Rip-off Roundup: Humanoids from the Deep

Last time on Rip-off Roundup, before it was an actual feature, I talked about the crazy Roger Corman ALIEN rip-off, GALAXY OF TERROR, and its unusual connection to James Cameron’s official sequel, ALIENS.  The connection continues with the crazy Roger Corman JAWS rip-off, HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP.

The Capsule:

High tech salmon canning conglomerate Canco is promising to bring progress to the backwards Pacific Northwest fishing village of Noyo.  Unfortunately it is also bringing mutant humanoid fish monsters, an unintentional result of their genetic experiments to create a super salmon.   Typical canning company, always playing God.  The monsters chow down Noyo’s dogs and menfolk, but believe me, they are getting off easy.  These slimy perverts have designs on their women, gross, awkwardly filmed designs.   Heroic but clueless Jim, Native American activist Johnny Eagle, and scientist Dr. Susan Drake look for a way to curb the tide of these murderous fish rapists.  Drake may have inadvertently caused the whole mess, but let’s just overlook that.  They also have to deal with cantankerous racist fisherman Vic Morrow.  The action culminates at the town’s annual festival, which all JAWS rip-off movies are legally required to contain (no one ever closes the beach/lake/resort).

This is a very goofy movie.  It’s undeniably modeled after JAWS, with it’s underwater POV shots and suspenseful setups, but really it’s a ‘50’s style rubber monster suit movie with a ton more blood and boobs.  Despite the oogie fish rape scenes, the movie is a lot of fun (it’s hard to take the mating scenes seriously when the monsters clearly have no genitalia).  I like the suits, they are silly but inventive, with elongated arms and well-articulated jaws.  The movie definitely does not follow the “don’t show the monster until the end” formula.  They paid a lot for those suits and they were going to get their money’s worth.  My favorite aspect of the monsters, which is thankfully exploited by their would-be victims, is their exposed brains.  That is one serious evolutionary flaw.   

I always forget just how gory this movie is.  People aren’t just slashed by claws, large chunks of their bodies are torn out.  Heads are twisted off like corks.  Even the quick kills in the hectic festival attack spray gallons of blood.  This movie doesn’t mess around.  It kills a kid and a dog within the first ten minutes.  The ALIEN inspired birth scene at the end is almost as bloody as the original.  Much, much hokier, but still bloody.

For a movie that is so rough on the ladies, it’s a little surprising the director is a woman, Barbara Peeters.  The lead female actors actually get pretty good roles, though.  Dr. Susan Drake is an assertive and competent scientist who essentially takes charge of the investigation.  Every once in a while she spends too much time taking pictures and almost gets eaten (or worse), but that’s what scientists do.  I think she screams here and there, but she never cowers.  Jim’s wife, Carol, goes toe to toe with several fish monsters all by herself while defending her home and baby.  The movie does have a blond beauty pageant winner who gets her bikini top torn off at the festival rampage, but she at least gets to beat her attacker to death (again, the exposed brains are a bit of a handicap).  Peeters didn’t have anything to do with the worst bits.  Roger Corman actually snuck in a different director to film the rape scenes without her knowledge, to spice things up.  Because Corman’s kind of a perv.

Weirdo moments I appreciated:

There is a sex scene in tent involving a young couple and a ventriloquist dummy.  The dummy might be alive, but they never mention it again.  I love that the big canning company is named Canco.  It's like an automobile company named Carco.  Drake causually announces "we found evidence they were here last night" as she kneels by a human rib cage.  At the festival, a random little boy kills a fish monster with a flaming harpoon.  When the annoying festival DJ is attacked, he throws records at the monsters, just like in SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but less effective.  Also, the film doesn’t really have a wrap up.  Jim and Dr. Susan Drake make a big show of spraying gas into the bay and setting it on fire, but since most of the fish monsters on are land, it doesn’t do much.  They are eventually killed or driven off, but some obviously survive.  There’s no talk from the main characters about what to do next.  Then it jumps ahead nine months and ends with an example of the dangers of interspecies relations.  I wonder if they ever got their fish monster problem cleared up.

