Wednesdays get weird when Late Shift at the Grindhouse hosts Ross Meyer, Joe Derderian, and Aaron Holmgren dig up low-budget b-movies, horror and gore-fests, and camp classics for your viewing pleasure. Buy your ticket and take a ride in our Time Machine! Punch in and earn a bonus! $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys and $3 small popcorn! PLUS -- special custom trash trailer reel curated by Ross with cheap swag and prize giveaways!
Humanoids From the Deep (1980)
Directed by Barbara Peeters (Summer School Teachers) and Jimmy T. Murikami (Heavy Metal)
Featuring Doug McClure, Vic Morrow, Ann Turkel
Sea beasts on the prowl... for human mates.
"Hide the kids, folks. This one is as mean-spirited and sleazy as they come, and for that I love nearly every second of it." - Steve Barton, Dread Central
"A lively, if predictable, killer-fish story chronicling the title creatures' carnal rampage, with a beachful of bikini'd bimbos at their sex-mad mercy." - The Phantom of the Movies
"Fast paced and wicked crazy gory in spots, Humanoids From The Deep is a veritable trash movie masterpiece." - Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!
The canning company wanted salmon that grew faster and larger. So it tinkered with the fish's genetic structure. But something went wrong. And soon the tiny fishing town of Noyo, until now a sleepy village, confronts the ultimate modern ecological horror: sea beasts half-man, half fish, obsessed with destroying the men and carrying off its young women to bear the monstrous offspring of their unnatural mating. No one, least of all the lovers on the local beaches, is safe.
Together, Jim Hill (Doug McClure) and the beautiful young scientist who started it all, Susan Drake (Ann Turkel), fight to defeat the inhuman monsters. Battling alongside them are Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow), who wanted the town to have the cannery at any cost, and Johnny Eagle (Anthony Penya), the Indian trying to save his land from just such ecological devastation. In the end, it is Drake who is left to confront the progeny of her experiments, their ultimate outrage.
Humanoids From the Deep grafts this modern ecological fable onto a traditional monster movie plot, a grimly sexual descendent of Creature From the Black Lagoon, which is very much in the spirit of producer Roger Corman's other underwater horror classics (Attack of the Crab Monsters; Creature From the Haunted Sea). And director Barbara Peeters adds her own touch, paying homage to the entire range of modern science fiction and horror thrillers, from King Kong and Alien to Psycho and Jaws. The result is a genuinely scary camp classic, voluptuous and unsettling in the manner of Halloween.
Restoration courtesy of Shout! Factory and American Genre Film Archive.
Part of Reel Representation at FilmScene.