Evil Spawn (1987)

The Hollywood studio machine eats people up and spits them out.  We all know this.  It’s understood as a given for anyone entering the world of cinematic celebrity.  Aside from those who get involved in drugs and murder and sleazy sex/religious cults or whatever, there is the omnipresent threat that at any moment, the phone may stop ringing because you have been deemed too old.  The difference between the former examples and the latter is that people have no choice in the aging process.  We begin dying the moment we’re born, and careers in Hollywood tend to die very prematurely indeed.  I think (I have no hard evidence for any of this, mind you) that an actor or actress knows that their career is on the downswing the moment they receive a screenplay wherein they will be playing the parent of one of the main characters or worse the grandparent (or – Horror! – scripts for television movies).  And women get it worse than men, clearly.  Men are said to get distinguished with age.  Men mature.  Women age, and the shelf life for a top actress who can headline a film and put asses in seats (who are scarce enough to begin with) is shorter than that of a mayfly.  It’s not uncommon to be considered over the hill by the time an actress is in her thirties.  It’s no wonder that they cling in desperation to their careers by getting all manner of plastic surgery done.  The sad irony is that said work typically makes them look more cartoonish than if they had simply allowed themselves to grow old with grace.  They make of themselves a freak show, and one thing that people love to watch is a freak show (celebrity or otherwise).  I believe we’re all culpable to some degree or another in this cultural perpetuation, but to go into it and all of its permutations at any length isn’t why we’re here, so I’ll be brief.  We moan that older actors and actresses get shit parts in shit films, but how many of us would pay for a theater ticket to see a big budget film with Diane Lane playing the lead role?  Don’t lie.  The vast majority of people would either wait until it hits video or cable or pirate it off a torrent site, if it even hits their radar at all.  How many studio executives would take a chance on a project like that?  Very few, if they value their tenuous jobs.  Though the occasional bright light does shine through this darkness, these glimmers are few and far between.  All of this ties into the Kenneth J Hall (Ted Newsom and Fred Olen Ray are also listed on IMdB as directors, but if memory serves, only Hall is credited onscreen) schlockfest Evil Spawn (aka Alien Within aka Deadly Sting aka Alive by Night aka Metamorphosis).  It just does very little to save the film.

A space probe brings alien microbes (which are actually quite large for microbes as I would define them and so not actually microbes at all) are brought to Earth to be studied.  Evelyn (who pronounces her name like He-Man villainess Evil-Lyn and is played by Dawn Wildsmith) murders a fellow scientist (apparently in his garage-turned-laboratory) and takes the microbes back to her mentor Dr. Zeitman (John Carradine who really struggles just to get through his scene; I felt bad for the man, frankly), who also promptly croaks.  Evelyn approaches aging actress Lynn Roman (Bobbie Bresee, thirty-seven years old at the time this was released) with an anti-aging serum derived from the microbes, and once Lynn reaches her snapping point and decides to take the drug, the beast that has been raging inside her is finally unleashed.

Okay.  From the above synopsis, the film’s plot probably doesn’t make a ton of sense.  That’s because the film doesn’t make a ton of sense.  Characters come and go just because.  Plot threads are brought up, scarcely tied into the main plot, and then completely forgotten.  The characters all act extremely dumb and/or whiny.  The world these people exist in is entirely unbelievable, even if you look at it through the lens of trash cinema (though doing that would likely make the film a bit more palatable).  Not one of these people are motivated by anything other than plot conveniences.  The picture’s story is almost a total lift of 1959’s The Wasp Woman (and if you want to read about a seriously messed up end to a starlet’s career and life, look up some information on Susan Cabot sometime) an, to a lesser extent, both versions of The Fly, but at least in those films, the characters pretended to do something every now and then.  The lion’s share of Evil Spawn is Lynn crying about her career, bellyaching about the movie she wants to be in, and being hopelessly untethered from reality a la Norman Desmond but not nearly as interestingly (and Sunset Boulevard is another influence on this film, though Billy Wilder likely spins in his grave every time this film is screened).  Even at seventy minutes long, this film outstays its welcome.  It’s like waiting for a boring guest to leave, then he says something that briefly piques your interest and snaps you out of your stupor, but then you swiftly realize that they’re still depressingly tedious, and go back to counting the seconds until it’s all over.  The only thing this film has a plenitude of is naked women, and they are certainly attractive enough, each and every one.  Just not enough to make sitting through this whole thing worth the effort.  There’s also some gore and a relatively decent monster costume (especially impressive if the estimated thirty thousand dollar budget is to be believed), but again, it’s just too little, too late.