So how does this relate to James Cameron’s masterpiece, ALIENS?  This one is more subtle.  Cameron wasn’t directly involved with this one like he was with GALAXY OF TERROR.  He was was working on Corman’s BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS at the time, so he would have been exposed to the film.  Legendary producer Gale Anne Hurd was a production assistant on HUMANOIDS, later going on to produce ALIENS (and to marry Cameron, briefly).  The biggest link is the music.  James Horner was the composer on HUMANOIDS, and it is obvious this was a warm up to the work he would do in ALIENS, particularly the distinct suspense theme when the Marines are exploring the abandoned base.  There are also a couple of scenes that are staged very similarly (if not as well) to scenes from ALIENS.  The fish monsters break through the planks of the dock just like the aliens burst up through the grates in the ventilation tunnels.  One fish monster attacks the driver of a truck from the roof.  She slams on the breaks, flinging the monster to the road, then she runs him down, just like Ripley in the APC.  The movies are worlds apart as far as quality goes, but they do seem to share some of the same DNA.  That’s the beautiful thing about inspiration; it comes from the strangest places.       

The Strange, Strange Case of Galaxy of Terror, or A Rip-Off Comes Full Circle

In today’s world of re-makes, re-boots, and re-imaging, it’s easy to overlook the most humble version of capitalizing on the past, the straight up rip-off.  Rip-offs are often seen as just being derivative cash-ins, which they certainly can be (NEED FOR SPEED mostly reminded me I’d rather be watching a FAST and/or FURIOUS).  But sometimes, when you dump a bunch of familiar ingredients into a pot with a couple of oddball ones and mess with the cooking time, you get something unexpectedly satisfying.  Without the DIE HARD rip-off, you wouldn’t have UNDER SIEGE, without the JAWS rip-off, you wouldn’t have PIRANHA, without the STAR WARS EPISODE IV rip-off, you wouldn't have STAR WARS EPISODE VII. 

One of the masters of the rip-off was Roger Corman.  He was renowned for taking a hot property and churning out half a dozen or so variations on the theme, as quickly and cheaply as possible.  More importantly, he also had an eye for young, hungry, unique directors, and he gave them the latitude to be creative.  Even if they were saddled with making a rip-off, they could put their own stamp on it.  This often resulted in strange hybrids; chimeras that were one part blockbuster aspiration, one part low-budget compromise, and one part lunacy.  One of the looniest ever to come from Corman’s rip-off factory was GALAXY OF TERROR, (1981, Dir. Bruce D. Clark).

On paper it was an ALIEN rip-off with a dash of STAR WARS inspired metaphysics, but this was only the connective tissue.  The space in-between was filled with wacko characters, bizarre psychological horror, boobs, blood, and scenes no one had ever seen in a movie before.  Allow me to encapsulate:
 
Glow-headed videogame enthusiast, Planet Master, orders a rescue party to travel to the barren world of Xerxes to search for survivors of a crashed spaceship.  The hand-picked crew of mostly insane people includes Captain Laura Palmer’s mom from TWIN PEAKS, a mute Sid Haig who worships crystal boomerangs, a man steaming mad at corpses, claustrophobic psychic Joanie from HAPPY DAYS, and Robert Englund in nice guy mode.  There’s also the guy from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN as a simple cook and certainly not an android like Ian Holm in ALIEN.  I don't know why you would even think that (not foreshadowing).  Captain Laura Palmer’s mom, who is not the galaxy's most responsible spaceship driver, almost kills everyone three times before her ship is guided to the surface of Xerxes by a mysterious force.  The crew locates the crashed ship, finding only bodies, which the nutbag team leader immediately incinerates, not really helping the investigation.  He’s kind of the anti-CSI.  One by one, the crew are attacked by their deepest fears made manifest.  Sid Haig is killed by his own boomerangs (and his own arm).  A scaredy-cat astronaut gets a really aggressive scalp massage.  One tech officer is unfortunate enough to have an irrational fear of being fucked to death by a giant maggot.  I can't remember what the Latin term is for that phobia.  Robert Englund has a split screen fight with his inner Kruger.  Joanie definitely does not love tentacles.  Finally, the bland hero, who is not interesting enough to have cool or ironic fears, must face the ultimate evil in the bowels of an alien pyramid.  Does he have what it takes?  Will anyone escape the planet alive?  Can anyone figure out what the hell the ending means?  

