31 Days of Halloween - Day 8 - Movie

After a meteor lands in the nearby woods,  the residents of a house, and their guests, begin to fall prey  to alien creatures which start breeding in the basement.

The Deadly Spawn (1983) is a super low budget film that worked with its limitations. It definitely delivers quite a bit of bang for its buck. The monsters are well designed and executed (by John Dods and Tim Hildebrandt) and are often above par for much higher budgeted films from this time period, and there is also an exceptional miniature. The script, by director, Douglas McKeown is pretty straight forward and stripped down, with most of the scenes setting up ways for the characters to wind up in the basement with the monsters, or for the monsters to get out and keep anyone from leaving the house. Most of the characters are pretty two dimensional, but the teenagers are given more substance, especially Ellen (Jean Tafler) a really likable, smart, girl interested in science who is not squeamish at all. If every character in the movie were as developed, then The Deadly Spawn might be a more entertaining movie than it is. The creators all deserve applause for doing so much with so little, but in the end there isn't enough to differentiate the story from any other low budget monster on the loose film.






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