Fred Olen Ray J: Evil Spawn (1987)

It's actually more interesting to know how the film got made than to actually talk about the film!  Today's movie is Evil Spawn, a 1987 'gem' from Ray.  It's the tale of an aging actress who tries some desperate measures to keep looking young.  If this sounds like something you've seen before, then you remember Corman's The Wasp Woman.  It was made in the '50s and later remade in the '90s for Showtime.  This movie comes between the two and is blatantly-obvious.  So yeah, the story is not much to speak of.  However, the story BEHIND the story kind of is.  To find out what that is, read on...

Always a good start to see that name in the credits.  Can this be as good as Frankenstein Island or The Wizard of Mars?  More on his role later...

There's an expression in Cinema known as 'Show, Don't Tell.'  Fred Olen Ray has apparently never heard of that before.

Stock Footage of a Space Ship.  I never get tired of seeing that in a Fred Olen Ray movie!  More Planet of the Dinosaurs footage?

I hope you were looking for a less-interesting version of the creature from Forbidden World.  You weren't?  Well, tough shit!

On the plus side, this thing barely appears in the movie.

In a random, tedious scene, two people goo looking for a cat.  They find it and one of them gets killed by a just-mutated scientist.  What does that add?  Absolutely nothing.  Now here's the funny part...

Carradine appears as a Scientist who was working on...something.  Him and his Assistant (aka Ray's wife at the time) talk about their work.  They do this very vaguely because...

This scene was shot to fit into any future film.  It shows up here and in some film called The Alien Within (future review?).  As it turns out, this is the ONLY footage here Directed by Ray...all three minutes of it.

Oh and the story...or whatever.  This Actress takes the vague drug to stay young.

It makes her into a monster.  Trust me- this is about as good as it gets.

Seriously, the rubber suit is cheap as hell.

She kills random people- mostly people who were 'in her way.'  She dies in a very anti-climactic fashion.  The End.

That was certainly a movie.  Really- what do you expect me to say?  The title makes the movie sound cool.  The movie is not.  It's a dumb, slow-paced B-movie.  Apparently Ray deemed that there wasn't enough of those in the World 25 years ago, so he made this movie.  Well, to be fair, he only made the stock insert scene with his then-wife and Carradine.  He's not responsible for the rest of this movie.  Actually, that's only partly-true, since he's the Producer here.  He almost Produced The Alien Within too, making it a double-dose of inadvertent Ray crap.  So, in summary, the movie sucks.  Here's a funny P.O.V. shot clearly made up of a glass bottles...

Next up, Ray gives us a movie about a famous family feud.  If Richard Dawson was here in place of Christian Slater, we'd have a movie!  Stay tuned...