Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema!

This week, I decided to go back to the first half of the 80s for a movie that was made on a really small $25,000 budget but turned out to be much better than most would expect on such a small amount of money. Let’s talk about 1983’s The Deadly Spawn. The origin of the movie came from producer Ted Bohus back in the late 70s. He got the idea after reading a National Geographic article about some seed pods that were found and recovered from the Arctic. Obviously, it sounds an awful lot like the all-time classic sci-fi movie The Thing from Another World, but this real life scientific discovery fueled Bohus and he got right to work on a creature design for an eventual movie.

Originally Bohus thought about a rubber suit that would be worn by an actor, but when John Dods, an associate producer and effects director for the movie, was brought in, his imagination was also put into overdrive. He came back with a bunch of alternate looks and the primary creature that would be used to spawn her deadly offspring that is in the movie. From that, the money was raised and they brought in director Douglas McKeown to bring everything to life.

Prior to making The Deadly Spawn, Bohus was an associate producer on the 1980 film Fiend and was an uncredited producer on 1982’s Nightbeast. Both films were directed by Don Dohler. Director Douglas McKeown had an interesting path to this film. He started out as an editorial coordinator for ABC-TV in New York City. Then, he spent some time as a high school teacher. Curiously, he was the teacher of a few prestigious people like director Richard Wenk of The Equalizer fame, David Copperfield of magic and Epstein Island fame, and Tom Ruegger, one of the creators behind Animaniacs. The Deadly Spawn would be McKeown’s only film he ever directed. He would also script dramatic recreations for the 1996 movie The Watermelon Woman which is now part of the Criterion Collection.

Before we get into the movie, one more person whose career launched with The Deadly Spawn as a production assistant was Tim Sullivan. Sullivan was only 15 years old when he got the opportunity to get involved with this movie through Dods being the art teacher of Tim’s brother. Later, Sullivan would go on to do the remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 2001 Maniacs which got some decent praise in 2005. In 2011, he did my favorite segment of Chillerama, the section with the gay werebears in the 50s.

Alright, let’s get into this 80s gory creature feature classic!

This movie waits for no man to get his popcorn and Raisinets before it gets right into the plot. After all, the movie is only 78 minutes in length. We don’t have a moment to lose. One night, in a secluded campsite on a quiet night, a meteor crashes to Earth. Two campers investigate and one of them is so excited that he needs to grab his camera and get a picture of it. While he’s back at the campsite, the other guy is killed by whatever hitched a ride on the meteorite. Whatever that was follows the amateur photographer back to the tent and kills him in a bloody mess too.

What killed these unfortunate fellas? Well, we see a silhouette of a creature that looks to be mostly teeth and tentacles inside the tent. I’m guessing that’s the monster that did it… Or Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors… Or maybe it’s a Piranha Plant.

And so The Deadly Spawn is off and running. This is a movie that certainly does not mess around with getting things going. If I had to guess, it’s the influence of 50s creature features on display here. In those older movies that also ran between 75 and 80 minutes in length, there was no time like the present to bring the monster to Earth so they could get the action going as quickly as possible. It draws you in by seeing the monster arrive and killing the first people it comes into contact with, and then you can begin telling the rest of the story.

At some point later, we meet a family in a house near where the meteorite came down. We have the parents, Sam and Barb, and their children, college student Pete, and the younger of the two kids, Charles. Pete is interested in science while Charles is keen on monster movies. When Sam goes out to get the morning paper in the rain, he fails to recognize that the basement window is open. When he goes downstairs to check out the water heater, which is currently not working, he sees the water in the basement. As he continues to look around to see where the leak is coming from and relight the water heater, he finds a whole lotta blood in the basement floor drain. Then, he’s soon pulled to the floor where the alien monster begins eating him.

Whenever the monster eats someone, you always hear this ripping and tearing sound that is quite gnarly.

