Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

Episode 133, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello, and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: We’re in week 3 right now of our summer fun month of July. This movie is Humanoids from the Deep, a 1980 Roger Corman film about humanoids who come from the deep. The deep. It you know, just from the title, you know, it’s a classy movie.

Craig: Right.

Todd: I saw this movie, I think, on cable at some point. It’s been a long time, but I have seen this movie. In fact, I think I had identified it early on as a movie that we should do at some point. Craig, how did you discover this movie?

Craig: Oh, same old way I always read about movies, you know, some list on some horror website. I’d heard of it, and I had seen the box art. I don’t remember actually seeing it in person when I was young, but, you know, online, I had seen it. With the title like Humanoids from the Deep, it’s been intriguing, but I had never, seen it. So this is my first time around.

Todd: Yeah. This is great summer movie, right?

Craig: Yeah. I’m just gonna go ahead and throw this out here. You know, it that it was on one of those lists, you know, like watch this in the summertime. It’s summertime movie or whatever. It’s funny because I think that it is supposed to be a summertime movie, but it’s so confusing because half the time the characters in the movie are running around in like shorty shorts and bikinis and the other half of the time they’re in like coats and stocking caps. So, like, it’s really hard to distinguish what season this movie is supposed to be set in. I think that it’s actually supposed to be set in the summer, but they filmed it in the winter, in California like November December time. So I guess their costumers were particularly concerned about continuity, but, you know, whatever. It’s a cheap b movie.

Todd: That’s what I was gonna say, you know, kinda just that’s what happens when you’re in a coastal Todd. You know, it’s summer time that cool ocean breeze blows in and gets chilly sometimes.

Craig: Thanks for that. You’re welcome, man. I can learn something new every day

Todd: this town Noyo get a town of Noyo is full of fishermen. It is a fishing town. It looks like they fish salmon most of the time, and they are in trouble because there is a cannery coming to town, and half of the people in town seem to be for the cannery, maybe 3 quarters. I don’t know. It’s kinda hard to say. And then the other half of the people in town are against the cannery. It’s going to do some unspecified bad thing to the Todd, whereas everybody else thinks it’s gonna do some unspecified good thing for the town. So that is the sort of thin threadbare base that we base all of our unnecessary drama on before we get to the necessary drama, which is when the humanoids start coming out from the deep. Right. We have an a series of people. You know, this is one of those, like, you can tell the scriptwriter is fresh or maybe there have been, like, 10 of them because I I I’m going down the list of names of characters in here, and we have Tommy, Johnny, Jim, Jackie, Hank, another guy named Hank, Dee. Yeah.

Craig: It really it really bothered me and confused me that there were 2 guys named Hank. Why in the world

Todd: would you do that? It is so insane. At least at least one of them, we barely see.

Craig: Maybe they were going for realism. You know?

Todd: I guess, have the same first name sometimes. There’s so many Hanks in these fishing towns. They had to get that aspect in there. You’re right. But it starts out with some really great underwater photography just kind of sweeping through. And it unfortunately, I think about midway through the movie, I realized that all of the good underwater photography was probably stock footage.

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: Yeah. It’s very colorful. It’s very pretty. It looks even better underwater than it did above water for most of the movie.

Craig: Oh, definitely. It was funny to me though because this movie started out almost exactly the same way as last week’s movie, Jaws 3. Oh, yeah. Underwater photography, like, it was almost identical. I was just waiting for, you know, a big fish to get its head chopped on. But

Todd: A giant fish head going towards us.

Craig: Right. But but anyway, unimportant. You’re right. No. The the, the underwater stuff looks good and and the above water stuff isn’t kind of mediocre at best and sometimes actually kind of poor quality. Yeah. But you know, overall the cinematography isn’t terrible. It just seems almost like it was poor, film stock or something.

Todd: It’s almost just like the movie has no style, you know. It’s it’s real paint in my numbers as far as I think the the directing and the the cinematography goes. It looks like a made for TV movie or or, you know, an episode of some TV show. It’s just, you know, there’s nothing really interesting about the way that it’s shot, about the angles that are used or anything like that. Even when it’s supposed to be intense and exciting, there’s, you know, it’s hardly anything there.

