Not much to add to the previous comments, they covered the plot remarkably well, at least as much plot as there was in the movie.
I'll add a few observations. The acting was actually somewhat better than expected in a movie of this type. They caught some decent performers either on the way up or the way down in their careers who agreed to do it. The special effects, for 1982, were pretty decent although the rubber masks in the transformation sequences were pretty unconvincing. They also got carried away with the air bladders under the skin blowing them way too high to be credible.
Now the weakest link, the plot. Although it had high ambitions it fell flat due to the inability to come up with anything resembling an explanation for the transformation of Michael.
Allegedly a local loser was discovered with another man's wife and was chained in the cellar for years and given cadavers to chew on. Conveniently the cuckolded husband was the local undertaker. Apparently the monster-to-be used to pretend as a child that he would come back someday like a cicada. Somehow they tossed those concepts together to get a completely nonhuman monster who could, in addition to the physical changes, transfer his mind and memories to his sperm. A neat trick but kind of silly. Hard as it is to fathom, the movie "Child's Play" actually had a better explanation than this one. I never thought I'd be saying that.
If they had thrown in almost any sort of rational explanation I would have enjoyed the movie more. Heck, I would have accepted alien experiments. The lack of an explanation kept bugging me, no pun intended, for most of the movie.
Overall it was worth renting on DVD and watching. It was certainly no worse than a lot of movies before and since. If you turn off the critical thinking you'll enjoy it more.
I'll add a few observations. The acting was actually somewhat better than expected in a movie of this type. They caught some decent performers either on the way up or the way down in their careers who agreed to do it. The special effects, for 1982, were pretty decent although the rubber masks in the transformation sequences were pretty unconvincing. They also got carried away with the air bladders under the skin blowing them way too high to be credible.
Now the weakest link, the plot. Although it had high ambitions it fell flat due to the inability to come up with anything resembling an explanation for the transformation of Michael.
Allegedly a local loser was discovered with another man's wife and was chained in the cellar for years and given cadavers to chew on. Conveniently the cuckolded husband was the local undertaker. Apparently the monster-to-be used to pretend as a child that he would come back someday like a cicada. Somehow they tossed those concepts together to get a completely nonhuman monster who could, in addition to the physical changes, transfer his mind and memories to his sperm. A neat trick but kind of silly. Hard as it is to fathom, the movie "Child's Play" actually had a better explanation than this one. I never thought I'd be saying that.
If they had thrown in almost any sort of rational explanation I would have enjoyed the movie more. Heck, I would have accepted alien experiments. The lack of an explanation kept bugging me, no pun intended, for most of the movie.
Overall it was worth renting on DVD and watching. It was certainly no worse than a lot of movies before and since. If you turn off the critical thinking you'll enjoy it more.