It Came From Beneath The Sea

It’s always a dicey proposition to revisit well-loved movies from the past. What enthralled you when you were ten may seem tiresome later in life. Sometimes, the movies hold up surprisingly well (see my review of 1933’s The Invisible Man) but often they disappoint, which brings us to today’s entertaining but dated entry, It Came From Beneath the Sea.

A new nuclear submarine on patrol in the Pacific encounters something in deep waters – something which chases them and damages the submarine. Vessels in a Japanese fishing fleet disappear. A merchant marine ship is attacked. Sub Commander Kenneth Tobey (The Thing From Another World) joins with scientists Donald Curtis and Faith Domergue to learn the world is facing the menace of a giant octopus, driven from the unexplored depths of the ocean because it has been irradiated by nuclear testing, and can no longer catch its normal prey. The action culminates with an attack by the creature on San Francisco.

The special effects for the movie were done by the great Ray Harryhausen, and look good enough considering he was working with a miniscule budget. A budget so low, in fact, the octopus has only six arms (you can’t really tell unless you’re looking for it) making it, in fact a sextopus. Sextopus would make a great name for a movie, but I bet you couldn’t sell the DVD at Wal-Mart.

The cast is good. Kenneth Tobey, who was mostly a character actor sometimes appearing as a lead in B-movies, is a likeable hero, Curtis is just off-beat enough to make a good scientist, and Domergue is very pretty. They are hampered by a fairly clunky script with some seriously dated lines (“This is a new breed of woman. She wants to make her own decision.”) and an awful voice-over narration (“Then on a momentous occasion, three people came together.”). Voice-overs rarely work, and they certainly don’t here.

After quite a buildup, the ending of the movie is almost anti-climactic, although there are some heroics as two of our heroes have to get out into wetsuits to stab the beast through the eye. (I would not have volunteered. The submarine looks so cozy compared to swimming with an octopus the size of an aircraft carrier.) Despite a lot of scientific doubletalk, whoever made the movie doesn’t seem to know much about octopi.

It’s still enjoyable on a certain level, with a giant sea creature attacking ships and ravaging a city (at least the part of the city near the bay), and the sort of firm-jawed heroics we found in films back in the 1950s. I’d say keep your expectations low, cough through some of the dialogue and enjoy the movie for what it is.
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Humanoids From The Deep

Not every movie can be a big-budget affair with a prestige director and Leonardo DiCaprio as the star. Some have to be more modest, low-budget fare, and they generally rely on one of the twin attractions of sex or violence to get an audience. No one understood this better than legendary producer Roger Corman, and his 1980 film Humanoids from the Deep may well be the ultimate intersection of cinema sex and violence.

The setting is a fishing village in the Pacific Northwest that has fallen on hard times. The fishing industry is suffering, and the community is torn between two factions, one which favors bringing in a cannery owned by the stock greedy corporation to provide jobs, and the other which wants to preserve the nature of the town, most represented by the local Native Americans. Well, Native American, since only one is seen in the movie. The two town groups are joined by a small party from the big corporation, including a scientist (Ann Turkel) who has come up with a way to make fish grow faster (uh-oh). All this backstory is presented in a perfunctory, by-the-numbers manner, which is okay, since we started watching this to see sea monsters kill people, not feel guilty about raping the environment. The lead, of sorts, is a sympathetic local fisherman played by Doug McClure, several years and many pounds removed from his heyday, and the villain is a hard-nosed local portrayed by the ill-fated Vic Morrow, sporting an unfortunate white-fro. But enough of that.

A series of attacks begin, of strange humanoid creatures arising from the, er, deeps. They rip men apart, while attacking women sexually for breeding purposes, ignoring the inconvenient biological fact that two different species find it difficult to interbreed, or that a fish-man would find a human woman as sexually attractive as a human man would a flounder (let’s not go there). The attacks increase in severity and culminate in an all-out assault at the town’s Salmon Festival. Irritatingly, despite salmon being the backbone of the local economy, none of the cast can pronounce it. The “L” is silent, folks. We are also treated to a scene of exposition as the Turkel character explains the situation is basically her fault, as one of her experiments has gone very wrong. She seems generally unconcerned with this, but that may be the limitations of the actress, other than callousness of the scientist, since the movie follows the old rule that an attractive woman can’t be to blame in these things. Must be the corporation instead.

