Spasms

source: Spasms

Spasms (which as a title means nothing) begins on an island somewhere near New Guinea. A bunch of Aboriginal natives are performing some kind of tribal ritual dancing around a bonfire, complete with severed pigs heads on poles. Suddenly a giant snake appears, well according to the film it does as we don't actually see it at this point, it kills a few natives and then gets itself captured in a net by a hunter named Mendes (Miguel Fernandez). Mendes works for rich businessman Jason Kincaid (Oliver Reed) and sends the giant snake back to the U.S. via a cargo ship, before his untimely death. However, Warren Crowley (Al Waxman) works for a secret snake worshipping religious cult run by Rev. Thomas Thanner (George Bloomfield) who wants the giant snake for himself as he believes it's the 'reincarnation of our leader'. Thanner has hired Crowley to obtain the snake, by any means necessary. Crowley bribes a Sailor (Patrick Brymer) to steal the snake. While trying to do just that the Sailor is bitten by the snake and after his arm expands and bubbles he throws himself overboard. Kincaid wants the snake because while he was out hunting, it killed his brother and bit him. Now Kincaid has a telepathic link with the snake, Kincaid hires psychologist Dr. Tom Brazilian (Peter Fonda) to try & figure out the hold the snake has with him. Tom feels that telepathy is caused by a virus & and that the virus may have been present in the snakes venom therefore spiritually connecting both of them. Hey, I didn't write this stuff OK? So the snake arrives in America & Tom convinces a friend, Dr. Claire Rothman (Marilyn Lightstone) to keep it in her laboratory at the local University. That night Crowley & one of his goons Duncan Tyrone (Angus MacInnes) break into the University to try and steal the snake but only succeed in letting it escape into the night! A giant venomous snake is loose, Tom, along with Kincaid's niece Suzanne Cavadon (Kerrie Keane) decide they are responsible. As the snake starts to kill local residents they set about locating & destroying it, but Kincaid & Crowley have other plans for it. Directed by William Fruet this is one silly excuse for a film. The script by Don Enright from the novel Death Bite by Micheal Maryk & Brent Monahan is an absolute mess as you can probably tell from my plot synopsis which makes it sound a lot better than it actually is. The main problem is that Spasms has no sense of it's own absurdity, bizarre snake worshipping cults, giant serpents attacking naked women in the shower, telepathic links between humans & snakes are taken 100% seriously and played totally straight. It simply doesn't work & comes across as extremely silly. Having said that it moves along at a fair pace & isn't too boring at only 85 minutes. The ending was a bit of a disappointment too, rather lazy & predictable. The snake itself isn't seen in it's entirety, just glimpses to start with & by the end Fruet gives us a chance to scrutinise it's head which wasn't a good idea considering the cheapness of the effect. Spasms stand out moment has to be the part where Crowley is bitten, his body and face starts to expand & bubble in a very impressive & gross special effect by Dick Smith among others. There isn't any other gore or violence worth mentioning besides this. The shower scene is wholly gratuitous, did the female victim really need to be undressed taking a shower for the scene to work? Acting wise what on Earth are Oliver Reed & Peter Fonda doing in this complete & utter nonsense? All I can think is that they needed beer money badly, if you know what I mean. The film is generally well made with nice production values & cinematography, although director Fruet fails to inject the film with much flair or imagination. Spasms as a horror film fails totally, as a piece of so-so entertainment it's OK, as a bizarre head shaking curiosity it can't be bettered. Just about worth watching if your a die hard horror fan (like me), otherwise don't bother.

