Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (1990) User Reviews

If you liked Deadly Spawn, then you will enjoy this one!

[tom_koopa · 6/10 · 24 August 2009]

I've been looking for AGES to get my hands on this film. Why would I go through the trouble, you ask? I loved it's prequel, the Deadly Spawn for it's creative monster, gore and wise-crack humor.

Metamorphosis: the alien factor has all that and more. It's a silly and predictable B-movie about a man getting bitten by an alien creature. He slowly transforms into a hideous monster. And once he breaks loose, it's best to just run. Run like the wind!

The acting is okay, at some points maybe a bit woody. But there's several stereotypes in this movie and they are played fine enough. It's not Shakespeare, but you don't need that quality in a movie like this.

I really liked the creative monster designs and special effects. Sure it seems corny or cheap at times, but that's the kind of gore I liked in the Deadly Spawn. So if you are a fan of cheap gore, check this one out.

Recommended for fans of the Deadly Spawn and similar movies.

Not a masterpiece, but still enjoyable. 6 out of 10 stars!

Kind of fun with a lot of bad acting

[IrateTyrant · 6/10 · 24 December 2023]

This was an interesting watch with b-rate acting and quite cheesy special effects. I heard that it was a sequel to The Deadly Spawn (1983,) and tracked down the original for a while. The aliens in both are significantly related to one another, but it is a strange addition to the series if it is one. They mention in this that there had been a previous invasion of aliens, which leads me to believe it is an actual sequel. There's also an Alien Factor by director Don Dohler which is completely unrelated and has its own sequel called Alien Factor 2. This was overall a pretty fun watch with plenty of creative practical effects that make it kind of worthwhile. Still, I wonder if it is a sequel, prequel, or standalone?

A fun little monster movie.

[Whovian · 22 April 2000]

I just watched this movie, and despite (or perhaps because of) my low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised. While there's certainly nothing brilliant here in terms of plot or acting, a lot of work and creativity went into the special effects. Not every effect works, but the ones that came out right are quite nice-looking. Fans of stop-motion animation should definitely check this out; early stop-motion effects in the film are pretty crude, but as the film progresses, the animation keeps getting better and better. At the end... well, just see for yourself.

Stupidity from start to finish

[Coventry · 1/10 · 14 June 2004]

Please allow me to present to you: dumb and redundant Alien/ The Thing clone number 5.276…All the elements that fill you up with irritation and annoyance are cheerfully presented. The scientist of a lab gets bitten by alien tissue and undergoes a transformation. Guess what…soon he's loose in the facility and on a killing spree. The children of a random, unimportant victim (the night guard) perpetrate the science lab and avenge their father! Oh, how interesting and fascinating…NOT! The cast is filled with lousy amateur-actors and the special effects are atrocious! This film was made in 1993 and the `horrible' creatures featuring here still look like typical 80's cheese. And can you dig the presentation of the makers of this? It's like the 10 millionth rip-off of `The Thing' but monsters seem explode out of chests like they invented it! Because it's so dumb, the film quickly becomes unintentionally funny. You can't hide chuckling when you see another stupid character running straight into the creature's mouth or. …simply hearing the entire screenplay, which is as dumb as they come. Example:

`We believe this tissue is alien' `Alien? You mean from another planet?' `Yes, doctor'

Oh my God! Is it possible to write a line more stupid like this? The characters are perfect stereotypes and endlessly boring. The typical `fat & fun scientist guy'-type is there (these are usually killed violently) and the cute blond girl turns out to be a Princeton math-queen. Her boyfriend seems to have escaped the of the `Revenge of the Nerds'-cast. The rebellious teenage daughter didn't look too that much like a rebel, neither. Movies like this are a waste of good money (both yours as the producers') and they're destined to go straight to the lowest shelf in unpopular video stores. It is there where idiotic people like me pick it up… It could be worse, though. I used to be in contact with someone who regarded this as the `greatest horror movie ever made'…Now this kid has got serious issues. Hunt down a copy and burn it…just for the fun of it.

