tlavideo.com

Review

It's official: 1983's The Deadly Spawn is the greatest no-budget science fiction/horror film of the 80s, or at least the greatest one many of you out there have never seen.

Shot in suburban New Jersey for $20,000, Deadly Spawn is in possession of such an imaginative and inventive genre sensibility that it not only transcends its budgetary limitations, but also even manages to exploit them to lend the film greater individuality and unique character. The real star of the film is undoubtedly the alien creature effects by artist (and co-screenwriter) John Dods (still oddly impressive in all their rubbery glory over twenty years later in the era of CGI), and indeed the film utilizes these teethy invading monsters to great effect. But director/co-writer Douglas McKeown's film (if one elects to utilize this possessive auteur classification; apparently the production was principally the brainchild of co-producer/co-writer Ted Bohus, and indeed, McKeown did not finish the film) also distinguishes itself through the creation of a specific, identifiable environment that plays host to this alien invasion: Deadly Spawn unfolds in a recognizably lived-in mid-Atlantic suburban home (actually the house of co-producer, and famed fantasy illustrator, Tim Hildebrandt), and the movie does an admirable job making the settings and characters feel comparatively authentic and human – not generally an accomplishment reached by many indie genre films of the era.

The story concerns a group of hungry intergalactic carnivores settling in within the basement of a home dominated by a science-fixated high school student and his science fiction-crazed younger brother on a single rainy afternoon, and the film definitely generates additional audience identification value through making two probable viewer surrogate figures its leading protagonists. And then there are the effects: the apex of early-80s low-budget foam latex-and-slime creature FX, the creatures of Deadly Spawn (also released as Return of the Aliens) are undeniably entertaining for genre fans (ditto for the severed heads, alien-eaten corpses, and shredded faces that also comprise the film's bloody special effects) – and one sequence involving a septuagenarian women's vegetarian luncheon has to rank among the genre's grisly and blackly comic highlights. An admitted adolescent favorite of this writer's, Deadly Spawn has withstood the test of time with flying crimson colors, and is highly recommended for those who prefer their horror raw, blood-drenched, and thoroughly 80s.

Travis Crawford