Movie Review: Humanoids from the Deep

Humanoids from the Deep (1980) aka Monster

Sometimes you have to admire the ideas that get turned into horror movies. Dog sized carnivorous shrews, shark filled tornadoes and violent mutated bipedal celocanths. If that last one isn't recognizable then you haven't watched Humanoids from the Deep a Roger Corman horror film about a fishing company trying to make super salmon that get eaten by Celocanths that then rapidly evolve into humanoid fish men that kill the men and rape the women of a sleepy fishing village.

The plot is  your standard tale of an unseen threat slowly infiltrating a town by killing the odd person or all the dogs (if you can't stomach dogs dying on film I'd skip this one) while the residents blame the local native american at first before realizing too late it's actually the horrifying love child of the creature from the black lagoon, regenerators from resident evil and Rainbows Zippy.

Time to eat the townspeople!

Is it any good? Well the effects for are really good as you might expect from SFX supremo Rob Bottin (pre The Thing), there is a huge kill count, there is a decent amount of nudity and a surprisingly large amount of explosions for a fishing village. The highlights are probably the creatures themselves which are really creepy, the brawl between the townspeople early on and the finale at the town festival where the salmon monsters run amok killing and raping everyone. On the other hand some of the acting is not that great, the ending sequel bait is kind of off and if mutant salmon men raping women isn't your thing then this is probably best avoided.

Overall this is a decent exploitation monster movie which didn't leave me bored at all, worth checking out.

3 out of 5 Pumpkins