Barb, while watching the thunderstorm and having her morning coffee and cigarettes, realizes that Sam went to the basement to work on the water heater and never came back. Apparently, she and Sam were preparing to go on vacation, so she wanted to get a shower, get dressed, and hit the road. So to see why Sam is holding things up, she goes into the basement. She misses there is blood on one of the pipes running along the ceiling of the basement, but she does see the blood on the lightbulb. She finds one of the galoshes that Sam put on to traverse the water-logged basement, asks what is going on around here, and when Sam’s hand lands on her shoulders, she thinks she’ll turn around to see her husband.

What she finds instead is the toothy mouth of the deadly spawn EATING his hand!

But, oh man… It doesn’t stop there. The monster rips at Barb’s face before gobbling her up too.

A short while later, Pete and Charles’ aunt and uncle, Millie and Herb, wake up to discover a note Barb left in the kitchen saying she and Sam have already left despite the storm raging outside. Barb closes the basement door and goes about her business as if nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, Charles is watching monster movies in his room. Pete wakes up to a call from his buddy Frankie. Pete decides to invite his friends Frankie, Ellen, and Kathy over for a study date while it’s storming. Later, they can go hang out and have some fun.

I kind of LOVE that we see the entirety of this phone conversation with Pete talking to Frankie. In one way, it’s mundane. However, in another way, we get a real feel for Pete’s personality and his kind of common sense attitude toward science. “If houseflies originated on Jupiter, how come it has the same nucleic acids and makeup of other life on Earth?” He tells Frankie that science fiction is called that because that’s what it is… fiction. If his buddy’s going to study with him, he must stick to the facts and ignore people who tell fantastical stories.

Meanwhile, Charles just likes dressing up in monster masks and trying, unsuccessfully, to scare Aunt Millie and read issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland at the breakfast table.

I think another thing that makes this movie so great is how we follow that scene with Pete on the phone with Frankie with another fairly mundane scene with Pete, Frankie, Aunt Millie, and Uncle Herb eating breakfast. They are having just normal conversations among family members. Millie talks about having to go to the kids’ grandma’s to help with a party even though it’s storming outside. Herb is talking about wanting a chance to talk and hang out with Charles. Herb telling Pete that he’s already a scientist as long as he operates with the scientific method even though Pete is only majoring right now in a scientific field. I also like they don’t pin down what science Pete is studying. He’s just a scientist and he majors in science.

The specific reason why Uncle Herb wants to hang out with Charles is that Herb is a psychiatrist and he’s heading to a conference. He wants help from Charles because there’s going to be a discussion of child psychiatry and he thinks Charles’ fascination with monster movies would be interesting. He asks Charles what his favorite monsters are. He likes The Mole People, Frankenstein, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Herb asks if he thinks Charles is scared of running into one of these monsters in real life. Charles says no. He likes them so much because he knows they aren’t real. His nightmares are about people chasing him and he isn’t afraid of the dark. This kid is fucking rad.

An electrician shows up to do some work at the house. Millie left a note to go around to the cellar door around back. Naturally, that’s going to put the electrician right in line to be eaten by the monster in the basement. Charles also gets the idea to scare the electrician with one of his scary masks. However, when he goes downstairs and looks around with the flashlight, he doesn’t find the electrician. He finds an awful lot of blood everywhere. He also sees two more things – a womry thing squirming around and a disembodied hand.

As he reels from trying to figure out what it is he’s seeing with that hand, he touches something slimy. That’s when he realizes he’s touching the big giant monster that ate his parents. When he drops the flashlight he’s holding, he sees the electrician dead at the base of the big monster and the monster’s little sluggy offspring eating the guy as if it’s feeding from a teet. The monster then spits the head of his mother out and it rolls to his feet.

Something very important is also learned by this interaction. As long as Charles doesn’t make sounds, the monster can’t attack. The creature and its offspring are blind. They don’t even have eyes. The reason why it ate the people it did up to this point was due to them making noise.

