Humanoids from the Deep... 1996!

16 years after the original trash epic, a remake surfaced from the depths of tv-movie hell that's been relatively obscure until youtube came to the rescue. This one changes the plot a bit to revolve around convicts that are mutated into sea monsters, but it still utilizes a lot of the same ideas (and footage) from the original movie. Chemicals are still being used to grow salmon in a beach community, and a few of the scenes are very reminiscent of the original.

Hell, the whole climax uses a lot of the festival footage from the original movie, but it's done in a half-assed way. Our protagonists are there to find the monsters and go into a mirror maze, and they keep cutting away to external carnage at the fair that our heroes have nothing to do with. But I digress...

I don't know about you, but I really like the characters in the original movie. This time, our hero is Robert Carradine. He's reluctantly associated with Mark Rolston's asshole character who's been pouring hormones into the water to make the fish grow. Justin Walker protests this with his do-gooder friends while trying to make it with Carradine's daughter, and that sets the stage for our main set of characters.

The progression here isn't too bad. It's not exactly boring, but it isn't exactly thrilling most of the time either. This was a tv movie, but there is gore, nudity, and bad language, but it never outshines the original. One thing that this movie does have that the original didn't: small roles by Clint Howard and Walton Goggins!

The creature design is a bit different this time around, but it's mostly the same. However, the stock footage cuts to the original monsters a few times, and the difference is definitely noticable.

I used to think that I had seen the original on tv when I was a kid, which prompted my obsession with Humanoids, but I know now that it was this movie I had seen. It's an easy mistake, considering a lot of the same footage is rehashed, but I know for certain because this one featured underwater caves in which the monsters gestate their women, which is what I remember most about the version I saw as a kid.

So that's one more I can scratch off the ol' watchlist. Was it worthy of its namesake? Not really, but nothing can beat the perfection of that sleazy 1980 exploitaiton classic.

#Review