Humanoids From the Deep (1980)
Directed by Barbara Peeters (the extra "E" is for extra Excrescence)
Written by Frank Arnold (story), Martin B. Cohen, and Frederick James
Our film opens in a picturesque seaside village, where fishing boat captain Vic Morrow is supporting construction of a local cannery, in an effort to torque off the Native Americans. Doug McClure arrives on the scene as a rival boat captain, modeling the loose, grayish, mock-combover hairstyle that would later be made famous by Clint Eastwood.
The village seems to be near Monterey, along California’s Central Coast. Nevertheless, the first fishermen we glimpse at work are a group of sea-going Okies (I must have missed that Grapes of Wrath sequel, Ma and Pa Joad Join the Tuna Fleet), under the command of Hoke Howell, who made a career of playing sub-Deliverance-style crackers, and who is best remembered for the dignity and gravitas he brought to Bikini Hoe-Down. The Okies catch a Humanoid From the Deep in their net, and in a rapid series of rib-tickling misadventures, Cap’n Hoke accidentally feeds his plump and tender son to the Humanoid, sets the deck on fire with a flaregun, blows up the boat, and incinerates his entire crew. This may help to explain why we don’t see more jug-sippin’, Appalachian hicks trawling for albacore in their bib overalls. If God had intended for hillbillies to deep-sea fish, he would have made them less flammable. And more buoyant. And he wouldn’t have stuck them out in the Ozarks where they’re less likely to scare the fish when they inevitably blow themselves up. But I digress.
Back on land, Doug’s dog "Baron" is attacked by a Humanoid while rooting through the garbage. Thankfully, Doug’s cat "The Dauphin," his parakeet, the "Duke of Tuscany," and his gerbil, the "Holy Roman Emperor" are unharmed. Doug and his wife find their titled mutt missing, and their trashcans coated with a frightening, unidentifiable slime that Doug just can’t resist playing with.
They wander down to the beach, calling piteously for their dog, when they suddenly come upon its gruesome remains. Their grief is tempered by the fact that Baron’s remains are represented by a Rolf the Dog figurine, mixed with kelp for a refreshing seaweed salad.
Later, Vic returns from fishing to find that his dogs have also been replaced by eviscerated plush toys. Only the Indians’ dog, Vic notes ominously, hasn’t been turned into a gutted Muppet.
Now the camera crew pauses to stalk a blonde with a Farrah Fawcet hairdo and a cheap burgundy teddy, and we’re forced to watch as she wanders through the house and repeatedly startles herself by bumping into the laundry, and brushing against a dish. Then the phone rings, causing her to shriek like a demented banshee. At this point, we can only hope her alarm clock doesn’t go off, or we might have to watch her lose control of her bladder.
Dr. Ann Turkel shows up at the village’s 75th Annual Salmon Festival on behalf of the proposed cannery to explain how adding fish guts and diesel runoff to the water table will be good for the local residents. But one of the Indians appears at the Salmon Festival with his own dead dog, and declares that he will stop the cannery! Vic orders his crew to throw the Indian out, and if the Indian were Billy Jack, this would lead to a really cool scene! But he’s not, so it doesn’t, and he just gets his ass kicked. Until Doug steps in, and pits his steel-gray faux comb-over against Vic’s preternatural Brady Bunch-style perm.
The next day, Vic disguises himself as the Old Spice Man, and takes a motorboat upriver so he can eavesdrop on the Indians as they plot court strategy for the impending lawsuit. Later, he will skulk in the shadows outside the Civic Center and listen in as the City Council discusses a proposed zoning variance.
Meanwhile, NotFarrah Fawcett and her boyfriend stroll along the beach, accompanied by music from a tampon commercial. Eventually, they wade into the surf, while the soundtrack suddenly switches to the ominous theme from the opening credits of "The Secret Storm." They jump around and splash each other for awhile, until the Humanoids decide to enforce the "No Horseplay" rule by yanking the boyfriend underwater and pulling his femur out through his ear. Then they grab NotFarrah for a little Afternoon Delight, ripping off her bra, and making the Beast With Two Backs and a Tail. This is our first chance to really see the monsters up close, and they sort of resemble an olive drab Barney with shingles.
Cut to a tent on the beach, where a shapely young woman is flirting with a ventriloquist’s dummy. She quickly falls under its thrall, much like Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night, and obediently strips naked. Naturally, the sound of a woman being seduced by Jerry Mahoney arouses a passing Humanoid, who rips through the tent. The naked girl flees down the beach, but she’s tackled by the safety, another Humanoid who has smartly accessorized his Barney costume by gluing a turban squash to his head. He throws the girl onto her hands and knees, and they do it Humanoid style.
Meanwhile, Vic has finished reading Heart of Darkness, and decides that he and his crew will journey upriver and terminate NotBilly Jack with moderate prejudice. As it happens, NotBilly is entertaining Doug’s First Mate, NotShaun Cassidy, and his girlfriend, NotLeif Garrett–who goes outside to pump water, just as a Humanoid surfaces offshore. This is getting to be one congested sub-plot! In fact, it’s verging on the style of classic French farce, except there’s no slamming doors, it’s not funny, and it tends to rely a bit more on scenes of non-consensual intercourse with bipedal salamanders than Feydeau was known to.
Vic lobs a Molotov cocktail at NotBilly, NotShaun, and NotLeif, and the gasoline-filled pop bottle somehow manages to produce an explosion that dwarfs the blast radius of a fuel-air device. But everybody’s fine. NotLeif takes the truck into town for help, and the frustrated Humanoid decides to settle for potluck, pulling NotShaun into the water for a little taste of the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Meanwhile, Doug finishes watching Apocalypse Now, and decides to journey upriver and terminate the Humanoids with inept prejudice. Dr. Ann insists on coming along, since she hasn’t had a date in awhile, and the Humanoids seem like a sure thing. Unfortunately, they can’t find the monsters upstream, so we cut to Doug’s boat out on the open sea, where Doug and crew are fishing for Humanoids. Yes, they’re bloodthirsty grotesques who do unspeakable things to our women, but they’re good eatin’.
The Humanoids aren’t biting, though, so Doug, Dr. Ann, and NotBilly decide to poke around the tide pools. They discover a herd of Humanoids basking on the sand, and Doug starts blowing them away, while Dr. Ann takes high fashion photos of the carnage. One of the monsters almost gets to third base with NotBilly, but Doug kills it, firing off three shots from a bolt action rifle in less than three seconds, beating Lee Harvey Oswald’s old record. Meanwhile, as Dr. Ann snaps away, telling the remains of the slaughtered Humanoids to wet their lips and work with her, Doug finds the nude and ravished NotFarrah languishing in a bed of kelp.
Back at the lab, Dr. Ann shows a junior high school sex hygiene film on the reproductive life of frogs, and explains that the Cannery–like most companies that pack minced tuna in spring water–is heavily involved in genetic engineering and biomedical research. And it seems that in order to make salmon reproduce and grow faster, they seeded the ocean with "DNA-5," or "Chlorinol-3" or something, and it’s making the Humanoids whiz their way up the evolutionary ladder. Dr. Ann believes that, in order to further enhance their development, they are driven to mate with human females. Unfortunately for them, the Humanoids have picked some of the stupidest girls in monster movie history to breed with, setting their evolutionary progress back by millions of years. Instead of becoming a super-intelligent hybrid race, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to Wal-Mart, where they stare enviously at the parked recreational vehicles, and snack on Devil Dogs and Hostess Snowballs as they shop for Bermuda shorts and Shania Twain CDs.
That night, the monsters go wilding at the Salmon Festival carnival. Some of the Humanoids set up a Tailhook-like gauntlet, while others rip the flesh off the backs of screaming townsfolk, and one rides the merry-go-round.
Miss Salmon Festival is attacked by a monster, who rips off her top (an early title for the film was Humanoids From Spring Break). But she rallies by grabbing a rock and braining the beast (which isn’t hard, since their brains are al fresco). Flushed with triumph, the bare-bosomed Salmon Queen bounces violently into the camera (and even though the movie’s not in 3-D, for my money this scene beats Captain Eo all to hell).
As Vic is sexually assaulted by Humanoids, Doug putters around the harbor in his boat, spreading an enormous slick of gasoline on the water. As the violence reaches a crescendo, he tosses a flare pistol to Dr. Ann and says, "Here. Send them all to hell." But he’s so bored with the whole thing that he says it the same way he might say, "Here. Send them a Pick-Me-Up bouquet from FTD."
Dr. Ann shoots a flare into the water, sparking a small, Girl Scout-sized campfire. Throw one Molotov cocktail, and it’s the firebombing of Dresden. But ignite five hundred gallons of gasoline, and you’re lucky to get one lightly browned marshmallow out of it.
Later, back at the lab, Dr. Ann is playing midwife to NotFarrah, who’s preparing to deliver a bouncing bundle of Humanoid. Unfortunately, NotFarrah has just finished watching Alien, and opts for a natural delivery through the chest. The End.
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So, Amalgamated Salmon Canning tries a little illegal bioengineering, just to improve their profit margin, and who pays the price? Busty, rock-stupid women with Farrah hair. As usual.