Much blood is spilled, many breasts are bared, and we are treated to the unfortunate ultimate effect of the creature’s attacks on women.

Roger Corman is one of the most prolific producers in movie history, with a staggering 393 producing credits listed on imdb, although that number may change daily. Although his reputation is that of a guy who could make an exploitation flick as quickly and cheaply as possible, a number of big names went to “school” on his productions. Through the years, he gave work to Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante and James Cameron, all of whom seem appreciative for Corman giving them a shot. He understood what attracts an audience to such a cheaply made film, and his terse instructions to director Barbara Peeters for the movie was supposedly “Kill the men, rape the women.” When Peeters turned in a cut with plentiful gore but mostly suggested sex, he fired her, and got a second unit director to shoot more nude scenes.

So there you have it. The movie is a lot of cheesy fun, in a SyFy channel movie way, but it is mostly gore and nudity. I think most people with a sense of humor would like it, but if you give it a try, you do know what you are letting yourself in for.

In some markets, the movie is known by the more unimaginative title of Monster, which must have shocked some viewers expecting a serious drama with Charlize Theron in uncomfortable prosthetics.
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Sea Beast

The Sci-Fi Channel keeps on releasing low-quality beast-centric crap on DVD. Who do they think is stupid enough to buy this stuff? D’oh! I do, of course. Curse your evil plan, Sci-Fi/SyFy Channel! You with your deceptively cool-looking box covers.

Will McKenna (Corin Nemec, Stargate SG-1) is a down-on-his-luck fishing boat captain. He’s just returned without a catch, and after losing a crewman to a rogue wave during a storm. Although he could have sworn he saw a creature come up from the water and snatch the unlucky crewman, that’s just crazy talk. Back home, he has to contend with a miserable guy he owes money to, and a suspicion his daughter is secretly dating one of his crew members, which is true.

His mundane problems are about to seem unimportant, because some of the creatures he saw have followed him back for a human smorgasbord. In keeping with horror movie tradition, the black guy is the first victim.

The creatures are described by everyone as looking just like an anglerfish, which is annoying since they actually look like a grey version of Venom from the Spider-man comics. They have a tongue that can grab prey from several yards away, and spit green goo that first paralyzes their victims, and eventually kills them, if they’re not eaten first. They can also make themselves invisible, useful in ripping off a scene or two from Predator. (Unexplained is how, when they come out of the water, they are also able to make the water that should be clinging to them invisible as well, but they are always shown dry. For a sea creature, they spend the vast majority of their time on land. It could be worse. Since the original title of the movie was Troglodyte, that would have made even less sense.

Anyway, the creatures show up and wreak havoc with the local population. No help can reach them due to the bad weather, although we see nothing but clear skies, so I imagine the potential rescue parties just don’t like the citizens of the town. Daughter and crewman have gone off for a weekend on a nearby island, where they are besieged by the creatures. Crewman is bitten by one of the creatures, but he treats it as no big deal, odd since he’s been bitten by something unknown to man, and his hand seems to be rotting away. There are indications the bite is causing him to change, but the moviemakers got bored with that subplot and dropped it. There is a humorous moment where daughter drops a big rock on one of the creatures’ extended tongues, causing it to slam its head against the rock when it is pulled in, but the light touches are few and far between. Daughter is a regular Buffy in this one. While three men with guns are no match for one creature, the young girl kills what seems like hundreds of them with whatever crude weapons are at hand.

Eventually, McKenna arrives, discovers the nest of the creatures, and rigs the most godawful Rube Goldberg device in history to blow them up. McKenna forgives his daughter for sneaking around and dating the crewman, since he got eaten anyway and is no longer a threat.

There’s not a lot to like here. The CGI is about as bad as they come, and most of the plot is equally nonsensical. I normally like Corin Nemec, but here he’s saddled with a wretched haircut and gives an uneven performance, and the female lead is so bland as to be unnecessary. Something that always irritates me: In almost every scene, nemec pops a cigar in his mouth, but only twice does he light the goddamned thing.

I realize I am the enabler in this relationship.
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