Humanoids from the Deep – produced, uncredited, by Roger Corman, started by director Barbara Peeters, completed by Jimmy T. Murakami and added to James Sbardellati – is unsurprisingly a wildly inconsistent and schizophrenic affair. On the one hand it’s a gory updating of earlier “humanoids from the deep” films like The Horror of Party Beach (1964) and The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959) but on the other it’s a trashy exploitation film with gratuitous T&A shots crow-barred in at every opportunity.
The small fishing community of Noyo, California is plagued by a series of unexplained and mysterious deaths Jim Hill (Doug McClure) investigates when his brother is badly mutilated by one of a race of humanoid monsters that have emerged from the sea and are raping local women. His investigations lead him to the corporation Canco that has announced plans to build a cannery near the town and with the help of Canco scientist Dr Susan Drake (Ann Turkel) realises that the growth hormone that the company has been experimenting with has caused fish to mutate into the amphibious, sex-crazed humanoids. As tensions run high between the fishermen, led by the openly racist Slattery (Vic Morrow) and the town’s Native American population, things come to a violent head at the town’s annual salmon festival when the humanoids emerge from the sea en masse.
Peeters started on the film, scripted by Frederick James from a story by Frank Arnold and Martin B. Cohen and originally titled Beneath the Darkness, and was plodding along quite nicely (the emphasis being on the word plodding) until she was confronted by Corman and told that Sbardellati had been brought in to “spice” things up a bit, adding lots of shots of naked young women being pursued and raped by the monstrous gill men. Peeters understandably decided that this wasn’t for her any more and walked, leaving Sbardellati and Murakami to finish things off. The result is three quarters a rather earnest and, if we’re being honest, pretty dull ecological thriller with a dash of racial tension melodrama stirred in, the rest being salacious and crass exploitation that undeniably hit its intended target of horny late 70s/early 80s teenage boys pretty much head on.
The non-Peeters material might be tasteless but it certainly livens things up a bit. The rest of the story is worthy but dull, its social commentary naive and too blunt to really work effectively. Some of the gory set-pieces are well staged (the climactic attack on the town celebrations is particularly good) and Margaret Prentice’s gore effects are more convincing than the monster suits, designed by Rob Bottin. These bulbous headed monstrosities, like the eponymous The Monster of Piedras Blancas, look great in stills but are somewhat less effective when seen scurrying about throwing themselves at every passing naked nubile. And we could certainly have done without the ridiculous Alien (1979)-inspired epilogue. Other fairly obvious influences include Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) (the small coastal community under siege) and Joe Dante’s Corman-produced Piranha (1978) (genetically mutated aquatic monsters wreaking mayhem).
The dour ecological musings that seemed almost mandatory at the time and the under-developed anger at the plight of dispossessed Native Americans sits uncomfortably alongside the film’s trashier elements. Scenes shot by Sbardellati often feel disconnected from the rest of the film. The ridiculous business involving a horny ventriloquist, played by real life vent David Strassman with his wooden sidekick Chuck Wood, is particularly egregious in this regard – neither Strassman’s Billy nor the naked brunette he’s sharing a tent with are seen anywhere else in the film. They just turn up for a spot of “comic” (after a fashion) business, he gets slashed to death, she gets raped and that’s it, no-one even so much as mentions them after that. It’s no wonder Peeters was keen to distance herself from the film in later years.
The film was a modest success for producers New World Pictures, its brisk 79 minutes making it perfect for double or triple billing (in the UK, where it was retitled Monster (Humanoids from the Deep) it was incongruously paired with Fred Walton’s altogether more interesting When a Stranger Calls (1979)). Corman oversaw a remake in 1996 directed by Jeff Yonis and Brett Piper’s They Bite made the same year shares pretty much the exact same plot. Footage from the film, particularly the shot of a truck falling from a bridge, was recycled several times, in films like The Nest (1988), Not of This Earth (1988), Raptor (2001) and Cheerleader Massacre (2003).
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