Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

A small New England fishing town has rather a lot of trouble: the fishing yield of the local salmon has been decreasing for years now, so much so that most of the population greets the plans of a corporation to build a cannery and start on a highly industrialized fishing operation with happiness. Only a couple of people, really mostly native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), are set against it. Johnny even might have a chance to stop the project in court, so the New England fishing rednecks under the leadership of Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow) are getting antsy enough, they start acting like the Klan. Despite being for the cannery, local boat owner Jim Hill (Doug McClure) doesn’t hold truck with these assholes, and might even become a voice of reason for the saner of the local fishermen, if he and the rest of the cast didn’t get distracted by a bunch of fish men going around killing men and raping women.

These gill men are of course the result of genetic experimentation by Evilcorp meant to increase salmon yield, a side-effect their own chief scientist Dr Drake (Ann Turkel) had warned them about (but they wouldn’t listen, and she apparently wouldn’t whistleblow). And yes, the local Salmon Festival is right around the corner, and the Mayor of AmityEvilcorp would absolutely prefer if things like a bit of murder, rape and kidnapping were kept on the down low. So it’s left to the fists (and guns) of Doug McClure and Anthony Pena to fight the fish folk eating the fisher folk.

It is rather astonishing how many Nature Strikes Back, Jaws-alike and classic monster movie clichés can be squeezed into eighty minutes of runtime, but that’s how producer Roger Corman liked it in this phase, and that’s certainly what director Barbara Peeters (with additional sleaze shot by Jimmy T. Murakami and/or James Sbardellati) delivered.

Because the film is stuffed to the gills with clichés and tropes that need little explanation, it zips along at an often incredible pace. Peeters somehow manages to keep things surprisingly coherent, with character motivations that make sense as far as they go, and a plot that may be a mix of the greatest hits of all monster movies, but also holds together through kill scenes, unpleasantness and weirdness.

Obviously, I have no problem at all with the film’s nature as a bit of a best of album with added sleaze, particularly not when it is executed with such vigour, as well as a true commitment to being a bit gory and unpleasant in the traditional exploitation style. The effects, particularly in the great, climactic attack on the Salmon Festival and the fantastic Alien rip-off moment that gets us out of the door do get rather Italian from time to time and become so imaginative, they stop being just unpleasant and instead turn surreal.

An added ace in the hole in this regard are the monster suits designed by Rob Bottin. While they were clearly realized on the cheap, there’s a sense for the strange detail on display that makes them work very well indeed. These things – all of them recognizable individuals too – look wrong in the just the right way. Mouths that are too broad, or arms that are too long suggest these creatures are something not coming out of nature as we know it, but mutants that don’t have a place in an ordered universe. Which is quite the effect to achieve with a batch of rubber suits.

Ravagers (1979)

The world has ended again, though it's not quite clear if in a bang or a whimper. Be it as it may, what's left of the world is rather brown and barren. Nothing grows anymore; men and animals have become barren too.

What's left of humanity largely falls into two camps - there are the "flockers", who hide away in remote places, seeking safety in numbers, and then there are the "ravagers", whose hobbies seem to be quite self-explaining.

Our hero of the day, Falk (Richard Harris, laying it on even thicker than usual with him, probably to make up for his character being a total non-entity without a past beyond the one we see being made at the beginning, and without any discernible character traits) does not belong to either of these groups. At the beginning of the movie, he leads a scavenging nomad life with his wife who dreams of better days and things beginning to grow again. They have been lulled into a sense of security by things going rather well for them, and practice some good old-fashioned domesticity. Alas, the couple's happiness is short-lived. A group of ravagers led by a very tenacious man without a name (Anthony James) discovers them, and rapes and kills Falk's wife, while Falk manages to escape.

Falk ferrets out the hiding place of the gang, kills one of their members and then goes a-wandering through the wastelands again. For some reason, the nomad gets a minor entourage, first in form of an old soldier (Art Carney) taking him for his commanding officer. Later, Faina (Ann Turkel), a young woman from one of the flocks gets rather keen on our hero. Falk doesn't exactly want to travel with others, but it's not as if he could stop them. While the trio has not exactly riveting post-apocalyptic adventures, the ravagers follow Falk for no good reason at all wherever he goes, this being the sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where following people is easy.

Things finally come to a head when Falk and his friends come to a not quite utopian community led by Rann (a wasted Ernest Borgnine) and the more sympathetic Brown (an equally wasted Woody Strode).

See that word "finally" I used in the last sentence? That's Ravagers problem right here. While I don't expect every film - not even my post-apocalyptic adventure movies - to be a fast-paced and exciting from beginning to end, Richard Compton's film puts even my patience to the test with one of the most uneventful post-apocalyptic travelogues I've seen.

The lack of outer events would be less of a problem if the film had anything much to say, but thematically, this neither adds to nor subtracts from the expected of the end of the world. If the film has a thesis, it's "people need hope, and they'll even turn to the most boring man alive - Richard Harris's character - to project it onto". Which would possibly work out better for the movie if Falk ever did anything at all to make everyone else's fixation on him believable. It's possible he is meant as the empty page everyone can project his on ideas onto, but it's not as if the film would do anything to explore that besides looking po-faced and having dramatic music (the only actually dramatic thing on screen, I'm afraid). From time to time, Falk and the ravagers meet again, but Compton does his humanly best to film these run-ins in the least exciting or disturbing way possible; and of course, he never answers the question why the ravager leader is so damn obsessed with Falk, because his actions go far beyond vengeance for a dead gang member.

The film's not a total wash, though. The photography is moody, and does its best to milk some dilapidated buildings and many different shades of brown for the proper post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Even though there isn't anything of interest happening on screen, at least the film looks like a proper non-generic end of the world happened. The other aspect I found well thought out and well done is how differently the body language of many of the film's characters is - the new world after the end has made most people visibly afraid and insecure, remembering how living as animals must have been, and their bodies show it.

It's just unfortunate that there is no story, no thesis, no interesting character to make any use of these flashes of something better in Ravagers. Watching it is like waiting for the actual film to happen. Alas, it never starts.

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