Oh come on, yes this is bad. This movie is so bad I just had to come here and tell everyone about it. It's not even bad on a "so bad it's good" level: I put this on the other night while some of the guys were over. They left at about the twenty five minute mark for the art bar, which should have spoken volumes. First impressions are usually correct. Instead of some tripped out perverse creature feature epic, what starts out as a kind of intriguing voodoo revenge crossed with nature striking back drama quickly devolves into a giant rampaging rubbery monster movie. The tipoff should have been the Point-Of-View photography meant to show the snake's view of the world as it stalked & attacked it's prey. When handled correctly (i.e. ALIENS 3 or even RATMAN with David Warbeck) P.O.V. photography can add an element to a film by showing people reacting to a genuine menace. Here it is just a relatively cheap gimmick meant to take the place of showing the monster, however, and nothing really important or revealing is seen during the P.O.V. shots to indicate that hey! this is a big, weird, freaky snake on the rampage. SPASMS could have been a movie about a monster kitty cat on the loose or maybe a runaway vacuum cleaner. Come to think of it, now THERE is an idea!! The choice of having the monster be a snake was arbitrary, and raises a couple of silly, nagging questions about the thing: How was it able to send pretty brunette coeds flying through the air with enough force to not just smash into a bathroom door, but fly clean through the door to smack against the shower stall? Snakes have no arms or fingers, no feet to dig into the ground to get a firm purchase on the floor and use momentum to get a 125lb human body into motion. Maybe it was smacking people around with it's head like a baseball bat. Evidence to the contrary, the snake was also intelligent enough to have seen horror movies and know where to go to kill people, most notably a college dormitory. It also knew where Oliver Reed lived, suggesting access to a roll-a-decks. This is some snake. The one thing I was pleased by in regards to the film is that while some live snakes were used during the early voodoo/mystics scenes, none were used in the big horror finale. None appear to have been used to ill ends during the course of the film, let alone exploited for their sexual connotations. Which when you think about it isn't exactly an easy thing to do in a horror movie about snakes, especially those with naked shower scenes set in coed dormitories. Stripped of it's latent phallic horror the snake becomes just another juggernaut of animal-friendly destruction. The producers instead relied on a cheap looking giant rubber snake puppet which got laughs even when attacking the coed in the shower -- which is never shown by the way. How can you fault a movie for not being exploitational enough? Next time anyone asks, point them in the direction of SPASMS. Great, sleazy name for a movie, but if you are looking for lurid thrills forget it, the people who made this film had something else in mind. Just what it is I haven't a clue: It doesn't really work as a monster thriller until about the final 15 minutes by when most people would have followed the boys out the door to the art bar, where you can't even smoke anymore. Fans of Peter Fonda will like the movie, and devotees of dumb, rubbery grade C monster movies will be well served, though I will personally qualify this film as an enigma who's existence can only be explained by contract obligations. 4/10: Has about a half dozen good laughs, two really nice breasts, and a conclusion rather than an ending.

The story in a nut-shell. Oliver Reed has a psychic link to a satanic super snake which emerges from hell every seven years and kills people on a tropical island. He can see through the snakes eyes when it kills! Obviously the best thing to do in a situation like this is to bring the snake to the US (Actually Canada filling in for California) Naturally the snake gets loose and continues doing what giant venomous satanic super snakes do best. BITING PEOPLE!!! Good stuff. The FX are done on the cheap. Lots O POV shots, inter-cut with VERY quick shots of a GIANT balloon-y snake head on a too thin looking body, inter-cut with screaming bloody people tossed around. The whole thing was done on the cheap for the most part. There is one well done super venomous bite that makes a guy break out a little. They probably spent half the budget on that one shot. You'll know the scene when you see it. If you like bad horror flicks from the 80's. You'll probably dig this movie. If the snake doesn't scare you, Oliver Reeds mustache will.

An astonishingly inept monster/slasher movie, in which the monster is just a reptilian version of Jason ("Friday the 13th") : it runs around (and runs faster than a jaguar), killing people with no reason. The film is irredeemably bad and no sane person will want to waste 86 minutes of his life with it.

What could have been promising in a silly, entertaining manner ends up being rather mediocre rushed and seriously confined. "Spasms" is a daft, cheaply made creature feature shocker from the early 80's with two recognizable stars attached; Oliver Reed and Peter Fonda collecting their pay cheques, but delivering two extremes in their acting. Reed hauntingly hams it up "I really believe I'm bounded to it", while Fonda keeps it cool and collected. Outside of those two, there were some other familiar names involved. Director / co-writer William Fruet is no beginner to the genre with making films like "Death Weekend" and "Funeral Home" before this one. Cinematographer Mark Irwin shows up. Then you have the Tangerine Dream adding to the score. Although these curious inclusions don't add too much and it shows in the final product. A gigantic, deadly serpent is transported from a Pacific island back to the States and is kept boxed up at a university where Dr. Brazilian is hired by wealthy businessman Jason Kincaid to experiment on the telepathy link Kincaid shares with the serpent. However before doing so, it comes loose and goes about terrorising the community. The systematic plot actually starts of rather well setting up the mood, but it really does lose its way when it goes on the rampage becoming simple-minded, outrageous and ending on a very lousy, incoherent climax. Neither is it that fun when the rampage transpires or in its tackiness. Even the muddled script has a few story threads, which are incompatible and abrupt like the sub-plot involving a religious snake worshiping fanatic. Director Fruet's handling is cramp and rudimentary in its execution with lopsided pacing by lingering on many talky exchanges. Supposedly the production run-out of money towards the back-end and its shows by padding it out with recycled snake-vision shots that happened early on in the film. The attack sequences are too little and the ones that occur are vicious and jolting in an exploitative manner, but rather tensionless with the snake mainly staying off-screen and the victim being thrown around. We only get glimpses of the serpent, until it comes to the final reel when the rubber beast is fully shown. It doesn't look that great and you could see why the lighting was mostly dim. On the other hand blue-filtered serpent vision got a real work out and was well-done. The most memorable thing about this production would have to be the aftermath of the serpent's attacks, as the ghastly make-up FX was vivid in its depiction of the skin bubbling and blistering. Outside the two stars there were decent support from Kerrie Keane and Al Waxman. "Spasms" has a poor reputation and rightfully so, but I was slightly entertained.