Craig: Well, you mentioned that this is a Roger Corman film. He was was he the executive producer on film?

Todd: Yeah. He was the sort of hidden executive producer on this for some reason. It was obviously put out by New World Pictures, his studio, but he’s actually not credited as executive producer, but he was ex extremely hands on, in, you know, having final say on how the movie was. Now Roger Corman, as we talked about before, he knew what he wanted. You know, he was making exploitation pictures. Many of them turned out to be pretty high quality. A lot of them had pretty what ended up being pretty high grade talent coming through his shop, and he really got a name for himself in Hollywood as a guy to work for because, you know, you could just jump in and work for Peanuts, but then, it seems like a lot of people that worked for him, both actors and behind the scenes, went on, you know, to be become big names in Hollywood. So, you know, a lot of respect for this guy, but his movies really ran run the gamut, you know. I mean, this is total drive and fair for example.

Craig: This is just Oh, yeah.

Todd: Blood and Sesame.

Craig: And and well, right. And and in that, you know, genre, it’s fun in that way. Like, you know, we okay. Again, I live in the Midwest in America and there are still a few drive ins around. There was one just a half an hour from the town that I live in for a long time, and we used to make you know, the half hour trek up there, and you know take some food, and, you know, just sit and have fun, you know, at the drive in or whatever. And so, I can see for that purpose how this movie would be fun. This would be something fun to watch. We’re sitting with your friends in the car and you’re goofing around or whatever that, you know, I get it. That’s cool. I just thought that kind of, the production history of the movie was kind of interesting, like, you know, Corman was behind it the whole time, but when they were casting the movie they casted it under the title beneath the darkness in the hope that they could get in some you know higher rate talent thinking maybe that they’re gonna be doing more kind of an artsy or heady kind of film, you know. So they they cast these people. I really didn’t recognize any of the people, but, if you look at their IMDB credits, all of them had worked and and can a lot of them continued to work, after this doing various things in film and television. And it’s directed by a woman which we don’t see see in horror that often, which I’m always happy to see Barbara Peelers or yeah. I think Peelers or Peters. She was one of the few female directors of the time, I guess, that really kind of embraced doing some of this exploitation type of stuff. You know, it was very much a male dominated, genre, but you know she did some of it too. This was her last feature film. She went on to continue to do TV stuff, but as as she filmed it, it wasn’t supposed to have nearly as much sexual content. Okay. So what happened was once it had all been filmed, Corman and this I don’t think was uncommon for him at all, decided that there wasn’t enough sex, in the movie. There there wasn’t enough TNA. So, he requested that there be reshoots to film more sexual content and the the female director said no. You know, she’s like, I don’t I don’t wanna do that. And so he fired her and hired on a, a second director, Jimmy Murakami to film some additional kind of sexual exploitation kind of stuff. And and some of that stuff made it into the movie. Apparently, not a whole lot of it. A lot of it actually ended up left on you know the cutting room floor, and Murakami isn’t even credited as a director. But when the actors specifically Anne Turkel found out that the title had changed, that they had inserted all of this new sexual content. They she and some others actually tried to have the film they tried to stop it from being released.

Todd: Or at least tried to get their names off of it. Right?

Craig: Right. Right. And but they couldn’t. So so it got released as we see it now, and, I don’t know. Well, let’s It’s weird.

Todd: You’re really, softening this a little bit. I mean, I mean, Roger Corman was pretty explicit from the beginning that he said that there are 2 important things in this movie. There’s the men getting killed and the women getting raped. Roger Corman is just like the sweetest, nicest guy, but he’s very he’s very matter of fact about all this.

Clip: She shot the killing of the men in the most gory fashion imaginable. It was so terrible on the screen. Then shot the raping of the women with shadows on the rocks, indicating that something was happening off screen. It was one of the few times I I really thought there’s a difference here in thinking this woman really shot the killing of the men, but she did not shoot the raping of the women, so we had to bring in a second unit director who shot that.

