AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

Micitype Pretty Good

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

MonteCarloMan 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.

Scarecrow-88 Conjured up by a tribe of primitives, a giant snake returns to kill anyone in it's path. Big game hunter Jason Kincaid(Oliver Reed) is plagued by "viral telepathy"(he was bitten by the snake, whose potent venom he was immune, his brother wasn't so lucky)and seeks the help of a psychiatrist, Dr. Tom Brazilian(Peter Fonda) experimenting with extra sensory perception, hoping for an antidote to cure his "link" to the snake. Kincaid can see through the snake's eyes and even feels the pain of it's victims. Kincaid's niece, Suzanne Cavadon(Kerrie Keane), attempts, futilely, to keep the snake from entering Stateside, and her efforts to kill it fails(..she turns up the temperature of the box containing it) but a former CIA agent, Warren Crowley(Al Waxman, in all his sweaty, lecherous glory) who is paid by a Snake cult leader to kidnap it(..a member of the cult frees it while attempting to tame it), fails at the job, barely escaping with his life while the fiend is set loose on civilization. Anyway, the snake is loose on the streets as the police comb the area looking for it while Tom hopes to find it through Kincaid, by using whatever device or tool he might have at his disposal in finding it's whereabouts before more and more innocents are stalked and destroyed. Kincaid decides he must end it's reign of terror once and for all, even if it means his life. Crowley, himself, must also find it or suffer the wrath of the scorned cult leader who demands for the snake to be in his possession or else.While the attacks are ferocious, the snake is mostly shot off-screen, with director William Fruet opting to show the bodies of victims hurled around like a battered toy in the hands of a child. A lot of the film is shot in point-of-view, the screen tinted blue as we see through it's eyes as it pursues potential victims. The plot will inevitably be viewed as rather nonsensical, and rightfully so, the whole idea of a man being telepathically linked to a devil snake. The creature itself looks like a rubber snake, so perhaps it was best not to show him too much. Fonda looks and acts very disinterested; I imagine he has disowned this movie, and perhaps Oliver Reed had as well. Probably the most memorable suspense sequence occurs as Fonda and Keane search for the snake in a university greenhouse. Also, perhaps memorable is a scene involving a pretty naked girl showering as her friend is being torn to pieces by a snake in the room next to the bathroom, before it bursts through the glass door to get her. Pretty embarrassing movie for Fonda and Reed known for much better than this, a low point for two really impressive careers.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) 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.

gridoon 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.