$50,000 Budget: $49,998 for Special Effects, $2.00 for Cast and Crew

[vanhalen1984 · 1/10 · 14 April 2008]

How else can one explain just how bad the acting/plot/script really are? I had the misfortune of seeing this trash when I was in college, and my test scores immediately dropped by 10 points across the board.

Some reviewers here on IMDb have touted the movie's "great special effects." For the budget, I guess they're not bad. It's obvious that, as I referenced in my summary line above, approximately 99.99% of the budget went toward special effects because the film does not contain a single competent acting performance. And honestly, the special effects, even for their day (1990), are not that great. With the amount of latex used, one would think the filmmakers had hired the shock-metal band GWAR to make all the creature models and so forth.

In any event, even brilliant special effects cannot compensate for a dreadful script/plot, and abysmal acting. We've seen this story a million times before--usually much more convincingly told. The special effects in this one might hold one's interest for five minutes or so, but after that, good luck!

Definitely the worst film ever made

[phantasmda · 1/10 · 15 December 2006]

Oh my lord, I can't believe the rating system here only goes as low as 1 star. I was hoping to give this ridiculous pile of trash a heavy minus but I guess thats life. Where to start? Well, this was originally supposed to be a sequel to the 1983 low budget classic 'The deadly spawn' which for the meagre budget was an exceptional advertisement on how to make a horror movie with a few pennies.

Deadly spawn had decent acing (for a bunch of nobodies) good direction a decent if slightly simple plot and a brilliantly put together monster, not to mention bucket loads of gore. This supposed 'sequel' is amazing, it has none of that. The acting is excruciatingly poor, (I've done better acting trying to bunk a day off of work and failed) the script is unbelievably bad to the point of ridiculam and the rubber 'hand puppet' monster and childlike stop motion effects provide more cringes at how poor they are than scares. There's some blob monster that honestly looks as if it is being pushed around on a stick, I mean, c'mon.

I can't say I have ever seen a horror movie quite this bad and I consider myself a fairly tolerant person. Some films are so poor that they become laughably enjoyable or mildly entertaining and then there's this, which is just downright painful. The thing that makes it worse is that the film had a budget of near $3m almost ten times that of its predecessor. and yet despite being made 7 years on (when effects have supposed to have improved) 'The deadly spawn' makes this film look like a college exam entry.

If you want to live a happy and fulfilling life, then avoid this at all costs, however, if you decide to watch it someday, please purchase a pack of razor blades to accompany the viewing. Trust me, you'll thank me for them.

campy but with some great effects

[trashgang · 7/10 · 11 October 2011]

I had never heard of director Glenn Takakjian and it's normal, this is his only flick he directed. He's still in the business as actor or in the animation department. I had never heard of Metamorphosis The Alien Factor but coming across a article in an old Dark Side Magazine I was surprised by the pictures. It looked like they used great effects. And by watching it, they did. It starts great with the breaking out of some alien virus attacking people working in the lab. One of them transforms into a weird creature but the transformation or metamorphosis was really well done. It even reminded me of The Thing when some tentacles appeared out of the victims body. It wasn't gory but the red stuff do flows a lot. But as I said it was campy too. The words sometimes said were really laughable sometimes. And when you saw a flesh eating plant moving or one of the creatures it was a bit of a laugh, but the dog was again really well done and face it, no CGI was used, just the good old latex and even some stop motion.

Everybody was talking about Tara Leigh being in this flick but for me the face of Dianna Flaherty rang a bell. She was in some Troma productions (Class Of Nuke'em High and Toxic Avenger). The acting was okay and by some mediocre.

The look of the flick itself looked like a eighties production and being made in the nineties it couldn't deliver the effects used then due being a low budget. But I enjoyed it a lot, man, the changing into the creature and the face changing towards the end, I loved it. The alien factor really did it for me, what a metamorphosis.

Words cannot say how bad this is.

[vyl · 1/10 · 15 January 2005]

This movie is crap. How else can I put it? Its... beyond bad? This movie is the ultimate badness. It has all the elements of a sub-B-grade movie.

