Spasms (1983)
Dir. William Fruet
No Animal Attack movie will ever be as good as Jaws. This is painfully obvious, especially considering that this sub-genre is now almost exclusively relegated to the SyFy Channel. And that’s a shame. If these movies had more respect and bigger budgets they’d be able to have better effects than the low resolution gifs they use to render their bloodthirsty juggernauts. Puppets and animatronics don’t always look great, but 99 out of 100 times they’re better than the stock animations we see in these movies today. And if you combine them with with an interesting narrative hook or two, you might have a solid piece of schlock on your hands. Spasms is just this. A solid piece of schlock. It was never gonna be as good as Jaws, but Jaws doesn’t feature Oliver Reed getting into a knife fight with a giant snake. So which one is the real winner?
The plot begins in New Guinea, where indigenous peoples are performing a ceremony to conjure up a Snake demon-god-thing. Or maybe they’re trying to quell it? I’m not really sure. In any case the giant snake shows up and attacks them with blue-grey filtered POV shots. It’s also implied that the snake can conjure fire, cause being a giant snake god isn’t intimidating enough. Two hunters are able to capture the beast with a few well placed nets. From here it is transported to the US by way of Toronto at the behest of Jason Kincaid, a wealthy industrialist played by Oliver Reed, who looks like if a brick wall let itself go and had whiskey for blood. Kincaid encountered the snake years ago where it killed his brother and left him with a limp and a telepathic connection to the creature, enabling him to see the blue tinted snake vision as it stalks and kills its prey. By capturing the snake, Kincaid hopes to study this telepathic link with the help of Dr. Tom Brasilian (Peter Fonda). To what end? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that there’s also a snake worshipping cult whose attempt to intercept the deadly cargo lead to its escape, allowing it to terrorize locals until the final showdown between the snake and Kincaid.
Spasms is a disjointed movie, and reading about its troubled production history, it’s easy to see why. The first half of the film is pretty talky, and not very snakey. Kincaid argues with his niece about the snake and straddles the line on the wrong side of creepy in his affection for her (but I think this is more due to Oliver Reed being gross than it is a written character trait). The snake cult consults with the sleazy Crowley on their plans to acquire the snake themselves. Peter Fonda...just kind of is Peter Fonda. He has a romance with the niece for no reason. But once the snake gets loose, the movie kicks into high gear as we get some pretty nice kill scenes. We still don’t see the snake much, but when we do, it’s pretty cool. The snake’s head kind of looks like that of Heisei Era Godzilla, and the way it jerks people back and forth the way Jaws jerks Chrissy around the water in the opening scene (see, I brought it back!) is pretty awesome. The best example of this comes when the snake somehow sneaks into a college apartment shared by three women, throwing one them around a hallway before launching her through a door and into her poor showering roommate.
There’s an element to the snake venom that anyone exposed to it quickly bloats and explodes. We only see this take effect twice in the movie, and really only once to full effect (well almost). The first guy we see bitten has his arm swell and start to bubble. He shambles around shaking (spasming you might say) before he falls over the rail of a ship. The second guy’s experience is more spectacular. It’s Crowley, the agent of the snake cult. The little hair he has left blows in the wind like wisps of brown cotton candy. He kind of looks like if Christian Slater got stuck in that alternate dimension from Phantasm with the heavy gravity that squishes people down. The snake crawls through the back of his van and jostles him around before leaving his face to bubble and expand and start to bleed. At this point he looks more like when Palmer starts to transform in The Thing, but the scene cuts before we actually see him explode, and that’s disappointing, but not terribly so.
What’s a little more disappointing are the opportunities that Spasms misses, the roads it doesn’t take. For instance, once the snake gets loose and starts to wreak havoc, the cult is never mentioned or heard from again. In fact, our protagonists are never even aware of their existence, so the cult’s inclusion in the movie is not just squandered, it’s totally pointless from a story perspective, other than to hire the person who accidentally frees the snake. I’d have love to have seen a subplot about Kincaid and Brasilian doing battle with the cult. Or the cops investigating the cult. They could have had a shootout or something. You’ve got a snake-worshipping devil cult, movie; don’t squander that shit! The supernatural qualities of the snake don’t really amount to much either. You’d think Kincaid’s telepathic link to the snake might be used to help him track it down, or might cause him to start acting all snake-like. Like what if the snake telepathically influenced him to set itself free? And like used him as a familiar or something? But all the link really does is make him shake and become lightheaded whenever the snake attacks someone. How awesome would it be if Oliver Reed and the snake had a Scanner battle or something? In the end he just waits for the snake to show up at his mansion, putting his poor service staff in danger. The knife fight that ensues is a pretty entertaining moment, but much too short lived. That there is more footage of this scene that never made it into the final cut of the movie may be one of history’s greatest tragedies.
It might seem like I’m ragging a little too hard on the film at this point, but the truth is I did have fun with it. Spasms is a worthwhile diversion for those who are either tired of, or not ready to scrape, the bottom of the barrel Animal Attack offerings that Asylum and SyFy Channel shell out endlessly. There’s some good ole fashion creature shenanigans, solid practical effects, and some interesting ideas and elements planted throughout the story, even if they are not explored to the most satisfying level.
Oh, also there's an end credits theme by Tangerine Dream.
Comments
Post a Comment