Trash on the Half Shell, ‘Humanoids from the Deep’ Presents a Tortured Sea Creature Feature
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
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Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: A Meddlesome Producer’s Bloodiest, Briniest Catch of the Day
As titillating as it is atrocious, “Humanoids from the Deep” has everything. Sandy boobs. Practical gore. A woman director undermined by Roger Corman. Garnish with those dead dog scenes, and what more could you ask of a creature feature from the summer of 1980?
Starring Doug McClure as a hero fisherman, Ann Turkel as an inquisitive biologist, and Vic Morrow in a shifty special performance, this sluggish monster invasion imagines a community ravaged by sea creatures (AKA clumsy actors in suits designed by special effects legend Rob Bottin) during an especially nip-slippy summer. The aforementioned humanoids of the deep have come to the shores of Noyo, California with an especially vulgar agenda in mind, and just when the new salmon cannery was set to open!
“They’re not human… but they hunt human women,” the tagline reads. “Not for killing… for MATING!”
Yes, the promise of nonconsensual fish fucking is on the poster, and somewhere in that classic Corman marketing is most likely where director Barbara Peeters’ actual vision got lost.
This overly self-serious B-movie, also directed by an uncredited Jimmy T. Murakami, served up sci-fi schlock on the half shell thanks to Corman’s low-budget genre factory, New World Pictures. Then at their peak, the producer and distributor behind cult and exploitation classics like “Hellraiser,” “The Brood,” and “Death Race 2000” offered up an unfocused horror script — about an ill-fated fishing town facing an onslaught of semi-aquatic attackers — to Joe Dante first. The “Gremlins” director turned it down, having made “Piranha” for New World two years earlier, and Peeters picked it up.
Like Scorsese and so many others before her, Peeters started as an independent filmmaker who got her shot at Hollywood because of Corman. New World was one of only a few avenues available to women directors back then, but after making just a handful of features together, post-production on “Humanoids” would permanently end her and Corman’s partnership. During a 2019 Q&A session hosted by UCLA Film, the pioneering Peeters alluded to the pair’s complex history.
“I’m not the only guilty person who has ever worked for Roger Corman,” Peeters quipped, introducing the back half of a double feature that included her movies “Summer School Teachers” and “Bury Me an Angel.” Released in 1971, that second project is the first American biker film made by a woman ever. It was written and directed by Peeters independently before it was acquired by New World, kicking off their tortured relationship.
The artistic license that Corman reportedly took with “Humanoids” when recruiting Murakami, an animated shorts director whose major claim to fame is adapting Raymond Briggs’ “The Snowman,” was significant. Murakami was asked to add more explicit rape and attack sequences to Peeters’ film, and sometime after, she disavowed the project. Prior to its release, Peeters allegedly requested that her directing credit be removed, but New World and Corman declined to do so. In the modern streaming landscape, “Humanoids” still pops up on badly researched lists recommending exploitation flicks made by women.
Known internationally by the misnomer “Monster” (not to be confused with Kenneth Hartford’s competing movie of the same name from that same year), “Humanoids” failed to break even at the box office. It’s perhaps a fitting punishment for the business-minded Corman, and a suitable enough outcome for what’s essentially a genre belly-flop immortalized on film. (Splashy, sure! But easy to criticize as a matter of form and taste.) Still, the sad truth is that the most memorable parts of “Humanoids” seem to have come from Murakami and Corman. This week’s After Dark, lacking tension in its plot-line but not without characteristic B-movie bite, is worth watching both as an outrageous seasonal horror and as bait luring you into the rest of Peeters’ filmography. Check back next week for “Bury Me an Angel.” For now, IndieWire’s Wilson Chapman is goin’ fishin’. —AF
The Aftermath: “Jaws” Without the Taste Buds
B-movies can arrive decades ahead of their time, introducing ideas and innovations mainstream Hollywood takes years to catch onto. But just as frequently, cult classics and fringe cinema are reactive rather than revolutionary, heavily cribbing from the more acclaimed and visible genre fare of their day while applying a trashy, tasteless sheen to the stories being spiritually retold.