Outside of the fear of irrelevance embodied by Lynn in her bid to stay in the spotlight is the motif that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  Her biographer (Ross Anderson) is essentially a meathead.  Her boyfriend Brent (John Terrence) gives the impression he doesn’t want to be seen in public with Lynn, and is cheating on her with some floozy (who he brings to Lynn’s house just so they can both become victims…I mean, just to get a little action).  Her agent (Fox Harris) is a two-faced slimewad, who dicks Lynn over for a younger client.  Her producer pal (Mark Anthony) lets her have it with both barrels when she all but begs him for a role in his next big movie (“No amount of diffusion can take that away,” re: Lynn’s wrinkles).  Naturally, there’s only so much a woman can endure, and since almost all of these characters are so deplorable and/or bland, we can’t wait for Lynn to “Hulk out” and start laying waste to them.  We’re in her corner, because she’s the victim.  Normally, audiences love films like this, but our main character in this one simply isn’t sympathetic enough for us to give a shit about her travails.  Sadly, it makes the creature/murder scenes little more than bathetic rather than cathartic.

MVT:  The only reason to watch this is for its exploitable elements (read: nudity and blood), and even then I would likely just recommend trying to find a condensation of those scenes without all the other shit.

Make or Break:  The death of Elaine (Pamela Gilbert) is the highlight of the film for a few reasons.  One, I think she’s the best looking woman in this film.  Two, she’s stark raving nude when it happens.  Three, the blood streaming down her back and into the crack of her ass does actually make a great image, all things being equal.  You got me on that one, Mr. Ray.

Score:  3/10             

Demonwarp (1988)

A minister (John Durbin) reads the Bible to his horse whilst trekking along a trail (his extremely clean “Old West” costume is the only indication we get that this is set before the turn of the Twentieth Century [okay, and the fact that he’s reading the Bible], because a subtitle would have been too tricky to put on screen, I suppose) when he catches sight of a “meteor” which crashes to earth nearby.   Cut to: a bright, sunny day, at a cabin in Demon Wood (duh duh DUUUHHHH!), where Bill (bulletproof check casher George Kennedy) and his doting daughter Julie (Jill Marin) are playing a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit™ when a Bigfoot-ian creature bursts through the door, roughs Bill up, and kills his daughter before dragging her corpse off into the unknown.  Cut to: a van full of idiots, including Jack (David Michael O’Neill), nephew of the owner of the aforementioned cabin, wending its way through the woods to investigate (unbeknownst to all but Jack and his girlfriend Carrie [Pamela Gilbert]) the expanding circle of weird goings-on in the forest (including the disappearance of said uncle).  Horror wants to ensue!

And so we come to Emmett Alston’s Demonwarp, an interesting premise in search of a good execution.  It’s set up initially as a slasher film with an animal (even though we can call the Bigfoot an alien, considering the prologue, but it still acts like an animal) as its villain (most precisely, the one we see the most).  It has the group of horny young people going out to a remote location to be killed in gory fashion.  It has bare female breasts galore (including two belonging to the lovely [and wasted, unless you count her boobs, though it could also be argued that they are the long and the short of her, if one were inclined to be a bit mean about it] Michelle Bauer).  It has a crazy old coot, trying in vain to warn the youths away from the area.  It has POV shots from the monster’s perspective (and I’ll get back to this later) as it stalks its prey.  And this got me thinking.  In many ways, a creature feature isn’t all that different from a slasher movie.  Both have antagonists who pop up at the worst possible times to dispose of irritating characters.  Both have antagonists who represent unknown quantities.  Both have antagonists who are non-verbal in the main (characters like Freddy Krueger and the more charismatic baddies notwithstanding), and in this way are even more inscrutable.  After all, if you don’t know why bad things are happening to you, they seem more tragic (this being based on the notion that most people believe that they are, at heart, good people).  The thing that should separate them is the human psyche, yet the way characters like these are regularly portrayed, there is little indication that such exists outside of the impetus for their individual geneses.  The Bigfoot in this film is not going to answer questions and develop a relationship with Jack like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.  The Bigfoot is irrational, animal, primal.  So, the Bigfoot (or something like the bear from Grizzly, let’s say) are essentially the same as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and both types can then be viewed as universal/natural forces.  They do what they do, they do it very well, and they are inescapable because their victims exist in the villains’ world.  

