Mordisco mortal

"The Guardian of the Gates of Hell.. The ultimate terror as it rips into your flesh" So promises the British VHS release. Oliver Reed stars as a millionaire businessman living in the US who shares a psychic link with a giant South American snake that killed his brother. Yeap! This has got to be one of the silliest plots ever. As a big fan of Reed watching this film did give me a certain amount of pleasure and it is not his worst movie either. Peter Fonda also stars but for me Reed gives the better performance. The snake attacks are quite gory and fun, plus they employ POV shots. Although the snake itself is not very convincing some of the effects for the bite wounds are pretty good. The makers throw in a gratuitous naked girl in the shower scene for good measure. But the film is not terribly well made, microphone booms appear and although set in the US the Canadian filming locations are not convincing. I do believe that this snake even growls! There is no denying that Spasms is a bad movie, however I got some enjoyment from it and would watch it again.

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.

SPASMS tops my list for the best killer snake movie out there. Jason Kincaid (Oliver Reed) has this massive serpent captured and brought to the US because it killed his brother and he now shares some kind of psychic link with it (!). He enlists the help of psychologist Tom Brazilian (Peter Fonda) to study the animal and the mental connection, but they don't count on a group of snake worshiping Satanists (!!!) to complicate matters by accidentally setting the beast free. Amazingly, director William Fruet (FUNERAL HOME) gets the cast to play this entirely straight with Reed - who shot the snake themed VIPER (1981) the same year - really throwing himself into his crazy part (even if he seems to be whispering every line). The attack scenes are really well staged (a sorority house siege being the highlight) and DP Mark Irwin makes the movie look way better than it should. Dick Smith handled the gooey special effects; the bursting bodies are great 80s bladder effects but the snake is kept offscreen for the most part. Tangerine Dream supplied the "Serpent's Theme" for the soundtrack.

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.

For years I heard reports about how utterly bad this movie was, so when I finally got a chance to see it, I wasn't expecting much - especially knowing the movie was also shelved for two years before getting a release.

As it turns out, I didn't find it completely bad. For starters, the production values were above average for a Canadian movie of the time (except for when we see the snake at the end - it does indeed look like it was made out of paper mache.) There are a few impressive gore effects (though not as much as you might think), and the sorority house attack sequence is pretty amusing. It was slow at times, but seldom could you find it boring.

But I won't deny that the movie is filled with problems. The editing is quite bad at times, with scenes cut short and some information seemingly missing. The whole "snake cult" subplot turns out to be for NOTHING - the movie would need very little additional rewriting if it was completely cut out. The scenes are mixed together with clumsiness - after Peter Fonda's character is introduced, it takes about half an hour before he returns! Ultimately the movie completely falls apart around the last 20 minutes or so, leading to an awful climax and ending. Not just awful, but abrupt - it's pretty clear the ending was considerably tinkered around with in the editing room for some reason. Could it originally have been even more awful than this? Quite possibly.