Upstairs, Ellen and Frankie have arrived for the study date. Ellen reveals something they found on the way over… One of the slug babies. They look like the pilot fish that preceded the arrival of Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One. Pete and Ellen try to figure out what it is. Is it a worm that has mutated? Is it a fish of some sort? Is it a deformed lamprey? Pete says there just is no such thing as these types of creatures, but, as Ellen says, here it is. It has to be something.

Ellen decides she wants to dissect the thing to learn more.

Meanwhile, I’m going to assume that Charles is having some peculiar feelings. On one hand, he’s face to gnarly face with a real, true-to-life monster. On the other, that monster’s slub babies are eating his mother’s face… literally. Not only that, for all her life, Barb was pro-slug baby monster. She never believed for a moment the slug baby monster would eat her face. The kid is just sitting there watching the monsters tear the face off his mother’s skull. He doesn’t react. He doesn’t make a sound. He just… watches. But the worst is that the lug monsters are getting outside to go out into the world.

Ellen dissects the specimen she and Frankie found. While Frankie paces the hallway outside the bathroom where Ellen cut it open, Frankie believes he saw the monster at the landing of the stairs. Pete refuses to believe it’s from outer space. He’s positive there’s no way it could have come from space. After all, he wants to follow the scientific method. However, isn’t Occam’s razor also a possible thing to run experiments against?

Pete is sweet on Ellen and he’s growing more and more frustrated with her kind of continued humoring of Frankie’s space monster hypothesis. Yet, she can’t deny that the insides didn’t look right. In fact, they didn’t just not look right, they didn’t make any sense.

Millie arrives at her mother’s home. Outside, the slug babies are starting to head through the front yard to the entrance of the home. One is also coming up through the kitchen sink. While Millie’s mother’s friends arrive, the slug babies infest the place. One climbed into the food processor and gets mixed into a sauce that the party guests realize tastes nasty.

I cannot understate enough how much I like the non-monster stuff going on in this movie. Again, it would come across as superfluous silliness or stuff that get in the way of monster action, but I argue it actually has the same effect seen in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. In that, we spend a lot of time with the characters getting to know them. As they are attacked or picked off, it affects us as viewers. It’s because we got to know them. We got to see them as almost real people and not lambs for the slaughter. No movie can exist totally on monsters eating faces. Not a Jason movie, not The Deadly Spawn. So these scenes with an old lady talking about how much she likes gorillas, her friends bringing over interesting food creations, and science majors flirting with each other… they make me give a shit. I want to see the monsters eating people’s faces, but I also want to care about whether or not one, or any, of these old ladies will survive the attack.

Everyone at Bunny’s lunch party is getting bitten and attacked by slug monsters. Millie turns out to be something of these creatures’ Rambo because she starts ripping them off the old ladies and starts stabbing the shit out of them with a fireplace poker. She leads the charge for the old ladies to escape Bunny’s house and pile into a station wagon for safety.

Back at home, Charles is figuring out how to move among the deadly spawn monsters in the basement. Upstairs, Pete decides he wants to show Uncle Herb the creature Ellen found and dissected so they can get his opinion on whether this is an earthbound creature or an alien. Turns out Uncle Herb is going to be of no help. That’s because many slug monsters have ripped out his eyeballs, eating his throat, they’re ripping through his torso, and cut off his hand.

When they run out of the room, they are met by the big momma monster who chases them through the house. Charles is able to yell “STOP!” at the momma monster to slow it down so his brother ran his friends can get away from it. Charles rigs a radio to attract the monster, but the monster destroys it relatively easily and moves on.

Meanwhile, Kathy arrives for the study date. She comes in, goes upstairs, and knocks on the door of the bedroom that the other three are hiding in. When Pete lets her inside the room, the momma monster attacks but only gets her coat. I do like that Kathy has the best line in the whole movie. After the monster attack, she gets pulled into the room unharmed and she just shouts, “What the fuck was that?!?” Pete then worries about Charles. He wants to know if Kathy heard him when she came in. Frankie’s like, “Yeah, I just want to get out of here.”

