Humanoids From The Deep A.K.A. Monster
(1980) 80 Min.
Rated: R (gore, nudity, rape, dead dogs)
Country: USA
Director: Barbara Peeters, Jimmy T. Murakami
Starring: Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Aquatic mutants harass a fishing village and go on a killing and breeding spree.
Synopsis:
Off the coast of a Californian fishing village of Noyo, an aquatic monster gets caught in the net of a fishing boat. As the people on the boat attempt to pull up the net a fisherman’s son falls into the water and gets eaten by the creature. Meanwhile through a series of mishaps the boat explodes, killing everyone aboard. Jim Hill (McClure) and his far younger wife Carol witness the explosion from their boat.
Later on in their home, they search for their dog, only to find it’s bloody remains on a beach. It was attacked and killed by the creature the night before.
At a Noyo town party the Canco company announces that it’s been doing research on salmon and is experimenting with making bigger and more plentiful salmon. It’s a local canning company that plans to bring jobs to the small fishing village. Meanwhile, mysteriously all of the town’s dogs are killed overnight except for Johnny Eagle’s dog. Johnny Eagle is a local Native American man and one of the villagers, Hank Slattery (Morrow), decides to murder his dog after assuming Johnny murdered everyone else’s dogs. Johnny confronts everyone at the party while holding his dead dog. This causes a fight which Jim and his brother Tommy gets in on, defending Johnny.
The next day, teens Jerry and Peggy go to the ocean for a romp and to make out. Jerry is abruptly pulled underwater and disappears, when Peggy calls for him she doesn’t find him at first. She then spots him standing still and turns him towards her only to see he’s missing a chunk of his face and he’s dead. She also gets yanked into the water. The monster pulls her onto the sand, pulls off her bikini top and rapes her.
Meanwhile, a guy in a tent on the beach entertains a girl with his ventriloquist puppet. She finds it all very sexy and gets naked. Suddenly their tent is torn apart by a monster. The monster kills the man and rapes the girl.
Hank has been spying on the Native Americans and discovers they plan to sue him and the canning company. He makes plans to do “whatever it takes” to take care of Johnny with his drinking buddies. The group takes a boat to Johnny’s house. Johnny, at this time, has invited over a couple from the village for a grilled fish meal. Hank and his cronies throw a molotov cocktail at Johnny’s house and it bursts into a giant explosion.
As Johnny is fighting the blaze, the girl gets in a truck to get help and Tommy, the guy from the village, tries to help Johnny spray the house with water. The guy gets pulled into the nearby water by a monster. Johnny sees the scuffle and kills the monster. While the girl is driving the truck another monster attacks her vehicle and it falls off a tall bridge and explodes as it hits the ground.
Johnny arrives in the morning with Tommy’s injured body. He’s Jim’s younger brother. Johnny describes the creature he saw to Dr. Susan Drake (Turkel), the scientist who has been working for Canco.
Jim, Johnny and Dr. Drake go exploring and looking for evidence of the monsters that Johnny described. They explore the beach near some caves and find a nest of monsters which attack them. The group manages to kill the monsters and find one of the missing girls, Peggy, still alive but in a state of shock.
Dr. Drake takes Jim to a Canco lab and inspects the body of one of the monsters. She explains that one of the Canco experiments was injecting DNA-5 into developing salmon which causes them to grow large. She also explained how over a thousand altered salmon got released into the ocean. She also believes that the creatures are trying to mate with the girls to create a new evolution of salmon.
There’s a large festival with a carnival and the monsters attack it. The townspeople run around and panic and try to fight off the monsters. Dr. Drake lights the nearby water on fire with a flare gun. Johnny saves Hank’s life from the mutant fish.
Jim goes off to look for his wife who is at home and being attacked by a mutant fish. Carol Hill is able to stab to death one of the mutant fish and Jim arrives in time to comfort her.
The next day, the town is still reeling from the attack and the carnival grounds are in ruins. Jim and Carol survey the carnage.
Meanwhile, Dr. Drake is helping Peggy through labor pains in her laboratory. Suddenly Peggy’s womb bursts open and a fish monster fetus soaked in blood roars to life. The film ends.
Review:
This film is produced through Roger Corman’s New World Pictures production company. It really seems to have the hallmarks of a bad b-grade film and yet it’s still mildly entertaining.
Mutant salmon kill dogs, men and rape women in an attempt to produce more of themselves. This movie also has quite a few explosions and gore aplenty. There’s even a creepy ventriloquist doll that moves it’s eyes for no reason when the carnage is occurring on screen. It’s easily the only truly creepy thing happening in this entire film.
There were a number of times when I questioned whether or not the actors in this film really understood what they were in for when they signed up. There’s a good chunk of this film where they’re quite literally fighting men in rubber suits and taking it seriously. This was in 1980, after films like Alien (1979) and Jaws (1975) existed.
Having said that, it is what it is. An amusing little monster attack film with a flimsy plot and just scenes of people running around and screaming. The only drawbacks are, of course, the large number of dead doggy corpses in the film and the creepy fish-on-women rape scenes. The latter of which are mercifully quick.
I would recommend this film to fans of low-budget old school horror.