Unimaginably lame and cheap 80's movie that has Oliver Reed (in his, hands down, worst performance ever) obsessing over some kind of gigantic serpent he's inexplicably connected with. He arranges the animal to be sent over to university professor Peter Fonda's laboratory, where it naturally escapes and goes on a rampage in the nearby park and housing estate. This crap movie won't appeal to fans of grotesque creature features, nor will it to lovers of typically cheesy 80's horror. The inventors of the story were stupid enough to use an unreal snake-species, so don't expect to actually see the creature as nobody knows what it looks like. Instead, the screen turns blue when the events are supposedly seen through the snake's eyes and its victims just try to look terrified as the camera rapidly approaches them. William Fruet, who's actually a personal favorite horror director of mine because he made the very competent "House by the Lake" and "Funeral Home", totally messes things up here, as he never manages to create any tension and completely fails to make the viewer emphatic with the characters. There wasn't enough money to finish the film, so they seemingly also cut back on lighting and set pieces. The whole thing is extremely dark and lacking decors. I bet Peter Fonda is still wondering to this day what purpose he served by accepting this role, as he adds absolutely nothing at all.

Nothing qualifies such bad reviews of a movie called "Spasms". It's about a giant snake and Oliver Reed shares telepathic powers with it. What more is there to expect? Not likely another early 80s director with a diminished Canadian budget could have done better. There's lovely gore effects, some effective shocks, and Oliver Reed emotional and tormented by his predicament. Unfortunately, there is also Peter Fonda and his terrible female costar. But at least one man undergoes such massive spasms he first tranforms into Robert Z'Dar, then pops. Not much more I can ask for than that. For all its sloppy editing and a plot which contains too much unresolved material, the movie delivers its share of drive-in quality thrills. Plus, the Tangerine Dream end credits piece rocks.

Spasms stars Oliver Reed as Jason Kincaid, a wealthy big game hunter who, while hunting in the jungle of a remote island, becomes cursed by a demonic serpent. Since the encounter, the hunter is telepathically linked to each attack done by the snake by way of an all-blue color perspective. The serpent is eventually captured after a vicious rampage against the island's native inhabitants and smuggled to North America for research when it escapes it's handlers. From there all hell breaks loose setting up a final, fateful confrontation with Reed's character. Spasms is a fairly decent suspense movie that will keep you riveted as you follow the snake's indiscriminate path toward each doomed victim it encounters. Special effects are generally good for it's time, showing some of the damage impact of the serpent's poison on it's victims but shots of the rarely shown snake itself does reveal some limitations due to lack of budget...this movie would be a good candidate for a CGI enhanced remake with increased budget to tie up the original's loose ends; mainly the believability of the snake itself. The movie is loosely adapted from the novel "Death Bite". Spasms is an increasingly hard to find title which so far is only available in it's out-of-print VHS format.

I had hopes that the negative buzz surrounding SPASMS would prove exaggerated once I finally saw it. I mean, how bad can this movie really be? The beginning starts off promisingly: the whole part with the natives summoning the snake is well made. I was impressed by the fluidity of the snake's POV shots (which have been copied in many movies since, like in ALIEN 3). But then the story moves to San Diego (or Toronto, in this case) and the whole thing fell apart. It actually has one good moment, the one that takes place at the cult which venerates snakes. The music and the mood were effective. But then the snake escapes from its box and the film becomes worse and worse by the second. The scene at the sorority is remarkably exploitive and gratuitous, and it's one of the most over-directed moments ever caught on film. It's fun to watch because it's so over-the-top silly and exploitive that you can't help but laugh at it all. But the whole moment doesn't add anything to the movie and they could have spent the money that cost to shoot that fun but useless moment on a better ending or a better snake. After the scene when Al Waxman is killed in the van (the scenes before his death are long and pointless), SPASMS suddenly becomes a one-man show: we only see Oliver Reed overacting and walking around, with flashbacks of all the POV shots of the killing or attacks the snake had made previously. The flashback scenes of the snakes POV shots are PADDING and the producers needed to extend the movie for a little longer before the stupid abrupt conclusion because they ran out of money. So for almost 10 long minutes, we see Reed walking about like an imbecile, the whole moment intercut with the flashback scenes, which are useless because the initial scenes were still fresh in my mind. The sub-plot with the snake cult is completely forgotten. Except for a few seconds at the very end, Peter Fonda is nowhere to be seen. Everything and everyone disappeared for a big chunk of the movie because the producers ran out of money and they seemingly only could afford Oliver Reed for the ending, which they had to wrap up quickly. The result is truly deadening. The snake fx at the conclusion are laughable. The whole thing stinks!!! Except for a good beginning and some nifty POV shots, SPASMS is as jaw-droppingly awful as everyone says it is.