Return of the Aliens' Deadly Spawn

Return of the Aliens' Deadly Spawn (Also known as Return of the Aliens: Deadly Spawn, with a colon, and simply The Deadly Spawn) is a hellaciously good and gory splatterific sci-fi horror flick with lots of toothsome alien nasties grown huge, and little in the way of actual plot or story to ruin things. It stars no one you've ever heard of or ever will, and was made by nobody on a budget of nothing. It features the world's most dopey bluescreened countrified house landscape shot, and then we proceed to an alien lurking in the basement, making people into bloody rags. A lot of gore, a lot of gruel, a lot of slime, and wiggly Gigeresque tadpole creatures who look as if they might have burst out of John Hurt's chest in 1979.

A couple gets eaten by the alien, who came in on a comet or meteorite (the prolog features two campers who, much like the ill-fated Jordy Verril in Creepshow (portrayed so excellently by Stephen "Steve-O The King" King, whose character becomes a walking second-cousin to Swamp Thing), find a meteorite they are too clueless to just leave alone. Out comes the alien, who is like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, but with rings of sharp splatter movie alien teeth.

Another couple, the Uncle or some shit, lives unaccountably with the people that become alien food, and their son is a Danny from Salem's Lot rip-off character whose walls are festooned with "Famous Monsters" horror movie posters, and who has a collection of rubber masks, Dracula dolls, what-have-you. He's a little horror and monster fantasy freak, and so he brought the corruption in, dig? (He spends the latter half of the film wearing a symbolic plastic devil cape. At least, I would call it symbolic.)

The older son and his two friends are like aspiring research scientists, and so they dissect one of the little squishy extraterrestrial parasites and the female of the bunch gets killed, which I suppose is unfortunate because that straight-to-video romance was just blossoming. Like so many others, though, she loses her head, only in this case, for real.

The special effects are cheapjack and dimestore--nonetheless, the film has a crude, sickening effectiveness, and a way of inducing anxiety in the viewer. When, for instance, a gaggle of old women gets together for a vegetarian lunch, the alien spawn attacks attaching themselves to varicose-veined legs in huge, snake-like twists of bloody red and oozy, slimy green. And the viewer is thinking, "Yeah, I know it's fake. It's making me grossed out and uncomfortable all the same."

Because such films play on our social fears, phobias, and anxieties, Deadly Spawn takes a few cues from better films, such as the echoes of Night of the Living Dead at the end. A weird scene where the Uncle seemingly interviews his son as a psychiatrist, talking about his fascination with monsters and horror, seems to suggest that such interests are abnormal, UnAmerican, and probably part of a Soviet master plan (this was the early Eighties, after all), and the invasion by these aliens grown ever larger, like living tumors with teet, is in the basement or subconscious crawlspace of all-American suburbanites--who just happen to have a very strange, sort of mixed-up living arrangement between two families.

So what crawling, flesh-eating horror lurks in the basement-dwelling of YOUR mind, eh? Is it something that threatens the natural order of Mom, Dad, Junior, Sis, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet? Is that where the horror originates from? Wherever it comes from, it's most definitely not just a menace from outer space. Nor is it the infernal doings of little boys who love their comic books and monster magazines. To say it is is a cop-out. We have to own up to what's crawling in the darkness, the "Beast in the Black" (to borrow the title of my favorite episode of "Greatest American Hero"). For if we don't, that thing may come to devour us, the Star Spawn NOT of Cthulhu, but of our implacable selves.

Written and Directed by Douglas McKeown.

Starring: Charles George Hildebrant as Charles , Tom DeFranco as Pete , Richard Lee Porter as Frankie , Jean Talfer as Ellen , Karen Tighe as Kathy , James L. Brewster as Sam , Elissa Neil as Barb , Ethel Michelson as Aunt Millie , John Schmerling as Uncle Herb , and Judith Mayes as Bunny.

So there.

The Deadly Spawn (1983)

Connect with me on Facebook