In 1996, schlock god Roger Corman remade a few of his earlier B-movie classics for Showtime cable network under the "Roger Corman Presents:" banner, tonight's review being one of them; an update of sorts on the 1980 cult classic starring Doug McClure and Vic Morrow. After having read an online review of this one that boasts it's "more consistent, realistic, and mature" than it's predecessor, it's kinda startling to see so many blind waterheads with internet access these days. Maybe even more so to see people who've dropped their collective entertainment bar so low that a fucking stinkbug couldn't limbo underneath it, even if he was sucking his gut in.
He looks as bored, dead, as I was, watching him die.
At the outset, we see some military types shooting up and flamethrowing an oversized container only to notice that whatever was housed inside has made a beeline for the convenient manhole escape route located a few feet behind it (that the soldiers apparently never scouted out). One of the soldiers sticks his head down the manhole. Au revoir, la tête! Then it's business as usual, with government cover ups and environmentalists protesting the local hatchery, where unscrupulous white guys, led by Bill Taylor (Mark Rolston, from 'Aliens'), count money and wantonly dump a synthetic growth hormone named Synestin (as kept in empty-looking fifty-five gallon drums, naturally) into the surf even after they've been videotaped in the act by the young activists, one of which happens to be dating the daughter (Danielle Weeks) of a local fisherman named Wade (Robert 'Revenge of the Nerds' Carradine, looking appropriately grizzled here) and Ron Howard's weird-looking brother Clint is also aboard as some sort of mostly useless law enforcement officer.
"Hold 'im in, Ellie Mae, you don't wanna lose yer Jazzy privileges at thet thur K-Marts, now..."
Emma Samms shows up as a genetic scientist posing as a news reporter and straightfacedly reveals the government's evil plot to transform five death row inmates into amphibious super soldiers, except, they fucked up and created these humanoids from the deep, instead. The horny fishmen abduct some local females and goop them together into a big latex pile in a cave on the shore, then familiarly attack the town's waterfront fair in a sequence directly snatched from the original movie. A chick gives birth to a fish-baby on a pool table at the dive bar, and later, Samms hatches her own tadpole at a midday traffic light. Typing finger suddenly compelled to hit the Z key, repeatedly.
Sometimes you get to play Fallon Carrington-Colby in Dynasty, sometimes you share a latex cocoon with a variety of half-nude twenty-something bimbos.
If you're going into this one with fleeting hopes of revisiting the exploitative levels of nudity, gore, hokey ignorance, and horny fishman sex that the original delivered, you're not gonna experience a single one of those things here. Even the creature effects (when the crew could be bothered to shoot new footage, lazily relying several times on whole sections of footage cut directly from the 1980 effort) look worse, as you can see for yourselves, below. On the scale, the Humanoids remake baits a familiar hook, struggles for eighty-six minutes, and pulls an old boot out of the foam for it's troubles. Goose eggs.
It's work like this that reminds me how much I liked Rob Bottin.
