Sunday, February 24, 2008

The Deadly Spawn (1983)




The Deadly Spawn aka Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn:

Over the top gore and disgusting alien creatures make a winning combination in Douglas McKeown and Charles Hildebrandt’s low budget drive in flick. The alien, which strongly resembles the killer venus fly trap from Little Shop of Horrors, reproduces asexually and spawns thousands of little eel like creepy crawlies that slither and fan out across the countryside, a gag imitated countless times in dozens of B-movies since the films conception in 1980. Which films spawned, inspired, or copied the various creature designs and sight gags contained in The Deadly Spawn is a discussion in itself. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then the artists behind this century’s horror films hold each other in higher esteem than those of any other film genre.
This film was originally released in the early 1980s by Continental Video in an oversized video box as Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn, but has been re-released on DVD by Synapse as The Deadly Spawn. The DVD features audio commentaries, deleted scenes, and picture quality far superior to any version previously available on VHS. Hats off to Synapse for giving a cheesy old monster movie the tuxedo treatment.

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