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As I noted in my review of The Strangeness, for anyone making a monster movie in the '80s, the influence of Alien was inescapable. That movie approached the sexual dimensions of the creature design from a completely different (and impressively unpleasant-looking) angle. The Deadly Spawn takes a completely different tack to the design. What if a kid watched Alien when they were way too young? What if they saw it with their fingers covering their eyes so that they didn't even get too good of a look? The alien had a lot of teeth, right? A whole mouthful of god knows how many? How many heads did it have? Are we sure it had just one? Why not two or three? What if they had just five minutes to draw what they thought the alien looked like? With a lot more time you'd likely end up with a lot more teeth and a lot more heads, but the result of those five minutes would likely look something like the monster in The Deadly Spawn, which has a finite number of teeth and heads but more than anybody would like to run into when venturing into their basement. There are also a lot of little monsters, which push up the number of teeth and heads even higher. I make this comparison not to suggest that the movie is lazy with its creature design, but that it feels filtered through a child's imagination. It's a great monster, all the more so because it seems the product of a specific perspective.
Of course, a great monster by itself wouldn't make a good movie, and I'm sure we've all seen examples of monsters saddled with movies not up to their standard. (What comes to mind for me is Tombs of the Blind Dead, which I found interminable whenever the camera wasn't pointed directly at the Blind Dead. Sadly, this composed a non-zero amount of runtime. Would not recommend, unless you really, really need your Blind Dead fix.) This thankfully is not such a case, as it extends the sensibilities that inspired the monster design to the movie around it. The horror is grounded in the realities of the characters' domestic existence, like when a character first encounters the monster in their dark, creaky basement. (I watched this the same weekend as The Strangeness, and while not as aggressive as that movie in this respect, I think this too makes tense use of limited light sources in this sequence.) The movie's funniest sequence involves a brunch meeting between some little old ladies which takes a gruesome turn, with the characters initially trying to pretend something isn't amiss and that the green sauce doesn't actually taste a little funky so as not to offend one of the hosts.
The movie is also surprisingly sturdy in the characterization department. The heroes here are refreshingly not the dumbassed horndog teens who populated the T&A-filled slasher movies of the era, but smart, methodical science students who attempt a logical approach to dealing with the situation. (One of them dissects one of the little monsters, which looks like a sausage casing filled with pasta.) The characters are defined as such so that when the movie metes out unexpected fates for them, it actually has an impact beyond the gruesome imagery. (This is not a movie where you can tell from the beginning who will make it to the end, even if the changing availability of the actors can be credited for its most shocking scene.) Most surprisingly is that the best character in the movie happens to be a kid. I've seen any number of terrible child actors and obnoxious children show up in horror movies (there was one in I Drink Your Blood, and a particularly egregious example in Trick or Treats, wherein you actively root for the mad slasher to take out the little bastard; and who could forget Bob from The House by the Cemetery?), so it's quite refreshing that the kid here is actually a pretty good actor and quite believable in the context of the movie. It also helps that as a monster kid, his perspective aligns with that of the movie and gives the events that transpire a certain catharsis. Which is a fancy way of saying that this kid kind of rules and so does this movie.
The Deadly Spawn (McKeown, 1983)
As I noted in my review of The Strangeness, for anyone making a monster movie in the '80s, the influence of Alien was inescapable. That movie approached the sexual dimensions of the creature design from a completely different (and impressively unpleasant-looking) angle. The Deadly Spawn takes a completely different tack to the design. What if a kid watched Alien when they were way too young? What if they saw it with their fingers covering their eyes so that they didn't even get too good of a look? The alien had a lot of teeth, right? A whole mouthful of god knows how many? How many heads did it have? Are we sure it had just one? Why not two or three? What if they had just five minutes to draw what they thought the alien looked like? With a lot more time you'd likely end up with a lot more teeth and a lot more heads, but the result of those five minutes would likely look something like the monster in The Deadly Spawn, which has a finite number of teeth and heads but more than anybody would like to run into when venturing into their basement. There are also a lot of little monsters, which push up the number of teeth and heads even higher. I make this comparison not to suggest that the movie is lazy with its creature design, but that it feels filtered through a child's imagination. It's a great monster, all the more so because it seems the product of a specific perspective.
Of course, a great monster by itself wouldn't make a good movie, and I'm sure we've all seen examples of monsters saddled with movies not up to their standard. (What comes to mind for me is Tombs of the Blind Dead, which I found interminable whenever the camera wasn't pointed directly at the Blind Dead. Sadly, this composed a non-zero amount of runtime. Would not recommend, unless you really, really need your Blind Dead fix.) This thankfully is not such a case, as it extends the sensibilities that inspired the monster design to the movie around it. The horror is grounded in the realities of the characters' domestic existence, like when a character first encounters the monster in their dark, creaky basement. (I watched this the same weekend as The Strangeness, and while not as aggressive as that movie in this respect, I think this too makes tense use of limited light sources in this sequence.) The movie's funniest sequence involves a brunch meeting between some little old ladies which takes a gruesome turn, with the characters initially trying to pretend something isn't amiss and that the green sauce doesn't actually taste a little funky so as not to offend one of the hosts.
The movie is also surprisingly sturdy in the characterization department. The heroes here are refreshingly not the dumbassed horndog teens who populated the T&A-filled slasher movies of the era, but smart, methodical science students who attempt a logical approach to dealing with the situation. (One of them dissects one of the little monsters, which looks like a sausage casing filled with pasta.) The characters are defined as such so that when the movie metes out unexpected fates for them, it actually has an impact beyond the gruesome imagery. (This is not a movie where you can tell from the beginning who will make it to the end, even if the changing availability of the actors can be credited for its most shocking scene.) Most surprisingly is that the best character in the movie happens to be a kid. I've seen any number of terrible child actors and obnoxious children show up in horror movies (there was one in I Drink Your Blood, and a particularly egregious example in Trick or Treats, wherein you actively root for the mad slasher to take out the little bastard; and who could forget Bob from The House by the Cemetery?), so it's quite refreshing that the kid here is actually a pretty good actor and quite believable in the context of the movie. It also helps that as a monster kid, his perspective aligns with that of the movie and gives the events that transpire a certain catharsis. Which is a fancy way of saying that this kid kind of rules and so does this movie.