Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

A small New England fishing town has rather a lot of trouble: the fishing yield of the local salmon has been decreasing for years now, so much so that most of the population greets the plans of a corporation to build a cannery and start on a highly industrialized fishing operation with happiness. Only a couple of people, really mostly native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), are set against it. Johnny even might have a chance to stop the project in court, so the New England fishing rednecks under the leadership of Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow) are getting antsy enough, they start acting like the Klan. Despite being for the cannery, local boat owner Jim Hill (Doug McClure) doesn’t hold truck with these assholes, and might even become a voice of reason for the saner of the local fishermen, if he and the rest of the cast didn’t get distracted by a bunch of fish men going around killing men and raping women.

These gill men are of course the result of genetic experimentation by Evilcorp meant to increase salmon yield, a side-effect their own chief scientist Dr Drake (Ann Turkel) had warned them about (but they wouldn’t listen, and she apparently wouldn’t whistleblow). And yes, the local Salmon Festival is right around the corner, and the Mayor of AmityEvilcorp would absolutely prefer if things like a bit of murder, rape and kidnapping were kept on the down low. So it’s left to the fists (and guns) of Doug McClure and Anthony Pena to fight the fish folk eating the fisher folk.

It is rather astonishing how many Nature Strikes Back, Jaws-alike and classic monster movie clichés can be squeezed into eighty minutes of runtime, but that’s how producer Roger Corman liked it in this phase, and that’s certainly what director Barbara Peeters (with additional sleaze shot by Jimmy T. Murakami and/or James Sbardellati) delivered.

Because the film is stuffed to the gills with clichés and tropes that need little explanation, it zips along at an often incredible pace. Peeters somehow manages to keep things surprisingly coherent, with character motivations that make sense as far as they go, and a plot that may be a mix of the greatest hits of all monster movies, but also holds together through kill scenes, unpleasantness and weirdness.

Obviously, I have no problem at all with the film’s nature as a bit of a best of album with added sleaze, particularly not when it is executed with such vigour, as well as a true commitment to being a bit gory and unpleasant in the traditional exploitation style. The effects, particularly in the great, climactic attack on the Salmon Festival and the fantastic Alien rip-off moment that gets us out of the door do get rather Italian from time to time and become so imaginative, they stop being just unpleasant and instead turn surreal.

An added ace in the hole in this regard are the monster suits designed by Rob Bottin. While they were clearly realized on the cheap, there’s a sense for the strange detail on display that makes them work very well indeed. These things – all of them recognizable individuals too – look wrong in the just the right way. Mouths that are too broad, or arms that are too long suggest these creatures are something not coming out of nature as we know it, but mutants that don’t have a place in an ordered universe. Which is quite the effect to achieve with a batch of rubber suits.