonderfully. They’re the cornerstones of any nutritious cinematic diet.

THE DEADLY SPAWN, Douglas McKeown’s $25,000 wonder, opens with a classic sci-fi set-up. A meteorite crashes to Earth. Two campers go to check it out, only to be messily dispatched by an unseen, carnivorous invader. We then meet Sam and his wife Barb. They live in a tiny model house in the middle of a matte painting. The couple climbs out of bed on a very rainy morning. While Barb struts around in a see-through nightie, Sam heads into the basement to check on the water heater, unaware that the hungry, hungry alien has slithered into town and crawled through his open basement window.

Barb heads into the basement to check on her husband, and gets her face torn off by the alien for her troubles. Unlike most monster movies that hide their beastie off-camera until the final act, McKeown isn’t shy about showing off the alien terror. Created by special effects maestro John Dods, the titular Deadly Spawn is a wonderfully disgusting creation, a fleshy assemblage of mouths and necks.

Dods' bag of tricks included puppets, hand-operated animatronic heads, wire gags, and copious amounts of stage blood. The effects work, while not on par with something like Carpenter’s THE THING, are ambitious as hell and chock full of personality. The wriggling, slug-like offspring of the Mother Spawn are gross and vicious, and the way they scuttle through the water like fat, toothy eels makes my skin crawl.

We’re next introduced to Sam and Barb’s children: nerdy science student Pete and his younger brother (and monster-movie super fan), Charley. Also crowded into this small three-story house are Aunt Millie and Uncle Herb, two relatives who’ve popped by for an extended visit. None of these people heard Barb’s blood-curdling screams coming from the basement. Scope is one of the victims of this film’s super low budget. Damn near the entire film will occur in this one house. Ear-shattering screams and characters disappearing for long stretches of time are things you need to overlook for the movie to work. Spatial relationships are tenuous at best.

“It looks like it’s going to be a bad day”, the radio announcer says as it continues to pour rain outside. Aunt Millie heads to her friend’s house for a luncheon. Pete’s friends, Frankie, Ellen, and Kathy, will be coming by later to study. Charlie pulls a prank on his psychologist uncle, to no real effect. Uncle Herb decides to use Charlie as a subject in his study. He asks him questions about his interest in monsters, questions like “how real are they to you?” Anyone who grew up loving horror films and monster movies will probably have flashbacks during this scene. We’ve all been called nutty at some point in our childhoods. Uncle Herb is just being exceptionally nice about it.

An electrician stops by to work on the breaker box in the basement, so Charlie, having left Uncle Herb to nap in an easy chair, decides to scare the bejesus out of him. He dresses up in costume and heads down into the now-flooded basement, only to find the electrician’s corpse - and his mother’s disembodied head - being snacked on by dozens of baby Spawn slugs. Charlie quickly realizes that the monsters are blind and hunt by sound. He watches as the slugs chew through electric lines, swim in the murky water, and get killed by mouse traps. They don’t seem especially intelligent. Just very, very hungry. Charlie stands still as a statue, waiting for a chance to escape. This won’t happen until the third act, so… Best of luck, Charlie. See ya in 40 minutes, pal.

Ellen (aka the cutie pie Pete is in love with) and Frankie arrive with a dead baby Spawn that they found outside. Naturally, being complete nerds, they dissect it. Frankie claims it came from outer space, but Pete, the scientific realist, rejects the possibility. Meanwhile, more baby Spawn escape the house by crawling out the basement window and swimming up drain pipes. A few manage to infiltrate Aunt Millie’s luncheon, snacking down on old women’s feet and legs. In a GREMLINS-esque moment of gross humor, a slug crawls into a blender full of herbs and greens. It’s ground up and served as a treat to the party guests, none of whom appreciate the delicacy. Pete and friends head downstairs to show their find to Uncle Herb, but find him dead in the easy chair, literally being eaten from the inside out by dozens of Spawn babies.

Everyone retreats upstairs, the clatter and commotion attracting the mama Spawn in the basement. Finally free, Charlie uses his Tommy Jarvis-level interest in special effects to MacGyver a contraption to fight the aliens, while Pete and Co. cower for their lives upstairs.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. Kathy, the fourth wheel, doesn’t need to be in this film. No matter how many times I watch THE DEADLY SPAWN, I always forget who she is, so when she pops up literally seconds before shit hits the fan, it throws me off. Every single time, without fail, I have to pause the film and think back. Who the hell is this Kathy chick? Oh yeah, they mentioned her 35 minutes ago in a single throwaway line of dialogue. That’s right. It’s Kathy! Duh. It doesn’t help that new girl Kathy RedShirt survives the film while poor cutie pie Ellen has her head bitten off and her corpse yeeted out a second-story window. I do not approve, film.

Also, the second act crawls. Once Charlie gets trapped in the basement, relatively little happens. We have a long, unbroken phone call, scenes of old women decorating, and sci-fi gobbledygook conversations about the feasibility of alien life on Earth, none of which is particularly interesting. Like THE ABOMINATION, another low-budget sci-fi winner about something creepy and gross hiding in a suburban house, THE DEADLY SPAWN is really at its best when it is actively concerned with its namesake. Pete and Ellen’s burgeoning relationship might be cute in another film, but here it just gets in the way. I want aliens, dammit.

Thankfully, we get them. Lots of them, in endlessly wonderful sequences of stalking, chewing, biting, sucking, and slithering, all building up to one of the all-time greatest final shots in low-budget sci-fi/horror history. The final act of THE DEADLY SPAWN is world-class cheese, riddled with ridiculous, glorious moments like POV shots from inside the monster’s mouth or buckets of alien guts being launched into the faces of gob-smacked actors. The ending is both gloriously absurd and insanely depressing, which I love love love with the heat of a thousand suns. One minute, we’re stabbing aliens with screwdrivers and using fake heads full of explosives as alien-killing traps, and the next we’re hunting down aliens with the locals, a la NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Pete ends the film borderline catatonic, and Aunt Millie finds Charlie in the backyard. “Are you alright?” she asks this poor shell-shocked child while picking stray bits of alien guts off his face.

THE DEADLY SPAWN is just fun. It’s a lightweight, low-cost schlock machine, full of brilliantly devised gags and some really effective horror moments. In terms of gore, it full-on delivers the goods, with its snaggletoothed monstrosities laying waste to everyone and everything in their path. If you ever wanted to watch a group of old women swat at plastic slugs at a lunch party, this is the movie for you. If you like having fun, this is one of the best low-budget wonders around, a real treat for the sci-fi/horror enthusiast.