Firstly, forget the sci part of sci-fi. There is not even a pretense of real science in here. To be fair, there is also no attempt to call it science. Its a cheap monster-flick, and makes no effort to be anything else.

Now, this can only be appreciated as a comedy. It is that bad. From the rather strange monster to the annoying computer-voice to the blocky white-painter architecture of the lab, its the representation of its genre: Those films that are so bad you have to laugh.

Funniest moment... Alien Thing gets shot with the full output of a building-sized particle accelerator. Huge blue glow, sparks, and out steps a perfectly normal, unburnt human.

Vastly enjoyable sci-fi horror trash.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 7/10 · 8 April 2008]

An alien from outer space bites a bio-researcher and turns him into hideous monster with an urge to kill.Its first victim is the guardian at the hospital he's working in.The guardians' daughters are getting worried that their father haven't called them and they go to the hospital,where they meet their worst nightmare."Metamorphosis:The Alien Factor" is a wonderfully cheesy trash loaded with gore and gross monster effects.It certainly better than "Dark Universe","Alien Predator" or "The Star Crystal".The plot is silly and full of holes,but the monster creations and stop-motion visuals are of a quality well beyond what one usually finds in movies on this level and remain convincing and scary throughout.Check it out.

4.4, REALLY???

[papadeltazulu · 1/10 · 18 January 2018]

This is surely one of the worst films ever made, the 10 star reviews citing excellent special effects and great suspense must be from cast and crew members, they have to be. This film is hard to get through, awful effects, bits of rubber dripping with petroleum jelly, stop motion so bad it makes some kids programs look good, the worst acting you'll ever see in a movie, it's beyond bad, some of the lines of dialogue and the delivery is on par with Troll 2. It really is an awful film, I borrowed this from a friend who told me how bad it was, so I thought I'd see for myself, hoping it was one of those so bad it's good flicks. Nope, it's just so bad it's really bad and I felt ripped off despite the fact I watched it for free.

Stay away from this dud, it has to be one of the worst films I've ever sat through.

Surprisingly good!

[Fisherandahunter · 10/10 · 19 March 2004]

After a misshalf in a laboratory, a engineer is bitten by a mutant amphibian creature and slowly mutates into a giant lizard monster and proceeds to devour fellow lab workers in a high-tech laboratory facility. Despite hammy acting, and some inane dialogue and logic laps, "Metamorphosis: The Alien Facotr" comes across as a solid, adequate thriller sporting some solid scares and tention with some unique special effects.

The production values and sets are elaborate and convincing, not the usual water-dripping and darkly-light alien-rip-off sets we see in these types of b-rate films. In addition to nice production values, the Takakjian director builds tention and some solid scares time to time. This film also breaks many rules of b-movies. Characters you expect to live die gory deaths, vice versa, and the ending ain't what you'd expect.

But quite possible the best element in this film are the special effects. The creatures look unique, and the amount of detail put into the monsters are astounding--The creatures can blink, they can breathe realisticly, muscles contract when they move, etc. and the F/X alone make this film worth watching. The special effects are just amazing, plain and simple.

Fun if slightly flawed creature feature

[kannibalcorpsegrinder · 7/10 · 11 December 2016]

Attempting to find their missing father, sisters tracking him down to the genetics lab he works out find that the company's experiments with alien DNA have inadvertently released a mutant monster in the facility forcing them to fight it off to get out alive.

