Howdy Enemaniacs!

This here is what I like to call a “happy little accident” around here at B-Movie Enema. Last week, I reviewed the cult classic sci-fi horror The Deadly Spawn. This week, I’m looking at the 1990 sort of sequel Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, which is also known as The Deadly Spawn II. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT INTENDED!

If you’re a regular reader here, I’ve mentioned how I was scheduling out the remainder of this year with a bunch of movies that were either in need of a review because they’ve been lying in wait for a long time or they came from the multi-packs of movies I had that played a crucial role tot he start of this blog 10 years ago. The Deadly Spawn was a movie that I wanted to review for a while. Metamorphosis was a movie in one of those packs. I scheduled them next to each other not realizing they were connected.

So, yeah… A happy little accident.

This is NOT a situation of producer Ted Bohus making both movies and opting to rename Metamorphosis as The Deadly Spawn II for whatever marquee value he could squeeze from the earlier film. That’s not the case AT ALL. No, this was originally conceived and filmed as The Deadly Spawn 2: The Metamorphosis. So from conception, this was intended to be a sequel. Production on the film began in 1987, but it ended up taking years to complete due to the massive use of stop-motion creations and the special effects used in the film. It eventually did make its way to home video in 1990.

Interestingly, both The Deadly Spawn and Metamorphosis received better-than-you-might-think reviews. According to Wikipedia, the TV Guide review of this movie came out to be three stars out of five. While kind of lukewarm, it’s better than a lot of direct-to-video or direct-to-cable horror in that era. And, of course, The Deadly Spawn is an all-time great gorefest of the 80s that also gets praise to this day from horrorhounds.

But there’s no time like the present to just jump right into this sequel!

Whereas The Deadly Spawn opened on Earth with the meteorite crashing down, Metamorphosis starts in space. The credits play over a starfield until the Moon comes into view. We swoop around the Moon and set our sights on Earth. This is already a little more ambitious than the first film in this duology.

At a facility called Talos, the nightwatchman is warned of an anomaly in one of the labs. He checks out the security camera to see some sort of ooze coming out from under the door of the lab. When he arrives at the lab door, the thing is going nuts. The doors are shaking and the lock keeps going back and forth between granting and denying access. When the security guard slips his keycard into the lock, it stops the doors from shaking and freaking out, but it does not grant him access.

However, the door does eventually open and one of the scientists comes out all bloodied and messed up.

The scientist dies shortly after, so the security dude goes inside. He looks around but sees nothing. But then, he hears something skittering around. He’s soon grabbed by tentacles and, like with the scientist, he’s ripped up and killed.

We transition to that guard’s home where one of his two daughters is playing grab-ass with her boyfriend while they have a monster movie playing on the TV. The older sister engaged in tonsil hockey with her boyfriend is Sherry. The younger, more rebellious sister, Kim, comes home from a date with a troubled boy. I’m guessing something bad happened to their mother because Kim makes an insensitive comment about Sherry acting like her mother. Sherry’s boyfriend, Brian, tries comforting her by saying Kim didn’t mean anything by it.

Though, frankly, I’m sure Brian, looking as he does in comparison to Sherry, is just playing every single good guy card he can so he can get back to making out with her.

I joke, but that’s exactly what Brian is doing. He tries to resume the make-out sesh but gets shut down. Look, man… I get it. You’re out-kicking your coverage with Sherry.

Meanwhile, back at Talos, two more researchers investigate the lab. He calls a couple guys to deal with this problem. It would appear something escaped. One of those researchers, Dr. Nancy Kane, is adamant that they need to find whoever it is that escaped. She believes she’s come up with a way to revert whoever it was that escaped back to normal. That creature that escaped was once Dr. Michael Foster. The head researcher, Dr. Viallini, is being a bit dodgy with this whole deal. He makes mention that Drs. Kane and Foster had a relationship in the past and that must be affecting her decisions to attempt to catch this deadly monster instead of kill it outright.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Viallini is a bad guy. I mean… Aside from Nancy calling him a cold bastard for making some sort of reference about how he’s going to deal with John the security guard and Elliot the scientist who got messed up by the monster thing, he’s also got a very uppity British accent. And he also smokes in his science office… And he also is probably going to mostly be seen wearing suits while his subordinates wear lab coats and stuff.

