You know your movie is in trouble when even the creature-on-girl stuff is sloppy.
Roger Corman always prided himself (at least up until a certain point in his career, and this is still his New World Pictures era when there was.... well, it was before Carnosaur and Sharktopus, let's put it that way) on having cheesy B-movie fun with things but also having some level of quality or interest in *something* else that could be there for the audience. That isn't there in Humanoids from the Deep.
This is where he tries, whether this was his call or incidental from the writers I don't know, to put in some liberal-type element into the story with the Native American Indian who's land is being screwed with and... who cares? A lot of this movie feels like wasted potential in that it has a who-gives-a-s*** plot, but then the creature effects (or, I should say, the three creature suits, one of them only being completed by Rob Bottin) are pretty good and when the climax happens there's some creative editing to make it seem like there are more when, of course, there aren't, with some decent gore (although it's almost ruined by the repeated 5-second loop of screaming sound effects which I wouldn't notice except it's repeated 100 times in ten minutes). Also, James Horner's score is fine and does its job as a serious thriller score.
But there's a reason this feels lazy on multiple fronts; the movie is a Frankenstein monster of editing, where, as Corman admits without compunction on the Shout Factory DVD interview, that he and the editors took the movie away from Barbara Peters because, as Corman put it, there wasn't enough rape that she shot (the kinder version is that she didn't shoot enough sex and violence, which also had a different title, whether she knew this would be changed from "Beneath the Darkness" to this one who knows). So on the one hand there's a passable-to-just-okay-and... no, there's not much logic to it on one hand (plus the performances are by actors who are barely B level, more like C), and on the other a sleazy bag of exploitation movie tricks that Corman and his assistant directors and editors pull to make it more tantalizing. Not to mention, of course, the fact that these mutated salmon-mansters do in fact inseminate the women which has, naturally, a payoff at the very, very end which, surprisingly, feels tacked on when all is said and done.
I could go into why a lot of the human story stuff doesn't work or lacks logic - chiefly why, after that opening where several people DIE IN A FIRE on a boat and no one investigates this (or the multiple dead dogs, which gets a shrug from the would-be excuses for Stephen King characters, as in they'd be in King stories if he lacked talent) - but I don't see the point. You may take to this schlock, but I didn't find enough to keep me really engaged past a certain point, despite the last twenty minutes trying to throw as much as it can at you. It certainly does try as far as lots of blood and gore and breasts (and some of those breasts, I'll readily admit, look splendid). But even at 79 minutes this is pushing it.
Roger Corman always prided himself (at least up until a certain point in his career, and this is still his New World Pictures era when there was.... well, it was before Carnosaur and Sharktopus, let's put it that way) on having cheesy B-movie fun with things but also having some level of quality or interest in *something* else that could be there for the audience. That isn't there in Humanoids from the Deep.
This is where he tries, whether this was his call or incidental from the writers I don't know, to put in some liberal-type element into the story with the Native American Indian who's land is being screwed with and... who cares? A lot of this movie feels like wasted potential in that it has a who-gives-a-s*** plot, but then the creature effects (or, I should say, the three creature suits, one of them only being completed by Rob Bottin) are pretty good and when the climax happens there's some creative editing to make it seem like there are more when, of course, there aren't, with some decent gore (although it's almost ruined by the repeated 5-second loop of screaming sound effects which I wouldn't notice except it's repeated 100 times in ten minutes). Also, James Horner's score is fine and does its job as a serious thriller score.
But there's a reason this feels lazy on multiple fronts; the movie is a Frankenstein monster of editing, where, as Corman admits without compunction on the Shout Factory DVD interview, that he and the editors took the movie away from Barbara Peters because, as Corman put it, there wasn't enough rape that she shot (the kinder version is that she didn't shoot enough sex and violence, which also had a different title, whether she knew this would be changed from "Beneath the Darkness" to this one who knows). So on the one hand there's a passable-to-just-okay-and... no, there's not much logic to it on one hand (plus the performances are by actors who are barely B level, more like C), and on the other a sleazy bag of exploitation movie tricks that Corman and his assistant directors and editors pull to make it more tantalizing. Not to mention, of course, the fact that these mutated salmon-mansters do in fact inseminate the women which has, naturally, a payoff at the very, very end which, surprisingly, feels tacked on when all is said and done.
I could go into why a lot of the human story stuff doesn't work or lacks logic - chiefly why, after that opening where several people DIE IN A FIRE on a boat and no one investigates this (or the multiple dead dogs, which gets a shrug from the would-be excuses for Stephen King characters, as in they'd be in King stories if he lacked talent) - but I don't see the point. You may take to this schlock, but I didn't find enough to keep me really engaged past a certain point, despite the last twenty minutes trying to throw as much as it can at you. It certainly does try as far as lots of blood and gore and breasts (and some of those breasts, I'll readily admit, look splendid). But even at 79 minutes this is pushing it.