This one turned out to be quite the intriguing creature feature. Among the film's positives here is the film's rather well-handled action scenes that occur throughout here which are incredibly fun and manage to generate some great moments here. The opening starts this off nicely with the discovery of the bloodied staff and the resulting attack on the security guard, and the first half does contain some rather nice moments in the hospital where his working with the mutations as well as the growing development of the transformation that's taking place in the infection room where they attempt to study him. That manages to keep this one going along nicely into the final half where it mainly deals with the creatures hunting them down within the corporations hallways and corridors which is all sorts of cheesy creature-feature goodness as the creature begins attacking them throughout here. The first encounters, where they come across the creature out in the hallways by sheer accident. are rather fun while the brawl in the exploratory lab makes for a solid action scene and sets up the fantastic finale in the basement where the creature gets a big fight in the lab where it features some rather impressive ideas and tactics used to combat the creature which ends this on a high-note. As well, the fact that the creature effects look decent and give this some nice moments in the kills throughout here. Still, one of the film's main problems here is in the completely clichéd and useless notion of the sleazy executives trying to keep the whole idea of their plans under wraps despite the ethical and logical rationale of their motives. The manner of him trying to keep the identity of the participant and the true nature of the experiments from getting out makes for quite an overdone set-up that comes off as rather illogical in the face of what's happening around them and really makes this one seem all the more familiar. The manner of going about hiding the involvement is quite lame and being yet another reappearance of that motif makes for quite a useless plot-thread. Likewise, the fact that the main part of the first half is played out like a flashback to the events rather than simply playing it straight which really makes for quite the bland beginning retelling events long before they actually occurred and then getting to the part that actually happened. This is wasted time that could've been used from the very beginning to get into the film proper by staying in the current time-line rather than recapping it rather lamely. While some might not be able to take the low-budget special effects work, but otherwise there's not a whole lot else wrong here.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence and violence-against- animals.

Journey is a band?

[jessegehrig · 3/10 · 12 July 2013]

First off I'd like to congratulate everyone who has written a review of this movie for IMDb, way to go! Honestly this is a movie better suited to be on in the background, like if you want to vacuum the living room and you want to have the TV on while you do it, Metamorphosis is the perfect movie for you. Perhaps you are a heavy drinker and need the light of TV to drink by, may I recommend this movie? If you have this movie on VHS, did you know it can be used as a cruel bludgeon, or as a paperweight? This movie probably played a role in some drug-money laundering scheme, because there is no way some one would want this movie to happen for artistic reasons, yeah and clearly it didn't make any money in the box offices. Some sort of scam was played on somebody either the financiers of the film or the IRS, but in no way can this be considered a legitimate motion picture.

one of the best "new" alien movies

[leathaface · 25 March 2004]

This movie was lots of fun to watch. If you enjoyed the anything-goes direction or creative-even-though-they-look-fake special effects of older monster movies, than you'll love this update, which almost seems to be a homage to schlock films. The plot is extremely simple, a top-secret organization finds alien DNA and begins to test it out on various animals. A scientist injects himself with the DNA and through a series of really gross, slimy, nasty transformations turns into a giant monster and runs amok in the lab where he works. First of all, the movie isn't for the faint of heart. It's really gory for the year it came out. REALLY. There was one part where the lead character gets his hand pretty much ripped to shreds by this frog-looking mutant, and he gets his assistant to pour sulphuric acid over it while the camera zooms in to show his mutilated hand being burned off. Or when his lab assistant gets her eyes gouged out. There's many, many other juicy bits, including a guy getting his head bitten off and another guy getting half his face ripped off, both shown close-up in all their glory. There's also many closeups of the scientist's festering, oozing skin as he transforms. There are many other outrageous looking mutants, like a dog that looks like it was spliced with a shark, and a giant monster crab. The movie is so full of special effects, makeup, gore, and weird looking, stop-motion animated creatures that you'd swear it was from the eighties. The monster that is killing people in the lab looks like a cross between a rhino and one of those Sandworms from Beetlejuice. This movie is great for a Sunday afternoon when you don't feel like thinking. It's more of a showcase for the great special effects than anything else.

Alien Mutation

[Fernando-Rodrigues · 3/10 · 1 March 2021]

Weak in every sense. Just another alien B-movie with weak make-up effects.

Body/creature/tentacle horror fest

[old_son · 7/10 · 12 October 2019]

Come for the gore, stay for the gore. This movie is a study in how to do practical effects really well on a shoestring budget. Everything else, like acting and story, is secondary and it shows, but the gore is phenomenal.

Kick-arse old-school alien flick!

