Take Me In, Tender Woman
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Make sure you pick up this week's issue of The Hub to read my piece on RACE WITH THE DEVIL. It was apparently trimmed a bit to squeeze into the space, but I'll run the unexpurgated version right here next week.

Speaking of Peter Fonda, what kind of B-movie star would he be without at least one killer-snake movie on his resume? 1982's SPASMS is a looney-tunes Canadian horror movie with Toronto very unconvincingly standing in for San Diego (!) and Oliver Reed equally unconvincingly standing in for a good actor. How much of this comes from the source material, a novel called DEATH BITE, I don't know, but the story concerns big game hunter Reed's obsession with bagging a giant serpent god from Hell that he encountered on a trip to New Guinea seven years earlier that crippled him and killed his brother. He now maintains a psychic link with the snake that psychiatrist Fonda claims is caused by a virus that was spread in the snake's venom. Reed has the snake captured and shipped to California, where it escapes, killing a nude woman taking a shower (of course) and many more people, including legendary Canuck character actor Al Waxman as Crowley, hired by a local snake worshipping cult to snatch the serpent and deliver it to their "church"

To call Reed's performance "unrestrained" is an understatement, and I ain't buying Fonda's shrink credentials either. Dick Smith provides some bubbling bladder effects, but the snake itself is wonderfully phony-looking. It appears director William Fruet ran out of either time or money to shoot the climax, which barely registers and is over before you know it. Kerrie Keane, fresh off THE INCUBUS, and Angus MacInnes from STRANGE BREW are also in it. Tangerine Dream performs the closing theme. SPASMS garnered a bit of notoriety during its original U.S. release, thanks to the juicy stills of Waxman's lumpy demise that surfaced in FANGORIA. It's not really a very good movie, and, in fact, it isn't even the best killer-snake movie Oliver Reed made in 1982. Make sure you seek out Blue Underground's nice DVD of VENOM, in which Reed plays the chauffeur of a London family who masterminds the kidnapping of their young son and finds his gang trapped inside their house along with a vicious black mamba. Now that's high concept, folks.