This movie is bonkers, right from the get go.  The believable, lived in future of ALIEN is nowhere to be found.  It's more like BUCK ROGERS' sleazy, loser cousin on a mescaline trip.  Obviously, it is endlessly entertaining.  Even the super gross stuff, like the rapist maggot, is too ludicrous to really be offensive.  In the scene, a regular sized maggot grows as big as a VW Microbus and flops on top of the worm averse crew member.  Technically, I guess she suffocates, but it very strongly suggests that the maggot has other things on its mind.  It is clearly a fake, and comes close to Ed Wood Jr. territory.  However, like the best of schizocinema, it's played straight.  As straight as that sort of thing can be, at least.

It also has a number of legitimately solid touches, including one of my favorites, the alluded to, but unexplained back story.  Captain Laura Palmer's mom (who you should never, under any circumstances, accept a ride from) suffers PTSD from the ill-fated Hesperus mission.  It had something to do with aliens and she was the sole survivor, but we get no other details except that she's haunted by it (not a good thing on a planet that feeds on your fears).  Even better, the bland hero and the corpse hating team leader clearly have some beef about a previous mission.  The corpse hater has a MAD MAX style leg brace, so it's probably justified.  Neither one goes into the specifics, though.  If they had explained it in exposition, it probably would have boiled down to the old chestnut, "Your recklessness almost got me killed the last time!", or something equally predictable.  Instead, the director wisely decides to leave you guessing.  It's the mystery that makes it interesting.  

The set design can be impressive, too, especially for being a cheapie Corman movie.  Some of the matte paintings are truly spectacular, and the planet exterior scenes feel appropriately bleak and alien.  The reason for this is perhaps the movie's most interesting facet, the Production Designer and Second Unit Director is none other than a young James Cameron.  So the rip-off of ALIEN can actually be seen as a prototype for Cameron's official sequel, ALIENS.  Tonally, the films are miles apart, but there are unmistakable similarities.  The crew from GALAXY is sent to a desolate planet on a deliberate rescue mission, just like the Colonial Marines in ALIENS, and both are more militaristic than the reluctant explorers from ALIEN.  There are scenes in a tight tunnel like the one Bishop crawls through in ALIENS.  It is even more apparent in the art direction, which Cameron had direct control over.  The scene of the GALAXY crew walking through the wreckage of the crashed spaceship is almost a mirror of when Ripley's gang are surveying the debris of their downed dropship.   None of the wacked out characters filtered through to ALIENS (thankfully), though some of the names were direct nods.  Colonial Marine sergeant Apone was in honor of GALAXY's Mechanical Effects man Al Apone.  Bill Paxton even worked as a carpenter on GALAXY.  Now, we can all agree that ALIENS is an indisputable masterpiece (all of us), but who knew a cheap, goofball early '80's knock-off played such a large part in its creation.  That, and HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, but we'll get into that at another time.

The tale gets even stranger.  Not only was GALAXY inspirational for James Cameron, it also has a bizarre connection to Ridley Scott's own wacko semi-sequel/prequel, PROMETHEUS, 21 years later.  In Scott's mega-budget space epic, while inside an alien pyramid, a simple maggot is transformed into a large, phallic shaped monster that face rapes one of the investigating crewmen.  Hmm.  Now, I'm not saying that Scott stole the pervert maggot idea from GALAXY OF TERROR, but if he ever saw that movie, that is the scene he would remember.  

C Chaka