Definitely giving off villain vibes.

The two guys Viallini called in are named Mitchell and Jarrett. They arrive to receive movie exposition. Nancy explains that not everything done here at Talos is exactly above board. Whatever it was that they were studying, it was, in fact, highly illegal. At least, according to Viallini. Talos was researching both nuclear power and genetics. The Defense Department brought Talos in to examine and study what the Defense Department called “alien” biological matter. However, Nancy believed it was some sort of mutated biomatter from Earth. Viallini says that they believed they were told about this stuff being alien to hide the fact that perhaps the Defense Department was messing about with a biological weapon of some sort.

The thought behind this was Talos was being used as a testing ground. But for what? Well, the Defense Department was testing their alibi. You see, bioweapons are expressly illegal under United Nations rules. So, if Talos could be tricked into believing this was alien, the United States would be able to avoid indictment. So, you know, typical US Government shit.

But! Here’s the kicker… The Defense Department was NOT lying. This was alien. Dr. Foster was put in charge of this. Dr. Kane was brought in to assist with other studies. Dr. Viallini was in charge of it all. They were the ONLY ones who knew the actual truth.

They say that May 4 was the day the trouble started. In a flashback, we see the lab full of a bunch of different types of creatures from plant life mutated by the alien bio stuff to fish to amphibious creatures. Dr. Foster discovered that there’s no genetic code with these creatures. They don’t reproduce like normal. They just form a mass. He’s not sure what they possess can even be called cells.

As Nancy kisses Michael goodbye, it distracts him and he accidentally pokes one of the mutants he’s working on with a needle. In return, it bites him. The bite is deep, and it begins to instantly change his biological makeup. He tells Nancy to pour sulfuric acid onto his wound, but it’s too late. With the alien biological matter in his system, it begins changing his system into a mutant.

Dr. Elliot Stein is the chief medical guy at Talos and Nancy called him to care for Michael. Nancy reveals to Elliot that what Michael was working on came from another planet. Elliot doesn’t believe it. In fact, he makes snide remarks like how he should change his name to Dr. McCoy or asking Nancy if she’s seen any pods around.

Dr. Stein wants to transport Michael to a hospital for better care. Dr. Viallini denies the request. He thinks they need to “keep it in the family” and make sure there are no others outside of Talos aware of what they are doing in their labs. Nancy believes Dr. Viallini had it out for Michael. Dr. Foster created a retro-clone virus that could seek out and destroy specific chromosomes in people. Michael and Nancy believe this could be used to help find amazing cures for diseases. Viallini turns it over to the Department of Defense to weaponize.

There’s a massive problem with this movie… The first half of this movie is telling us all our exposition in flashbacks. Something happened. Viallini called in these two fixers. Nancy is telling these two guys what the story is to this point. At least we’re getting these vignettes that show what she’s revealing to these guys, but that’s just it… they are vignettes. It’s almost like they have two movies. The first is all this set up with the Department of Defense handing over alien tissue and the stuff infecting Michael and then him escaping. It’s been a long time since we went back to the two sisters who will likely be the leads of the back half of the movie. These just feel like two different movies sewn together.

Now, I will be honest, the monsters in the lab are great. They are gross and goopy and kind of imaginative. In some ways, the little guy Michael was working on, and got bit by, looks like a Boglin.

I praised The Deadly Spawn last week for all these dialog scenes in which we got to know and appreciate the characters before they ultimately got attacked with some even dying. I said that sometimes you just need stuff like that to care about characters and be invested in believing they are normal, everyday people. This movie is the antithesis of last week’s. Here, you have scenes of dialog that are giving us exposition, but not really making us feel anything. It’s unfortunate because I want to like this movie. I want to like the idea of what the deadly spawn could be if it doesn’t eat people, but infect and mutate them instead. I wish this was either entirely the scientist movie or this movie actually be two separate movies.

One day, as Dr. Stein was trying to get a sample from Michael, Michael’s body ejected a small creature that was mostly teeth. It has a singular stinger that injects its prey with venom. However, as Nancy describes it, like a bee that’s spent its stinger, the creature dies and decomposes after it tries injecting its venom.