Another aspect that the film plays with is the concept of fanaticism.  Jack is fanatical about solving the mystery of Demon Wood.  Bill is fanatical about killing the Bigfoot.  The two characters are identical in this way, but they don’t trust one another, fanatics tending to be a bit paranoid.  This fanaticism reduces Jack and Bill to the goal of their myopic quest, and it removes them from the normal world.  They become loners, and, distanced from humanity, they become a bit deranged.  Of course, Kennedy is about ten times (maybe more) the actor that O’Neill is, so it’s possible that Alston and company were trying to delineate the interior conflict between Jack’s crusade into the Bigfoot’s world and his desire to escape from it with his friends and return to the ordinary one.  It doesn’t work, because O’Neill plays Jack as so intense and unlikable (he snaps at Carrie and Cindy [Colleen McDermott] no matter what they say, no matter how much sense or nonsense they talk) that not only do you not want to follow him to the culmination of his journey, but you kind of wish the monster would just appear and rip his head off so that the film would just end.  There is also the fanaticism of the minister, but his fanaticism is purely religious in nature, though, like Jack and Bill, his narrow world view allows him to be lulled in by what he believes to be an angel, though the alien villain (hint: not the Bigfoot) is in actuality a “devil.”  The zealotry of his believer’s mind ultimately makes the minister do evil, because he has essentially met God (to his mind), and since he was devoted to this deity before it asked him to sacrifice human beings (and, of course, there is at least one story with sacrifice at its center in the Bible), it is just a short trip from faithfulness to maleficence (a theme which feels all too easy to believe in the face of what we know about and learn more of in our non-cinematic reality).  All this said, that Jack is allowed to live, even though he doesn’t come to any revelation about his shortcomings, makes no attempt to change himself, and is still a grade-A peckerwood by the time the film ends, makes the film less satisfying than it was already.  His arc is a flatline.  

I’ve said often that POV handheld camera shots do not work all that well when used for an extended period of time (Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake being the two notable exceptions that always spring to my mind).  In horror films, they tend to work even less, since we know that they are either going to be false (a cat jumps onto a character’s back or whatever) or exactly what they appear to be (yet still somehow unsatisfying in their predetermination).  The effectiveness of this technique varies by filmmaker, and I can confidently say that Emmett Alston is not a director who should employ POV very often, or even at all.  That’s the problem.  Just about every two minutes of Demonwarp, we get either shaky handheld POV shots or shaky handheld shots of legs running or walking (sometimes both).  You may think I’m exaggerating this.  I’m not.  In fact, I may be underestimating the frequency of these occurrences.  I’m guessing that the filmmakers thought this would keep pacing up and build some tension in the stalking scenes.  Instead, it becomes swiftly redundant to the point that I actually groaned every time I saw yet another of these shots (though it does give us Kennedy swinging an ax in direct address, so that’s one in the plus column).  This level of (what I can only surmise is) naiveté, which can be charming even in junk movies, is herein merely annoying, and worst of all, boring.  This is yet another example of a film that has everything I like (mashing up pulp horror and science fiction and revenge and survival genres, amongst other things), but is so breathtakingly dull, it’s a chore to sit through.

MVT:  The Bigfoot costume (and other creature effects), courtesy of John Carl Buechler, are solid fun.  Unfortunately, like a twig placed under a hunk of pig iron, it just can’t hold up enough of the picture to make any of it worth one’s time. 

Make or Break:  The scene where Tom (Billy Jayne of the late, lamented Parker Lewis Can’t Lose television series) goes full Jack Nicholson not only made the large vein in my forehead begin to throb, but it also made me want to grab my television and stomp it to death for showing me this travesty.  Thankfully, the latter never came to fruition.

Score:  3/10