Pete decides they need to go to his room where he has a phone they can use to try to call for help. Also, he hopes he can find Charles as well. When they open the door to make a run for it, the momma monster is waiting for them. It immediately splits the four friends up. Frankie and Kathy are forced to go to the attic, and Pete is left in the hallway. Ellen initially stays in Charles’ bedroom to lock herself in, but soon the momma monster starts busting down the walls and opens the door.

Then Ellen gets it… pretty bad.

But, see, again… Because we got to know these characters through some of those longer segments of dialog scenes, I actually am quite bummed out that Ellen is dead. One of the main heroes of the movie, Pete, had been crushing on her for a while. Now he finally got his kiss from her earlier in the movie when she confirmed she’s not into Frankie. Now she’s headless in a pile of death on the ground outside the house and everyone can see her. That’s harsh, man.

Also, it’s pretty ballsy that early on in the movie, the monsters killed Charles and Pete’s parents. I’m not sure that’s something we see too often throughout the history of horror films. When Pete goes out onto the roof to see if Ellen’s fine and if he can get to his room to call the police, he sees his parents’ car in the garage. He realizes now they never left and they must be dead. Pete is now pretty damn distraught and wants to go downstairs to basically get got by the monster. Frankie and Kathy both try to stop him, but it only causes the monster to come and try to bust into the attic.

But Charles has a plan! I’m telling you, this kid’s fucking awesome. Earlier, when he tried to scare Aunt Millie with one of his costumes, he used some flash powder to create a burst of smoke. Now he gets the idea to do this again but sacrifice one of his monster masks and foam heads that it sits on to create an explosive. Charles is nearly eaten by the monster as he tries to lure it over to him, but when the monster chomps down on the prop head, it explodes when Charles plugs the wire he used as a charge into the outlet.

The house is no longer the home of the momma monster. Later, once the word has gotten out about the monsters, locals started hunting the baby slugs and the mid-sized monsters by killing them and burning them. Kathy and Frankie recover from their traumatic experience in the back of a police car as Pete is taken to a hospital in a catatonic state. Charles seems to be doing just fine because he’s rad. Millie returns to see the mayhem and basically take over as Pete and Charles’ new mom. Also, she’s widowed. That’s something that totally happened too.

In time, it seems the locals have wiped out all the monsters. Things seem to be getting back to normal. A deputy who is stationed by Pete and Charles’ house gets on the radio to talk about the various sizes of these things the cops have seen the locals pull out of bushes and out of the ground. That’s when the ground begins to shake and out from a hill next to the house, a completely full-grown monster emerges revealing these things get real freakin’ big.

The Deadly Spawn is truly a masterpiece in low-budget creature feature fun. On the surface, you might think this movie is silly and beneath your notice as a moviegoer. However, there is more going on here than meets the eye. It may be influenced by a real story about finding something in the Arctic. Yet, it’s also incredibly clear Ted Bohus, Douglas McKeown, and John Dods were influenced even more so by the 50s monster movies they likely all grew up seeing either in theaters or on TV.

The bones are all there of what you would have seen 30 years earlier in a 50s sci-fi movie. The alien threat arrives in a secluded rural area. It primarily attacks one specific group of people until it does finally spread out. It uses puppeteered creature creations and, as seen above with the house, miniatures that look fantastic. It builds the case around actually liking the characters we are following so we do end up caring when bad things happen to them. There is not a single character in this movie that I want to see something bad happen. This movie has imagination. It has a spirit of fun. It’s a great way to spend 80 minutes.

You know what? Let’s keep the sci-fi theme rolling for the rest of the year! Next week, we go to 1990 for another sci-fi horror film. I’m going to look at Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor. Now, some of you may already be doing the Leonardo DiCaprio meme of pointing at your screen, but I want to tell all of you who recognize how perfect that’s the next review… it was a total accident that Metamorphosis is the follow-up.

To understand what I mean by all of that, why not come back next Friday to see what the connection is and why people get why it’s the perfect follow-up review!