We do get a quick reminder that Sherry and Kim are characters in this movie when Sherry arrives to find out what’s going on with her father. She explains that he has not been home and it’s not like him to be absent like this without her or her sister knowing where he’s gone. Viallini says that her father didn’t work last night because he called in sick. Nancy does not like Viallini lying about Sherry’s father.

I do gotta give it to the guy playing Viallini. This guy’s name is John Marcus Powell. He was really from Wales and he had a handful of roles in his career. He’s so smarmy and comes off like an upper-class British twat. He’s almost perfectly playing the part of a bad guy. I knew right away to not trust him when we saw him and Nancy for the first time. I like the actress playing Nancy has the other kind of British accent and affectation, the fetching kind. She’s played by Katherine Romaine. Romaine did exactly two things… She played a makeup artist in the Australian musical comedy Starstruck and she was in this. It’s entirely possible she is, in truth, Australian. Either way, we have two accents with two different effects on the viewer.

After Sherry is shown the door, Viallini says that they may have trouble with her, implying she might be in need of elimination.

And speaking of eliminations of the butt kind… It’s back to the fuckin’ flashbacks after Sherry leaves. Michael continues to mutate and transform. The big question that is asked around this point in the movie is where could Michael be? Where could he be hiding? I kind of think we’re spending waaaaay too much time telling these stories and not checking where Michael could have gone. I would have to assume there are, like, security cameras all over the place, right? Michael couldn’t have left. So, couldn’t they just see Michael slithering around the hallways and to a hiding place?

Anyway, I kind of hate this movie?

No, I’m serious. These flashbacks make the movie feel cheap and pretty cheesy. But not cheesy in the way that, say, I dunno… Zombie 3 or something. This feels like it’s simply a cheap-o made-for-TV movie. The movie took three years to be made and released. It feels like this movie’s shooting length caused a lot of reshoots or clever editing. There’s something about Nancy that doesn’t look right in some scenes. Now, I guess the movie’s timeline takes months to tell from when Talos got the samples to Michael and Nancy studying them, and Michael getting bitten, to when he mutated and escaped. Okay, fine.

I wonder if it’s possible the movie was meant to originally be the Talos stuff. Maybe the stuff with the security guard’s daughters was added in later due to not getting actors from Talos for reshoots or continued filming schedule or what. I don’t know. This movie feels incredibly fractured. The charm of The Deadly Spawn is simply not here. The creature effects are great. Michael transforming into a monster is appropriately goopy and gross. This movie has the elements of something great, but it just comes off as cheap and generic.

That’s the shocking thing about this too. The Deadly Spawn was hardly original. It borrowed quite heavily from monster movies of the 1950s. However, it was put together with the right elements of fun, pastiche, appreciation for those old movies, characters you could like and be invested in, and a lot of really good creature design stuff. It’s like seeing all the same puzzle pieces you’ve seen a hundred times before, but when you put them all together in this way, it ends up creating a new picture.

Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor looks and feels like all those other sci-fi monster movies from the late 80s and into the 90s. If you were around then, you’d know what I was talking about. They are all in a lab dealing with shady corporate or military overlords. The movie is almost entirely set in a lab. Most of the shots are very bland and uninteresting. The lighting is too bright. I guess you could say that Metamorphosis sets the stage for what these types of movies would look like in the 90s while also looking like it’s the ripoff.

So we’ve finally caught up to where the beginning of the movie started. Michael’s transformation takes another large leap forward. He sprouts John Carpenter’s The Thing tentacles. While Dr. Stein tries to get a sample or something he could use to sedate Michael, Nancy goes to get Viallini. A wormy creature with a giant mouth and big sharp teeth emerges from Michael’s body. This is when Dr. Stein and the security guard die.

So, here we are… We’ve gone half the runtime of the movie and we’ve only come full circle to the start of the movie.

I do like when we catch back up to the end of Nancy’s story, one of the two fixers that Viallini brought into the office asks, “What do you think this thing looks like now?” Nancy’s only response to that question is that when you see him you’ll know it. I like that they’ve heard her tell this story all day, and they ask a question about what they should look for. Um, dudes? It’s going to be unlike anything your mind has ever comprehended, idiots.

