What a way to start the 80s horror era. Humanoids from the Deep is everything The Creature from the Black Lagoon wanted to be 25 years before—filled with blood, boobs, an enlightening Native American subplot, and sea monster perverts!
Only in my recent years of nostalgia film watching have I come to realize how much focus was put on Native Americans in movies of the 70s and 80s: Prophecy, Creepshow 2, Porky’s II, The Dark Power, and this film, just to name a few. Hell, there’s even a little Indian kid who eats baked beans out of a flashlight in that very special three-part Grand Canyon episode of The Brady Bunch. However, ‘Humanoids’ casts the hottest Indian of all. This is one sweet piece of Tonto ass, with tight jeans and feathered Parker Stevenson locks. In fact, most of the cast in this film has Farrah Fawcett/Bruce Jenner hair. Awesome. As usual, the lone Native American character in the film is more in tune with nature and the way progress destroys it, but is faced with major discrimination when he tries to warn of the consequences of industrialization. The whities even call him ‘dumb’ and ‘drunk’—right before beating him up! Luckily he has some white allies, and the film even throws in a message of peace at the end—right during all the sea monster madness.
The film scores immediate points for daring to have a child as the first victim. Sweet! But soon after, not one but multiple dogs become victims. Now they’ve gone too far! They should have left well enough alone with killing the kid. The film’s opening sequence features an underwater-swimming-through-the-seaweed perspective right out of Jaws 2, plus you get a cheap cat scare—right out of every horror movie ever made. Even so, the basic plot is the best part of this film. These pervy humanoids seem to be able to smell fish from a mile away, because every time a woman gets near the shore, these hideous humanoids crawl from the surf and pounce! Yep. They are hungry for human va-jay-jay. And they also need visual stimulation because they always swipe at the victim’s bikini and rip it right off before taking the plunge! It really doesn’t get any better than that.
Well, actually, it does, during the big festival on the dock at the end of the movie. First of all, there’s a Bubblicious bubble gum booth! Ah, the memories of the Bubblicious/Bubble Yum/Hubba Bubba wars (and that nasty spider egg urban legend). Then the humanoids break right through the boardwalk. Yep, they’re under the boardwalk, out of the sun, under the boardwalk, probably having some fun—with some pour human victim. But that’s just foreplay, because they then ravage all the hot chicks at the festival…and even some not so hot. The gore is upped big time as people are torn to shreds by these horny humanoids. But the humans fight back, and a gang of dudes even surrounds one of the humanoids and starts giving him a serious beat down with some sticks. It’s like footage right out of a lawsuit against the police department!
Other great moments include the humanoids pulling a Michael Myers as they stalk some woman in her own house. Very creepy and effective moment. This is just one of two very suspenseful scenes, the other being an attack on a pickup truck, made slightly less impressive due to the laughable reactions of the chick driving as the humanoids crash through her windows.
The final thing that could have made this film better is the addition of MOST of the deleted scenes on the disc. The film is only an hour and twenty minutes and could easily have been bumped up to an hour and a half with the inclusion of deleted scenes, most of which contained…more humanoid attacks, boobs and blood! How rare is it that you watch deleted scenes for a horror movie and find they actually contain horror and nudity??? I’m shocked these scenes were ever deleted in the first place. Blood and boobs are the key ingredients of a horror movie! Cut out the dialogue, the plot, the social message…and give me more blood and boobs dammit!
