HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980) – Category: A neglected bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult following
Okay, this movie is better known than many of the other joyously bad films I review, but it still hasn’t acquired the reputation or the following it deserves as Midnight Movie or Movie Host material. Vic Morrow IS the heavy and Doug McClure IS another bland and unmemorable hero in this film, one of the many horror flicks that tried to imitate Alien.
Roger Corman executive- produced and his gang alone would turn out a few other movies that were , shall we say – “reminiscent” – of Alien, namely Forbidden World and Galaxy of Terror (If you ever wanted to see Joannie from Joannie Loves Cha-Chi explode from within this is the movie for you!)
The central idea of those films, as with Humanoids from the Deep, seems to have been “audiences can’t get enough scenes of people getting violated in bizarre ways then bursting open with the inhuman offspring thus conceived!”
In Humanoids this gimmick is combined with the time-honored “scientific experiments spawn mutant sea monsters” plot for a true classic of fun-bad filmmaking. The monsters are amphibious man/ fish hybrids who are visually compelling but silly all at the same time and their all-out assault on a boardwalk festival at the end of the movie is hilariously absurd.
The fish-men spend the bulk of the story slashing up men and making off with their women so they can sexually violate them, then wrap the women in seaweed until it was time to give birth.
Unlike Corman’s other Alien pastiches this one makes the audience wait until the very end for the scene of a mutant hellbeast erupting from its human host. This is the type of enjoyably bad movie that would be just plain depressing if it was done with state-of-the- art special effects and competent actors. As it is, though, it is one long laugh from start to finish punctuated by flashes of gore and gratuitous amphibian-on- woman mating. You can make your own sophomoric From Here to Eternity jokes when you see the seaside sex scenes.
Director Barbara Peeters went on to direct several episodes of the prime time soap-opera Falcon Crest, which featured Lorenzo Lamas violating various females while managing to seem even sillier than the monsters in this flick. Veteran fans of bad biker films will recognize an early victim of the sea-beasts as Hoke Howell, beloved for decades as Crapout in the movie Sidehackers (“That was number FIIIIVE!” ).
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