Crew
Director/Story – G.L. [George] Eastman, Photography – Lorenzo Battaglia, Music – Pahamian. Production Company – Filmirage.
Cast
Gene Le Brock (Dr Peter Houseman), Catherine Baranov (Sally Donnelly), Henry Cason (Dr Mike Lester), David Wicker (Willy Carson), Jason Arnold (Tommy Donnelly), Stephen Brown (Professor Lloyd), Tom Story (Professor Huston), Anna Colona (Patricia), Allison Stokes (Alice), Laura Gemser (Prostitute)
Plot
At the university at Norfolk, Virginia, Dr Peter Houseman comes under pressure from a newly appointed academic oversight committee to demonstrate results of his lengthy, ongoing experiments into halting aging. In desperation, he injects himself with the still uncompleted serum. However, this causes his body to start aging and undergoing a metamorphosis. Peter is then subject to blackouts during which he realises that he is killing people.
The Italian exploitation film was at its height between the 1960s and into the early 1990s. The Italians would make copies of just about every commercial Hollywood film under the sun and some of these became genres in their own right – the peplum, the giallo film, the Spaghetti Western. Directors and actors would frequently hide behind Anglicised pseudonym to sell their works in the US. (See Italian Cinema). Metamorphosis is one such instance of an Italian horror film pretending to be American – indeed, it has gone well beyond Anglicised pseudonyms in its efforts to resemble an American film and actually went to shoot in the USA (Norfolk, Virginia) and has hired US actors (all unknowns).
Metamorphosis is essentially a copy of US-made films of the era such as The Fly (19886) or Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986). These jumped aboard the 1980s revolution in physical Makeup Effects, producing an array of gory creature effects, meltdowns and transformations, all with with a nominal science amok plot to give rationale to the proceedings.
This is a standard Mutations type film where the incredibly handsome Gene Le Brock self-experiments and then undergoes an icky transformation. For a time, the film takes on Jekyll and Hyde overtones as Le Brock turns into some kind of beast that goes and kills, while he has blackouts and remembers nothing of what happened. This transpires in far more dull ways than you feel like it should. For at least the first half or more, we just get Gene Le Brock in what looks like aging makeup where most of the actual attacks occur during his blackouts, which we are never privy to, except for one attack on hooker Laura Gemser.
In the last quarter of the show, we get the full transformation into monster and things pick up marginally, although these are no more than standard creature effects of the era. However, the creature’s final change into a laughable rubber dinosaur bursting through the door as the cops surround the lab is something that shoots the entire film down in flames. Rather absurdly, Metamorphosis exists in both cut and uncut versions, which seems ridiculous in that there is not much that is gory in the uncut version seen here.
Metamorphosis was the only film directed George Eastman (the Anglicised name of Italian actor Luigi Montefiore). Eastman had a considerable number of credits as an actor between the 1960s and 2000s in films that include Fellini Satyricon (1969), Anthropophagus (1980), Terror Express (1980), 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), The New Barbarians (1983) and The Barbarians (1987), among others. He has also written a number of films including The Great Alligator (1979), Anthropophagus, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980), Absurd (1981), Porno Holocaust (1981), 2020: Texas Gladiators (1983) and StageFright – Aquarius (1987).
Trailer here