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I don't recall exactly which theme I was running with when I put Evil Spawn on my queue, but it looks like we're in for a really low budget piece of 80's schlock that could likely be described as The Fly With Boobs. Oh. OK, Fred Olen Ray is involved, the guy who did Alien Dead. Specifically, he's doing this little Elvira style late night cable schlock tribute intro. It's very sleazy and unprofessional and I kinda like it. Apparently anyone who actually buys this DVD gets a card in the case you can fill out to get a random item of... totally random junk from the director... and uh. Wow. Boobs by before the movie even starts. After listing off the various random CDs and signed photos of washed up B-movie stars, here's a random topless girl who may be arbitrarily sent over to your house instead of a random item... and now we're just randomly touring his all-girl aerobic S&M torture dungeon for some reason. That took a really weird turn there. Here's hoping this particular movie was made before the guy responsible became some kind of... avatar of his own id or whatever. Anyway, actual movie starting now.
"The Venus probe 'Odyssey' returns to earth. It brings back alien microbes for study by independent laboratories. The use... and misuse... of these microbes is the subject of this film." Uh... thanks Mr. Disclaimer. I'm sure that's totally going to be TOTALLY relevant here. Oh. We totally do start out with a pretty nifty little spaceship floating in towards the earth though. And a vague attempt at some John Carpenter style music. I always feel bad about how I never get to cover any John Carpenter movies doing these. One of these days I need to sit down and just make a big list of all the stuff I totally would have done Consciousness Streams on if they weren't good enough to actually demand my full attention... which is honestly rude to the few actually good movies I press and and do a CS for anyway. Anyway though, yeah. Here's some very 80's looking Evil Woman breaking into this bald guy's.... director's basement. I guess it's supposed to be some kind of secret lab. In any case, it's got this col evil puppet spider bat thing locked up in it, which she lets loose to kill him then leaves. It... chews on his face and neck a while, and his whole head is blood coated, but apparently he's not quite dead because he gets up a bit after and screams and clutches his throat and foams at the mouth some.
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Now here's some meddling teens showing up in... what appears to be a jeep made from recycled cans? I hope these two are going to be our actual main characters and not just random victims, because they have such a HUGE Fred and Daphne vibe going on. Give these two some neckerchiefs and it'd be as obvious as it gets. As is, I still say it's intentional. They've got a pet cat who comes along with them in their weird jeep on their random adventures to back alleys oo apparently. Anyway, I guess the science guy who kinda looks like Donald Pleasance and REALLY looks like the guy from the Beverly Hills Cop movies is a zombie now or something and... he just kinda yanks Fred's arm off without bracing him in any way. Then Daphne hits him with the jeep and I guess that's pretty much it? Evil Lady goes to meet with Evil Kindly Old Man and have a really weird conversation. It feels like exposition, but I think it's really more just time killing and proof of Mwahaha I'm Evil. Evil Kindly Old Man dies at the end, and Evil Lady is... trying to take credit to no one in particular I guess? Seems to me he just had a conveniently timed stroke though. Now here's some guy typing while an awkward narration comes over the radio about how the plot will go once the movie, you know, ACTUALLY starts.
Now here's a really uncomfortable sex scene between two characters we're only just now seeing for the first time. Apparently the girl, who kinda has a Fara Fawcett deal going on, is an actress who's really desperate for work but can't find anything besides terrible terrible B-movies. I'd say "and also, that's what she's playing in this movie!" but... the movie is kinda running that joke into the ground on its own. It was even specifically made in that intro thing before it turned into... whatever that was. Anyway though she's all "rar I'm still totally hot and can actually act (OK, NOW I'll make it "that is, she's playing the role of someone who can act"), but apparently she's over 30 and everyone thinks she's an old hag and thus won't put her in Oscar movies. Yes. That's the reason. Now here's Evil Lady showing up and... dang. Did she just say her name was "Evil-lynn?" Like the He-Man villain? Anyway she apparently learned about Actress' aging woes because... she read the script I guess, and is here to offer her a free sample of some anti-aging serum. "That sounds like something out of a bad science fiction movie!" Anyway yeah, celebrity endorsement kinda deal. Actress gives her a real hard no, saying she's really proud of looking as good as she does without any sort of drugs or plastic surgery. Evil-lynn leaves the syringe behind while Actress leaves her back turned long enough for her to be gone before she turns around, and Actress proceeds to strip and take a bath, making sure we invoke Boobs By Paragraph 3 even if you don't count that intro bit. Seriously, is this something they teach in sub-standard filmmaking classes or something? One of these days I'm going to have to make some little icon to tag titles with in the archive and prove how common it is.
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Anyway, she has a nightmare about accepting an oscar but being this actually pretty cool looking mummy/zombie deal (I'm pretty sure getting old and ugly doesn't remove your nose) so she immediately goes and jams herself with the syringe. This results in intense pain and vomiting... which, let's ace it, is the usual result of injecting yourself with random syringes given to you by anonymous clearly evil people. Remember kids, winners don't use drugs! Except in baseball apparently, where it's only a concern for lifetime achievement records and nobody seems to care about overturning actual wins or anything. Anyway, now it's time to stare at Actress' boobs for a while. Seriously, there's just this montage of her checking out her own chest in the mirror and then taking a shower where it's pretty much filling the screen. The "with boobs" portion of my prediction has clearly come true. Can we please skip ahead now to where she turns into a big goofy bug monster and start eating people? That's what I'm really here to see, and we've already had a lot of filler.