Anyway, Sherry and Brian are trying to figure out what happened to Sherry’s father, John. Well, I should say Sherry is trying to figure this out while Brian is trying to come up with reasonable explanations. He suggests they check the answering machine… something new to the house and that’s why Sherry didn’t think of it before. There’s a message from John’s girlfriend about having drinks. Then there’s a message from John.

Problem solved, right? Shit no. Sherry doesn’t believe any of this. She thinks Talos is holding her father against his will. She says he considered quitting because they were doing all sorts of weird, creepy experiments. She ponders if Talos is experimenting on her father. So, realizing they have John’s keycard, they plan to go into Talos and find out what happened to her father. To fit in, they wear a disguise… Labcoats.

Basically, from this point forward, I feel like this is an entirely different movie. This is some Godfrey Ho portmanteau business. The original idea for the movie was either this segment, or the previous segment, and since the filming of the movie dragged on, new segments had to be written from the ground up and characters related to the seemingly insignificant security guard at the start of the movie are now the stars of the movie.

Mitchell and Jarrett are sent out to hunt down Michael in Talos. Naturally, because of the era in which this movie takes place, they have uzis. They were also told that if Nancy continues to be a concern, they may need to “stage an accident” to deal with her. These two guys, of course, are going to get a chance to see some of the monstrosities created by the mutagen that the Defense Department gave to Talos.

Now, Kim stowed away in the car as Brian and Sherry went to Talos. She doesn’t have a lab coat or a key card so she has to improvise. She hangs her leather jacket onto the railing outside. The security guard checks it out and she sneaks in behind him, locks him out, and steals his keycard. Brian and Sherry get to Viallini’s office where she plans to use her computer learning to hack into some files.

Sherry hacks in while something legitimately funny happens. Like he’s Clark Griswold, Brian is checking out a model of some sort of molecular structure. He touches one of the balls pinned to it and the thing starts to deteriorate in his hands. I actually had a good chuckle out of that. Anyway, the young couple is discovered by Mitchell and Jarrett. Sherry escapes with Jarrett pursuing her while Mitchell is left behind to rough up Brian.

While in pursuit, he sees Kim running away from the decomposing dog mutant that Mitchell killed. Kim runs directly into the Michael Monster. Jarrett tries shooting the creature, but bullets basically do nothing. Jarrett is essentially killed the same way John and Dr. Stein were. Kim escapes and runs into Nancy.

So we have Sherry running through the halls of Talos. Kim and Nancy running through the halls of Talos. Then, when Mitchelle catches Sherry and starts beating the shit out of the girl in a fairly unsavory moment, Brian is now running through the halls and tackles Mitchell only for Mitchell to brutally beat Brian up. As Mitchell tries to choke Brian to death, Michael arrives to eat Mitchell’s fuckin’ head.

Okay, I’m into that.

Unfortunately, Michael eats Brian too. But… Honestly, I’m okay with that too. Brian kind of sucked. He was a total goofball and way above his league pay getting to make out with Sherry. I’m curious how Michael is saved. Let’s be honest, he’s eaten people. He ate the company doctor. He ate a pair of sisters’ father. He ate one of those sisters’ boyfriend. How do you come back from that?

He’s cornered Kim and Sherry in the lab. Sherry tries to get to a cabinet to get acid to attack the Michael Monster with, but he shoots one of his bug creature things at her and then latches on with a tentacle. Michael whips Sherry around the room with the attached tentacle, but Kim gets to the acid and throws it at the monster. Michael tries latching onto Sherry once again, but Viallini distracts Michael by shooting him with a security guard’s gun. Michael attacks Viallini pretty good and kills him. As Sherry and Kim escape, Viallini gets his face eaten and it seems as though Nancy is also killed by her own lover.

You know… I’m beginning to think there’s no saving Michael.

I’m beginning to also think that unless Michael rips your fucking head off, you’re able to survive attacks pretty well. Jarrett arrives in the hallway and tells Sherry and Kim that they are locked in, and that he needs to kill the monster. Jarrett’s blood was splattered all over the walls when we saw him get attacked. He’s barely got any injuries when he shows up again.

He approaches the door to the lab and Michael busts through the door. He’s carrying Nancy and starts smashing her against the wall. So, yeah… she’s dead.

