Humanoids from the Deep

1980 horror movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Damn science! Once again, scientists dick around and accidentally create rampaging monsters. In this case, it's fish men who go around slicing up men with their deadly claws and violating women with their hideous reproductive organs. I guess they should have all listened to the Native American.

This is also, as you can tell from the poster called Monster. But that's not nearly clever enough for a movie made by people who can afford three monster costumes, the amount that is shown on screen at the same time. Yes, this is a cheap production as you'd expect something from Roger Corman to be. But it made up for its cheapness with the half-man/half-fish rape scenes. I mean, you never saw Jaws rape anybody unless you saw that titular beast as the phallic symbol that he was and saw the whole movie as some sort of rape allegory. I kind of liked how the monsters looked in this thing. They had these enormous heads and elongated arms, the latter which I imagine made groping teenagers a lot easier. This movie also has a fantastic ending, one that only sort of looks like it might have been stolen from another (more famous) movie that came out the previous year. And there was a random ventriloquist dummy in this thing as well as a splinters joke that I'm definitely going to be using if I ever get my hands on a ventriloquist dummy. This isn't the worst of these low-budget sci-fi horror hybrids, and the climactic scene where the monsters unleash their fury at a carnival that for whatever reason wasn't cancelled has its moments. And those monsters really do look kind of cool in a very ridiculous way. But this just feels like something we've all seen several times before.