Dr Peter Houseman (Gene LeBrock) is committed to his research project at Virginia University where he is trying to arrest the ageing process, but he hits a snag when the board decide to request that all scientists there hand over the details of precisely what they're up to to their investors. Houseman is incensed, and protests loudly, but cannot see any way out of this without losing his funding - which he may do anyway when they see his partial results. There's only one thing to do: speed up his experiments.
Metamorphosis was notable for about one reason, and that was the man behind the camera. He was none other than George Eastman, or Luigi Montefiore as he was known to his mum, star of some of the trashiest Italian exploitation flicks of the seventies and eightes, here making his official debut as director. From that build up you might have expected - hoped, even - that this would be on a par with the kind of dodginess he had made his stock in trade, but disappointingly for the most part this remained fairly conventional.
There was that ending to take into account, but we'll get to that. In the main this had been inspired by the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly, or that was what everyone thought, but watching it you could see that what most inspired Mr Eastman was the opening credits of the seventies Incredible Hulk television show, with Houseman very much of the "what the hell, I'll experiment on myself" school of boffins. This landed the movie in the well-worn territory of mad science, a venerable genre that showed few signs of ever going completely out of fashion.
It also landed the movie in the territory of the audience second guessing the entire story thanks to a deeply predictable plot, with every twist well telegraphed to anyone who had ever seen this type of affair before. Houseman does indeed inject himself with his anti-ageing serum (through the eye and straight into the brain, of course) and for a while it seems that it's done him the power of good. He gets a new girlfriend in the shape of Sally (Catherine Baranov, apparently a waitress at the hotel the Italian crew were staying at!), and he feels better than ever, except, oops, why is he having these blackouts and quick flashbacks to incidents he cannot recall?
Could it be something to do with the serum? Well what do you think? By the time he's finally remembered flinging none other than Laura Gemser around her room it looks as if this has gone too far, made plain by the scary contact lenses LeBrock is required to wear as his physical form lives up to the title. It's Jekyll and Hyde all over again, only Mr Hyde was not a lizard man transforming into the most logical final step in that evolution, for a finale that after all this drawn out boredom rewards the patient viewer with a true belly laugh - not one, in fact, but two, as the last minute revelation after it all seems to be over is truly hilarious. As to how true to life this is, I'm not a doctor like Houseman is, but I'm pretty sure this is one hundred percent bullshit, yet so were The Alligator People and the Tarantula of fifties sci-fi cinema, so you could observe Eastman was carrying on a fine tradition. It still wasn't very good, though. Music by Luigi Ceccarelli.
George Eastman scripted most of his notorious horror and porno vehicles himself. To his credit he also wrote Keoma, which is probably the last great spaghetti western.
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