Unapologetically exploitive and with seemingly little on its mind except gore and T&A, “Humanoids from the Deep” falls firmly into the latter category. Watching the film without looking up the exact year it was made, it was instantly easy to peg Peeters/Murakami’s sci-fi horror as a child of “Jaws” and “Alien.” Sure enough, it went into production just five months after the latter first premiered in theaters.
That’s really the only explanation for how “Humanoids” could so boldly and shamelessly (but effectively!) rip off the iconic “Alien” chest-bursting scene as its final bloody button before the credits role, or account for how five years after Spielberg’s shark feature “Jaws” changed Hollywood forever, this New World Pictures flick sets itself in a small fishing town suspiciously similar to Amity Island. Hell, there’s even a scene where a young buxom blonde gets dragged and attacked in the water by an unseen force during which I could practically just close my eyes to hear the menacing John Williams Great White theme.
To give “Humanoids” credit, the inspiration isn’t nearly as blatant as Corman’s “Piranha” series. Still, if you’ve ever watched “Jaws” and thought Spielberg’s masterpiece would be improved if the man-eating shark was a rapist, then “Humanoids” is here to satiate your (questionable) cinematic desires.
Corman and New World Pictures pumped out genuine classics during their 23 years at the forefront of B-movie cinema (“Slumber Party Massacre,” anyone?) Even if its biggest fans probably wouldn’t accuse “Humanoids from the Deep” of being one of them, there’s something hypnotic about a film that so readily commits to its own rancid rhythm.
There’s ostensibly a plot going on, and yet none of the characters’ feeble storylines stick in the brain, since it is all just an excuse to deliver some memorable “Creature from the Black Lagoon”-inspired sea monsters, buckets of blood and gore, and a parade of damsels in varying states of distress and undress. It delivers all those elements well, providing enough genuinely good scares and monster movie mayhem (that attack on the festival is worth the price of admission alone) to chug along as a mindless bit of fun.
At just 80 minutes, “Humanoids from the Deep” does still somehow drag, mainly because the seams between the seemingly more buttoned-up film that Peeters wanted to make and the 200% pure-grade schlock that Corman commissioned are readily obvious. There’s a vaguely environmentalist message regarding the cannery company responsible for creating these abominations that goes nowhere, and an odd quickly abandoned subplot about racial tensions surrounding Anthony Pena’s activist Johnny Eagle. Watching the flick is an exercise in wondering what might have been done with these weightier themes had Peeters kept control of the final project.
The answer, honestly, might be simply that the film fades into complete obscurity. The lurid rape scenes are difficult to stomach, but they’re what makes the film such a notorious, noxious relic of its time. In some respects, “Humanoids from the Deep” is an unusually honest monster movie in how it takes all of the subtext inherent to classic ’50s sci-fi about giant apes or sea creatures kidnapping women and delivers more explicit confirmation about the monsters’ intentions. That doesn’t erase how gawking the actual sequences are, and it’s hard to blame anyone who wants to avoid a film that is clearly trying to provoke titillation from scenes of sexual assault — even if it’s sexual assault from mutant salmon people.
Watching the film reminded me a bit of running internet jokes about “misogynistic bangers” — think “Misery Business” by Paramore or “Cry Me a River” by Justin Timberlake, songs with rancid lyrical content that nonetheless can provoke car singalongs whenever they come on in shuffle. “Humanoids from the Deep” strikes a similar chord: you know it’s risible, but when you’re in the mood for gore and trash, it can hit like a fresh dose of dopamine. If you feel a little filthy and a little guilty after turning it on, then isn’t that just half of the appeal? —WC
Those brave enough to join in on the fun can stream “Humanoids from the Deep” (1980) — AKA “Monster” — for free on Prime Video, Tubi, Fandango, and more. IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59 p.m. ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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