Sometimes, the sludge at the bottom of the barrel tastes nasty good….
DEMONWARP (1988)
Demonwarp should just be called WARPED because it is Bigfoot-alien-zombie insanity. You heard right. It’s the best crossover of unexplained mysteries since Stephanie Powers brought a bionic Bigfoot from outer space to fight Steve Austin.
Veteran actor George Kennedy, who protected a wooden Indian statue in Creepshow 2, has a rather pointless role in this film, which is really about…a group of kids staying in a cabin in the woods. WAHOO!
Amongst the cast is Blanche Devereaux’s bratty grandson, Billy Jayne (aka: Billy Jacoby), b-movie scream queen Michelle Bauer (and her boobs), and a chick named Pamela Gilbert, who also happens to be in Evil Spawn, which I cover below! But the starring role goes to the front and back packages of the leading man’s jeans. Yowsah.
Anyway, it’s all classic 80s horror: scary synth score, tons of boobs, loads of sex, a Bigfoot suit, alien suits, a horde of zombies, and an absurd “shocker” ending! Demonwarp is just too good for words, really.
SLUGS (1988)
It’s very rare for an 80s horror flick to have passed me by since the video store I worked in back then had practically everything. But Slugs squirmed by me unnoticed!
This is slimy-gross-gory creature feature awesome sauce squirted with loads of 80s Cheese Whiz. It’s a pretty perfect b-movie that takes place in a small town at Halloween time. A health worker named Mike Brady (WTF?) is on the case when bodies start turning up as gruesome piles of goo.
The slugs are icky disgusting and are often injected into places you’d rather not think about, like toilet bowls and heads of lettuce. Not for the squeamish! Bodies regularly explode and release wiggling worms. There’s plenty of nudity, including some major man butt.
And a bunch of teens even have a Halloween party in the woods, complete with a couple of jack o’ lanterns! And finally, the heroes of the film have to journey down into the sewers to blow these slug fucks away.
THE ALIEN WITHIN (aka: Evil Spawn) (1987)
The Alien Within was originally released as Evil Spawn, but apparently, director Fred Olen Ray shot some more scenes with different actors and inserted them into a re-edited version of the movie and retitled it The Alien Within.
The result is a bit sloppy, but it’s still 80s b-crap awesome. It’s kind of the same plot as the movie The Rejuvenator. When an older actress finds the jobs drying up, she starts injecting herself with a special formula that…turns her into a giant rubber bug costume! Awesome.
Bobbie Bresee of Ghoulies and Mausoleum is the leading lady and she pretty much gets the same exact demon makeup from Mausoleum before fully transforming into the rubber bug costume. We even get multi-eyed bug POV and a bee swarm sound when she attacks.
And finally, boobs and bush abound. The Alien Within starts a little slow, but at about the halfway mark it takes off and perfectly completes this triple bottom of the barrel 80s creature feature.
As for the differences between The Alien Within and Evil Spawn, it’s mostly the insertion of Jay Richardson of Teenage Exorcist and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers as a detective with a female sidekick. They get a really good scene fighting a big mutant rat that appeared at the beginning of the movie. And yet a scene from Evil Spawn of a guy bitten by the rat attacking another is omitted from The Alien Within. There’s also an entire extra monster scene tagged on to the end of The Alien Within. Conveniently, there is a DVD release that has both cuts of the film and it looks like this:
