Humanoids From The Deep (1980)

Humanoids from the DERP, amirite?

Humanoids From the Deep (1980)
Directed by Barbara Peeters (the extra “E” is for extra Excrescence) Written by Frank Arnold (story), Martin B. Cohen, Frederick James

Our film opens in a picturesque seaside village, where fishing boat captains Vic Morrow and Doug McClure are locked in a bitter rivalry over their hair. Vic sports a Mike Brady-style perm, while Doug models the loose, grayish, 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 12-year old 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 wander down to the beach, calling piteously for their dog, when they suddenly come upon its gruesome remains. Our horror is tempered by the fact that Baron’s remains are being played by a Rolf the Dog puppet, 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Later, Vic returns from fishing to find that his dogs have also been replaced by eviscerated plush toys.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 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 Salmon Festival on behalf of a 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 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.

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 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 Mortimer Snerd 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.

Doug decides to 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. So we cut to Doug’s boat out at sea, where Doug and crew are knocking back a can of suds and fishing for Humanoids. Yes, they’re bloodthirsty mutants who do unspeakable things to our women, but they’re good eatin’.

The Humanoids aren’t biting, though, so Doug, Dr. Ann, and NotBilly Jack 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. 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, as the film momentarily becomes 3-D.

While 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.”

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 sternum. The End.

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.

And while we don’t want to seem to be blaming the victims, we must ask: is it possible the damsels were giving the Humanoids mixed signals? After all, this isn’t the first time that slimy monsters have pursued one-sided relationships with human women, and one must ask why. 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 wanting to taste his tartar sauce?

Or perhaps the media is to blame for inciting humanoids and gill-men to commit 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 dickeys—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.)