Review: Humanoids From The Deep 1980

For it’s time, “Humanoids from the Deep” (aka “Monster”) was a radical and shocking film. The amazing thing about this movie is that it may borrow so many scenes from so many previous ‘monster’ and ‘creature-feature’ films that it’s practically a collage of old movies with very little in the way of genuinely original subject matter… but, at the time, the intent of this movie was to show what previous films had only ever implied, with regards to monsters, gore, sex, and even rape. Viewed with the desensitized eyes of today’s horror fans, it would likely seem quite tame, but you absolutely must keep in mind that “Humanoids from the Deep” very well may have been the first film to push all of these boundaries. It truly was groundbreaking, and it also happens to be FANTASTIC.
“Humanoids from the Deep” tells the cautionary tale of a small town invaded by a new, hyper-evolving, humanoid/salmon species created as a result of scientists attempting to breed salmon that grow larger and faster than regular salmon. These ‘humanoids’ seek to kill all human males, and ‘mate with’ all human females..and lets just say these things don’t take ‘no’ for an answer…
This film is full of blood and gore and nudity, the creatures are seen, in full, many times throughout the movie, and, yes, there are a couple of scenes that do depict the monsters raping young women… However, by today’s standards, even the rape scenes are pretty ‘tame’, but back in 1980, of course, those scenes were absolutely shocking and, for many viewers, the film did go too far. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that while the main credited director of this film is a woman, she did not condone the rape scenes or the gratuitous nudity (I’m actually not even going to name her because she actually asked that her name be removed from the film entirely after seeing the changes made). She was actually fired from the film, after directing it in it’s entirety, with presumably much more ‘suggestive’ sex/rape scenes, of course… And then the producer, Roger Corman, found a new director willing to shoot just the few specific scenes that the original director refused to shoot ‘his way’, then he had the new scenes spliced in, unbeknownst to the original director and many of the cast of the film, before releasing it to the public! From what I can gather it was essentially somewhat of a misunderstanding, the original director likely believed that she could deliver what Corman wanted, but he just wanted so much more than she expected and when she realized just how far he wanted her to go, she just couldn’t do it…so he found someone who could. While I can’t say I agree with the way in which he went about it, I must say that I loved the result and I applaud him for pushing the boundaries and doing something that had never been done before.