[opforce3 · 8/10 · 16 August 2005]

A p*ssed-off alien escapes from a lab. An evil CEO tries to keep things hush-hush by hiring two evil hit men. A group of not-so-evil scientists and civilians are trapped in the building with the alien, thus becoming it's dinner. That might not sound like much of a plot, but don't let that jade you: This is a gory, effects-packed ride, and a heck of a fun one at that. Acting isn't very good and the plot has holes, but this is a fun one anyways. Some kick-@ss gore, and the creature effects are great. None of this crappy CG stuff that looks like Atari graphics like we see today, we're talking stop-motion and prosthetics like in Alien and The Thing. REAL special effects. This is a fun flick, a good old-fashioned monster movie that doesn't shy away from the good stuff like the crap Resident Evil movies or the new Star Wars films. Fans of old-school horror will be pleased by what this baby has to offer! 3 stars out of 4 (8/10).

Little suspense, good effects

[bazza-4 · 9 January 1999]

Rented this one from the video library out of sheer curiosity. Like a cross between Cronenberg's "The Fly" and Ridley Scott's "Alien", the slimy special effects are better than average. The script and acting, on the other hand, are not, giving this a bit of a tele-movie feel.

If you're a sci-fi/horror buff with an hour and a half or so to kill, give this film a go. Otherwise, catch the above-mentioned originals, who did it much better with a lot more intensity.

This movie was a lot better than expected.. for the most part

[kenton99 · 8/10 · 15 November 2007]

The Talos corporation is conducting some very strange experements with alien lifeforms..... A scientist gets bitten on the arm by a little creature and begins to mutate into a big alien monster. Its killing the employes one by one and leaving a wake of destruction in its path.... little balls of what appears to be poop can be scene in the bloody labrotory where the sucrity guard gets killed, What the hell?!?! I also learned that if you break a sucrity code box on a door it magicly unlocks. The only thing that kept me clinging on in this movie was the awesome monsters. It made the movie worth while. Sadly im sure this movie made as much money as the bottles of oil the jerky boss of the corporation has put in his rediculas hair, but give it a try if you like monsters.

"I don't get paid enough for this sh!t"

[lost-in-limbo · 11 February 2012]

Tautly directed and cheaply made, little sci-fi / horror monster throwback flick which is nothing but schlock, though all the same quite fun. It's a sideshow of horrid make-up effects, stop-motion and a touch of gore thrown here and there. The story is basic starting off rather grey, if a touch slow and talky in parts, as situations is explained through fragmented flashbacks. What are going on are the usual secretive experiments on genetic engineering that sees a doctor accidentally being contaminated by alien cells and virtually transforming in to something otherworldly that goes on the rampage in a forlorn scientific facility. While a headstrong girl along with her boyfriend and younger sister enter the building looking for their missing father, who worked as the facility's security guard. While the doctor in charge hires two killers to rid any evidence. Although it's no walk in the park, as they'll find out they are really unprepared. The first half is mainly told in flashbacks explaining the occurrences before and after the contamination. Here it tries to be thoughtful and selective with its choices (where the most suspenseful moments occur), but the second half keeps it straight-forward and dumb it down with the usual monster on the loose formula around empty rooms and corridors. Throwing in some outrageous special effects (tentacle action anyone?), grisly jolts and mutant creations where it finishes on a crazy note. In some aspects in reminded of another sequel "Syngenor" and it was interesting to see that it was initially set-up to be the sequel to the 1983 film "The Deadly Spawn". The acting is on the lousy side, but there are few exceptions with Marcus Powell chewing up his scenes with glassy intensity and Tony Gignate as one of the hired killers with a dry sense of humour.

"Please dear, not in front of the mutants."

the scariest yet obscure Sci-Fi/Horror movie ever made

[sandlot1992 · 28 February 2021]

Now for starters, I have not seen this film before either on VHS or on DVD and despite this being like an unofficially sequel to "the Deadly Spawn". this movie is like a cross between John Carpenter's "the Thing" and Cronenberg's "the Fly" and the stop motion animation to the creatures looks really neat since this pays homage to Ray Harryhausen, and or course despite it has some disturbing scenes and images that look like it came straight out of Ridley Scott's "Alien" and it's sequel, so I recommend probably seeing it once perhaps and least this won't give you nightmares yet to come after the past 30 years since it's release.