As this movie vividly demonstrates, doing the nasty with Charlie the Tuna is no day at the beach (well, it is, but not a good day). But really, can it be worse than breeding with Doug McClure? (See the summary of Because They’re Young for the shocking answer to this question.)
And while we don’t want to seem to be blaming the victims, we must ask: is it possible that the women were leading the Humanoids on? After all, this isn’t the first time that slimy monsters have pursued one-sided relationships with human women, and one must ask why, when it seems like they’d be a lot more happy with another slime-enhanced freak. For example, there was the Creature from the Black Lagoon, another romantic just looking for love in all the wrong species. Why did he fall for Julie Adams, when she appears to lack every major quality he looks for in a woman, namely gills, fins, and a zipper? Is it possible that when Richard Carlson wasn’t around, Julie made suggestive remarks to the monster about the size of his "fish stick" and wanting to taste his tartar sauce?
Or perhaps the media is to blame for inciting humanoids and gill-men to commit forcible, Salmon-on-girl sex. Maybe the monsters had been profoundly influenced by Titanic, another "fish out of water" story in which the working class Leonardo Di Caprio courts an aristocratic Kate Winslet. Is their tragic mesalliance really any different than a pair of bipedal trout gang-fertilizing a Denny’s waitress? In fact, (according to the supplemental materials on the DVD) when Humanoids director Barbara Peeters was temporarily felled by illness—a kidney infection, or possibly a bad conscience—future auteur James Cameron was brought in to finish the film, and it’s evident that he used the opportunity to touch upon themes he would later explore more fully in Titanic.
For instance, the dramatic picture hat worn by Kate Winslet in her first appearance, which allowed her beauty to be slowly, breathtakingly revealed, is clearly prefigured by the lead humanoid’s fetching turban squash. Likewise, the constraining dinner clothes worn by the condescending First Class passengers—the corsets and bustles, the stiff celluloid collars and starched dickey’s—symbolized their inflexible views of social mobility, while the Humanoids’ appearance symbolized inflexible rubber costumes that were really cheap and hard to move around in. Lastly, the cuckolding that drives Billy Zane’s character into a murderous rage is clearly foreshadowed by the humanoids’ frenzied reaction to the girl in the tent sexually taunting a ventriloquist dummy. (If there’s one thing they hate, it’s a fishstick-tease.)
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The Deadly and the Beautiful, Mars Needs Women, The Bride, and Humanoids from the Deep: four classic Hollywood films, four visions of aberrant sex. And now you’re probably thinking: how can I use some of the perversions presented in these movies to liven up my stale and unsatisfying sex life? Well, we knew you’d think that, so here are a few ideas:
1. Be like the white insurance investigator who’s a sex machine with all the chicks (just talking ‘bout Ross Hagen): go to singles bars and lasciviously eat the maraschino cherry out of your Shirley Temple. Research done by Masters and Johnson shows this is almost as effective as Hai Karate after-shave.
2. Want a man, but you're in a hurry? Try Pillsbury Thaw and Serve Stud-Muffins, in your frozen food case.
3. If you too need women, do like the Martians and go where the girls hang out: the third planet from the sun. And if you get there between 5 and 7, they’ve got a two-for-one deal on watermelon shooters.
4. And don’t overlook press conferences as way to meet women. Look for subjects that are bound to make attendees hot, like "Space Sex" or "The Economy."
5. Tired of consistently spending Saturday nights alone (always the bridesmaid, never the Bride of Frankenstein)? Then ask your mad scientist buddies to start making dates for you (and we mean that literally). The next story you tell around the water cooler come Monday morning could be, "I Slept With a Zombie"!
6. Is your relationship lacking electricity? Try doing it during a thunderstorm with a large conduction device on the roof. Or, if that sounds too elaborate for you, just rub your feet on the carpet before you touch each other.
7. Eat more salmon (you’ll be amazed how much more action you’ll get if you take the time to make sure the salmon is satisfied first.)
8. Ventriloquist sex. ‘Nuff said.
9. Do some role-playing. Once you tire of "Horny Humanoid and White Trash Bimbo," get out your rain slicker and play "The Gorton Fisherman and the Little Mermaid," or "I Know Who You Did Last Summer."
Well, that concludes our walk on the wild side of cinematic sex. We hope it has proved enlightening for those of you who are seeking a deeper understanding of the extraordinarily diverse ways in which humanity expresses its essential nature, and sufficiently disgusting for those of you who are still depressed because they tore down the drive-in. And remember, while many other Hollywood movies involve weird sex, some are just too depraved to be viewed by non-professionals. So, please contact us before watching Caligula, In the Realm of the Senses, or Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Thank you.
