Humanoids from the Deep (6/10)

    "Humanoids from the Deep" is an American science fiction horror film from 1980.  Another one that is probably very niche and obscure to folks - I had certainly never heard of it at the age of 31. I went digging for some Lovecraftian horror films for the month of October and this was in the depths of Amazon Prime. (Get it? Depths? Haha!) 

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Immediate Trigger Warning:

This film has two or three separate scenes of disturbing sexual assault / teratophilia. It's kind of - the main horror component. The fishmen come on land and slaughter the men and use the women as unwilling breeders for their young - which I would argue is worse than dying. If that is triggering to you, just a heads up. I could have done without it myself, but I still clicked the film despite it's crystal clear description of what to expect so that is on me. Also a dog dies.

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    Overall it was a decent enough film. Worth the watch if you're a fan of H. P. Lovecraft's stories like "The Shadow over Innsmouth." It didn't have the fastest pace and sometimes it seemed to drag a little beginning/middle but the finale was fantastic. The final scene itself was especially horrific. 

    Sometimes in movies, you can tell that the director was kind of just trying to make something as quickly and easily as possible. For example, the monster is obviously CGI and poorly so. The Sci Fi Channel's 2010 original movie, "Mega Piranha" comes to mind. The giant fish are obviously made with computer graphics and the whole film is sepia toned and corny and it's just obviously not very good. It wanted to save as much money as it could in production and couldn't have taken that much effort to complete.

    (I'm not saying it wasn't entertaining or hilarious by any means. Still worth watching if just for the absurdity. And I hope I don't sound like I'm trying to bash B Movies overall because they certainly have their own place in cinema and their own worth as films - I'm just trying to make a special distinction here for "Humanoids of the Deep" in comparison.

 Wikipedia even calls "Mega Piranha" a mockbuster of "Piranha 3D" so maybe I'm missing the point that it was made badly on purpose and this attempted analogy doesn't really work. But anyway-)

    "Humanoids of the Deep" was not quick or easy by any means. Seeing as it was the 80s, they didn't really have the capabilities to make CGI monsters or make really difficult/elaborate scenes a bit easier with a green screen. Everything had to be physically made with practical effects. And honestly, I loved it. I have a sense of genuine respect for the film because it was only really limited by the technology/capabilities of the time, not because the film was meant to be silly or a throw-away project.

    There's obvious passion and effort in "Humanoids of the Deep." There was an obvious desire to make a good film, and that makes it better than some of the other sci-fi / horror films I've watched in the past.

    They couldn't cut corners with the fishmen. They had to design full-suits for actors with abnormally long arms that were surely cumbersome to wield. The things must've been waterproof, or the actors just had to hold their breath for the underwater sequences. They were draped with seaweed and were a good effort of bringing a rather complicated creature design to life on the big screen. 

    The blood and gore were also done quite effectively. The wounds where flesh would be hanging or bones would be poking through obviously had to be made and affixed with prosthetics and makeup to the person wearing them. The gunshots and bullet wounds were fairly convincing. The blood wasn't that "too bright red" that you see sometimes that ends up looking quite fake and silly. 

    The sense of suspense when you knew a fishman was approaching a hapless victim was honestly well done, with the support of the lighting and the music to boot. It was just all around quite obvious that the people making this film really cared about it and did their best. 

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SPOILERS

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    The final 15 minutes or so of the film, when the fishmen finally attack the crowded local festival in the marina, was particularly good. There were many people falling off of the piers into the water and crawling up broken, sloped pieces of dock to avoid the fishmen crawling up after them. The main man, Jim and the scientist Dr. Susan Drake (who is one of many Canco employees who are accidentally responsible for the fishmen mutating into existence in the first place) dump a bunch of gasoline into the harbor and set it on fire to prevent the fishmen from escaping into the sea so the townspeople can gang up on them and finish them off. 

    They had a large area of water on fire for real, not digitally. There were lots of people and fish creatures thrashing about in the water, lots of running and screaming and knocking things over. Some fishmen even caught on fire, which is a dangerous move in movies. I just knew that sequence of the attack at the festival must've taken so much work and coordination. 

    The scene of Jim's wife, Carol defending their child from two fish creatures was so suspenseful and well done. I was nervous for her because her fear felt so genuine. The shadows in the house at night were so visually interesting and added so much atmosphere to the actress and her attackers moving through the darkness. The baby crying in the pantry, not knowing if his mother was going to be able to protect him from the monsters or not. Pretty excellent, all things considered.

    Carol manages to kill the two fish creatures by herself, which is very satisfying and admirable, and her husband arrives just in time to protect his wife and his infant son from any more horrible sea creatures. 

    The townspeople that are still alive have quite a mess to clean up in the morning, after the fish people have been defeated. But overall it seems like the town of Noyo, California will be able to continue on after this terrible disaster, hopefully to recover with enough time to heal.

    But then we hop over to the hospital where one of the victims of assault at the clawed hands of the fishman is currently in the delivery room, WAY too pregnant for how much time has passed since she was attacked. It looks like 9 months have gone by even though it hasn't been more than a day or two. Her stomach is so bloated and the thing inside of her is thrashing so much that it ends up - tearing out of her stomach in a bloody mess that could honestly rival the chest-burster scene from "Alien." 

I don't even want to include a screenshot of it oh no XD

    It was a bit shocking - it was obviously a puppet but it's lack of realism almost made it more disturbing. I was left thoroughly grossed out as the credits rolled, which was probably exactly what the director and writer's intended. I still sometimes think of the hideous creature in that final frame every now and again and I hate it. XD

    So yeah, a 6/10. They gave it a good go and obviously cared about what they were doing. They made so many rubbery fishman suits and prosthetic wounds and had actual ocean to risk drowning and actual fire to risk burning. Nothing exactly ground-breaking? But I still want to give credit where credit is due.

    Thanks for reading. More reviews to come. 

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EDIT: Oh my god one of the directors was a woman. Barbara Peeters. No wonder the assault scenes are so graphic and unsettling. The camera always stays on their face, humanizing the victims, instead of wandering to their bodies in an objectifying way. The girls are always left covered in sand and seaweed, just filthy and trembling. It's uncomfortably realistic, as realistic as a fishman assault can be. That just adds such a different spin on things, knowing the viewpoint it came from. That's so interesting for the commentary about women's depictions and women's fates in the horror genre overall.