So yeah, now she's been all youth-enized I guess and her cheating husband is all shocked. I... really don't see any difference though. She looked like she was in her early 30's before, and still does. Not old, but not especially young either. Couldn't you at least fake it with like, the latest youth fashion. Oh hey, here's something. Remember that bit on the director's commentary about the crazy broadcast real time bad dub deal? We seem to be doing that again here. Terribly. I don't think her lips were moving at all while "talking" right there. Anyway, now she's going out with... I guess the director of the actually good movie she can now get a role in, presumably in exchange for sleeping with him, because that's TOTALLY what you do to get into Oscar movies and not B-movie schlock.
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Now here's Evil-lynn being cartoonishly evil and insane, talking to a wig stand about how she's granted it immortality. Then the police show up at her door because... well she's not exactly subtle about being evil is she. So she pulls out a gun, takes aim at the door, and... immediately blows her brains out through the roof of her mouth with it. Now here's Actress' assistant taking a break from signing photos for her to swim around naked. Yeesh. She has a big zit on her butt, which is notable I suppose, and... yeah we're just going for straight up prolonged full frontal nudity on this one. On he bright side, Director refuses to cast her, wanting a girl with long dark hair in her early 20's, like Assistant. So she walks in all annoyed, turns into a giant goofy as heck looking bug monster, and murders her. Finally. Then she turns back though. I guess we're going for more of an Incredible Hulk sort of deal than The Fly. When she gets jealous, she monsters out, then comes to not remembering it in the morning. Also, did I mention she's after the part of "the savage goddess" in this Oscar bid movie? Because she doesn't want to star in terrible B-movies anymore?
Now here's a news report on the radio about how Evil-lynn and her mad dermatologist partner were totally discovered to have been performing experiments on human subjects that turn them into monsters and have been brought to justice. It's rather astoundingly thorough. Husband hears this and screams at Actress how she really does need to stop taking those (wait, didn't she only have the one dose?) and should seriously go to the hospital. And uh... we're just not going to mention the dead girl floating in her swimming pool? No discovering that the next day? No police coming to investigate? No wondering why she didn't show up the next day? Apparently we're just moving on. Specifically to Actress confronting her agent for being a slimy jerk and letting her embarrass herself, then injecting herself with some bug juice... I guess intentionally causing herself to monster up so she can properly kill him? She doesn't go full bug right away though, just kinda gets stuck on fang faced deadite and delivers some cheesy one-liners. Then we cut to her transforming back and being all shocked and horrified at what she just did. Yeah, you can't play that card lady. That was a totally pre-meditated and willful monster transformation right there. It was obviously your reason for confronting him, the only reason to inject yourself on the spot, and quite frankly you seemed to be in a totally level-headed state of mind while killing him.
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Oh, and apparently Husband is sleeping with the actress who got the part she waned. So.... two birds with one stone time now I guess. Meanwhile someone is discovering Manager's body in what I swear is the next room over in the one house this whole movie was filmed in. I actually thought for a second it was Husband getting up and walking in there for a second. Anyway, Rival is doing a strip tease thing, but stops before removing her underwear as she hears evil bug monster noises from outside. Of course, her underwear is completely transparent, so this isn't exactly saving any dignity. And then of course both are murdered. Oh and we've got a REALLY low-rent compound eye vision deal. I think it's just a bunch of old bottles taped together and held in front of the camera or something. Looks pretty sad in any case. This guy here is also murdered. Then some cops come in to gun her down and give a hilarious speech about what happened. This random street cop goes from first totally being up to speed on the science gone mad angle, and then making this over the top "deep" speech about vanity and the roman gods. Then we go back to that guy at the typewriter I'm not even willing to call a framing device, and a little bug puppet bursts out of his chest Alien style for... really no particular reason I can think of.
So yeah. That movie was like, right on the line of making me think it was an intentionally terrible Troma style deal, but I get the distinct impression that this really was a sincere best effort from everyone involved. They all just knew going in that the end result was going to be pretty darn terrible and tried to at least hang a lampshade on it. Oh and then after the credits Fred Olen Ray appears once more, apparently just having remembered something he wanted to add to that oh yeah, if you don't want to get the random offerings of a signed photo, CD, book, or a visit from the random topless girl (which really seems to be a completely serious offer), you can save up 4 cards from various terrible movies of his (or, I guess, 4 separate copies of this one), and send them all in for an original animation cell from Evil Toons... unless he runs out, in which case he'll have to send you one of the other things. He then goes on to correct himself into "well, all four I guess since it's four cards." What a strange person. That is then followed by some odd... fake disclaimer I guess declaring that "No Real Breasts Were Used In The Making of Tonite's [sic] Feature" which... I suppose is referring to just the weird promo bookends and some odd attempt at humor or... something.
So, what do we have to look forward to next week boys and girls? If you guessed Evil Toons then.. no. No way. I thought I'd been warned away from that as traumatically bad and porny, but apparently that was Terror Toons. Still, as a survivor of Cool World, I try to avoid low budget animation/live action mixes where possible. Plus I really need a break from Fred Olen Ray here. Incidentally, I double checked whether I must absolutely avoid Evil Toons by way of the Head Injury Theater archives. Figure I might as well give that a plug because we cover pretty similar stuff in a relatively similar way, with nearly no overlap. That guy really needs to cool it with the RPGs and get back to work on talking about bad movies though. Me, I need to do the exact opposite.