I really do wonder if the movie got stuck in a scenario where the Michael Monster was killing off all these characters and, all of a sudden, someone was like, “Uh… we’re left with two girls who don’t know how to fight the monster. How do we bring this movie in for a landing if that’s all we’re left?” Well, that’s when Jarrett gets to survive. Jarrett, who I might add previously, was willing to beat up either Sherry or Brian, is now the girls’ hero. You see what I mean when I kind of elude to the idea that this movie wrote itself into a corner and didn’t know what to do from here?

So, here’s the deal… Earlier, Nancy told Jarrett and Mitchell about this particle accelerator that could help stop the monster. Jarrett leads the girls to where they can activate the accelerator. Jarrett and Sherry work to get the thing activated. Kim is basically useless so she’s there to stand there and hope for the best.

Naturally, things don’t quite work out as planned. This movie felt like it needed an extra few minutes of runtime. They have to lure the monster onto this very specific spot on the floor before they activate the accelerator. When Sherry hits the button, it doesn’t work and they need two more minutes to keep the monster there on this specific spot on the floor. So Kim, deciding to try to do SOMETHING in this movie, goes to help Jarrett. It works to buy the time they need to charge this beam again. This time, it works, and Michael’s mutation reverses and he’s normal again.

This was the entire plan all along to save Michael. This was what Nancy and Dr. Stein planned to do to reverse the mutation. If they only did it one day earlier, everything would have been fine. But now Michael has killed just about everyone. Jarrett reloads his gun and stands over Michael and calls him a “miserable fuck”. He tells the sisters he has a job to finish and a loose end to tie up. He’s about to pull the trigger when…

Jesus fuck! What is that?!? Michael’s mutation was not fully reversed. His head flips back like a Pez Dispenser and he mutates again into the same monster he was, but this time bigger. Sherry attempts to blast the monster again. This time, she lowers the accelerator beam onto Michael’s head and overloads it. That does it this time and Michael’s head blows up real good. It then bursts into a bright light and his body disappears.

When the girls leave, Brian meets them in the hall. Apparently, he survived being maimed by Michael. As they walk through the halls, there is still one last monster. It climbs into the ceiling and busts through the roof of Talos as a giant monster.

Yeah, this movie is no good. I like the monsters. But the movie as a whole feels disjointed and, as I mentioned earlier, kind of cheap. Half of the movie is told in flashbacks. The second half of the movie features a new set of leading characters to figure out the highly scientific way this monster has to be dealt with. It’s pretty bad if you ask me, and it’s really bad if compared to The Deadly Spawn.

Maybe the biggest glaring problem is this… How did Michael turn into a monster after being bitten by one of the mutated creatures, but when Michael bites people, or they get their skin cut by one of Michael’s little monster lice, why didn’t other people mutate? That’s another indicator of a change of course while this movie was still in production. I understand that could overly complicate the mutant threat. How could the mutant monsters be a scary thing if they bite into someone and it turns them? How could anyone survive if it was that easy to turn a person? So a lack of understanding of the threat and the rules can make this house of cards very uneasy from the foundation up.

There’s almost no charm to this movie and that’s what hurts the most. I can take a shaky understanding of the rules of these creatures. I can understand sometimes needing to shift gears to finish a movie that’s taking years to complete. But when all the charm of The Deadly Spawn has been excised from the movie… that’s a problem. I am someone who can say that charm can trump almost any other nitpick or medium-sized problem. If the movie can charm me, I’m on board with it and will ride with it through to completion.

Metamorphosis seems to not even understand the concept of charm. Sure, Brian is kind of a dufus who cracks jokes and seems mostly useless as a potential hero… human… love interest for college girl Sherry. But you know? We need more than that to charm anyone. I think if we had more time with Sherry, Brian, and Kim, and they were the overarching main characters, then his lighter tone and portrayal would have added to the charm. But we only get half a movie with either cast so I have no grasp on these characters whatsoever.

Sigh…

Well, I’m glad to have seen the movie. I know I’ll watch The Deadly Spawn again and even though Metamorphosis will never be watched again by me, I am not sorry I watched it. But you know what I need to do to reconcile and get back into feeling good about stuff? I need to call on an ooooold friend. Next week, he’s back… Oh yes.

Norman J. Warren is here to save the day with his 1979 sex comedy Spaced Out!