Entry Thirty-Nine: Metamorphosis (1990)

Metamorphosis (1990)

Dir: George Eastman

"Witness the change!"


Wow...This one has been a LONG time coming.  Let me take you back to the year of our lord, 1990, when ten year-old Michael James Harmon haunted the horror sections of various and sundry mom-and-pop video stores.  On one particular trip (made via bicycle with my cousin Terry, to a video store in Eden Prairie which is now an Oasis Market), I discovered the videocassette of this film, which featured a 3-D severed head that lit up and screamed at you when you pressed a button on the box (I wasn't yet world-weary enough to know that the flashier the packaging, the shittier the movie).  I was intrigued enough to look the film up in my oft-consulted copy of Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's Video Movie Guide, which gave the film a zero-star review, but informed me that it was about a scientist who turns himself into a dinosaur.  To my ten year-old self, this was perhaps the most fantastic movie idea of all time (and as a 34 year-old man, I'll be honest-the concept of a man turning into a dinosaur is fucking RAD!).  For a couple weeks, I was obsessed with the idea of this movie; I begged my ma to make the drive to rent it for me, to no avail (it wasn't available at our local store, and we would need to open a new account at the store in Terry's neighborhood in order to bring it home).  In absence of the film itself, I wrote my own illustrated story about it (I believe the mutated dinosaur-man fought another, similar creature).  As I was a kid with a limited attention span, I eventually forgot about it and moved onto something else.  Fast-forward 24 years, and an internet article on gimicky VHS packaging brought this all flooding back.  A quick internet search revealed that the film had been released on DVD in one of those shitty 50-film packs, and I immediately purchased that bad boy and dragged it down into the Basement of Sleaze...

Peter Houseman (Gene LeBrock-who looks like Tom Cruise's older, taller brother) is a university scientist doing research into using reptile chromosomes to combat the human aging process, because bullshit movie science (reptiles...don't age?)!  He develops a serum that shows positive results but, because this is a horror film, the university cuts his funding and, in desperation, he tries the serum on himself by injecting it straight into his eye.  The serum gives him a renewed sense of vigor (which he demonstrates during a soft-jazz-scored deep-dicking session with his university overseer girlfriend, Sally), but it also drastically augments the dickhead portion of his brain, as he intentionally trips a polio-stricken colleague, beats the shit out of a bar full of people (including Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, who also served as this film's costume designer) and, most drastically, murders an amorous student by drowning her in a bathroom sink.  Peter begins rapidly aging (he kinda looks like Dan Aykroyd in Nothing But Trouble), before transitioning into a lizard-man, who walks the city streets incognito in a fedora and trenchcoat (like Marvel Comics' Thing and Daredevil!).  And yes, in the end, Peter transforms into a (very unconvincing) Tyrannosaurus Rex and is blown away by a S.W.A.T. team.

This Italian flick is often criticized as a ripoff of Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, but it reminds me more of an uncredited remake of The Alligator People (1959), with labratory and transformation scenes inspired by the 1977 TV-movie version of The Incredible Hulk.  Writer/Director Eastman is better known as the actor who played the hulking, scary-looking titular character in the Anthropophagus movies, as well as heavies in a myriad of Italian post-nuke movies.  What a disappointment; my 4th grade stories were much better than this movie.    +