Todd: He thought this was strange that she would and I don’t know. You know, it’s kinda funny. I mean, we’re talking about it. This is a dub movie. Right? There’s no this is quite serious. So, you know, it is an interesting point, if you think about it, how willing we are to put up with violence, you know, in which people die. Mhmm. And blood and gore, and there’s there’s a head getting cut off in this movie. There’s limbs. There’s so much blood and gore in this film. But, when it comes to the the, you know, anything sexual, we get, oh, you know, we get a little little weirded out by it. Even so, the, you know, the rapes in this movie, which are monster on woman kind of stuff, they’re they’re not that explicit. It’s it’s all still pretty quick, but it’s there, you know.

Craig: Yeah. And, you know, I don’t know. You say, you know, we you you could be talking about me. Like, I can watch people get mutilated, you know, all day long, doesn’t bother me. Fun fact about me, I can’t watch blood being drawn out of my own arm. That makes me wanna pass out. But I can watch people being mutilated on screen, not You’ll figure. Right? Right. But, you know, sexual violence, that really does bother me, and I I don’t like it. You know, like, I can still like and appreciate a movie if it’s there, but it makes me very uncomfortable. And, this one, yes, the the the sexual assault is is certainly I mean it’s more than implied it’s explicit, but the the scenes really aren’t that explicit. You know, like, the monsters rip open the girls Todd so their boobs pop out and you know, they jump on top of them. That’s it. You know, you don’t see anything terribly explicit. It’s more implied. But, you know, I can see how even that would be upsetting to some people’s sensibility. So I’m not I’m not being critical of the original director or the female stars of the movie. I get where they’re coming from, but compared to some of the other things that we’ve seen pretty tame really.

Todd: Yeah, for sure. Well, let’s just get on into it then. There’s really not a lot to talk about because the plot is quite simple. It’s it’s all these people. And, I mean, who are they? It doesn’t really even matter. There’s a guy named Jim. I think his brother Johnny, or is it his son? I don’t know. It’s his brother. His brother, Johnny. There’s a boy named Jackie. There’s a guy named Hank. I think Jim is for the cannery in town, and Hank no. Hank is for the cannery in town. Jim is for the cannery in town. There’s a guy named Tommy, I think, who’s against the tam cannery in town.

Craig: No. It’s the the guy who’s okay. You’re terrible.

Todd: No. No. Johnny is the one against the cannery. Right? Because Johnny’s the guy with, he’s, like, Native American, which we sort of find out later. Right?

Craig: Well, I mean, if you can’t tell because he looks like a native American and his name is Johnny Eagle, like you would probably kind of get and the fact that the other some of the other white people, not all of them, specifically the guy, one of the Hanks, I’ll call him Slattery for clarification because that’s his last name. He is for the cannery and Johnny’s against it. So there’s also kind of this subplot of, like, racial intolerance, like, the native Americans want to preserve their land and they, you know, they wanna preserve their rights to fish the land, and so Johnny being the representative of all the Native Americans, we don’t even see any of the other ones. We hear their voices like Johnny has like Johnny has a meeting in his house, but we just witness it from outside and just hear the other Native Americans voices. So, like, there’s, like, kind of this cultural, divide which is totally Shoehorned. Inconsequence. Right. Like it doesn’t make any difference at all. The the point is some were for it, some were against it. It doesn’t really matter. Basically, what happens is these monsters start appearing. The first one we see, you know, some guys go out fishing and they think they’ve got a great catch in their net and they start trying to pull it in, but, like, it’s being more resistant than usual, and you know it’s a whole kind of mousetrap kind of thing where some gasoline gets spilled and the engine won’t start and, like, all like, the winch breaks because the net is so heavy or whatever. Meanwhile, we’re seeing, you know, kind of this zombie hand wrapped up in the, the netting, but, you know, it’s moving and stuff. So we know there’s some monster down there or something.

Todd: It’s like a a flipper. It’s like a hand. It’s like a webbed hand with flippers on

Craig: it, right? Yeah. I I mean, it just looks kinda like it’s kinda got like flappy skin. I don’t know. It just looks gross. But anyway, so the the there’s a kid on the boat, the kid falls in the water, gets knocked in the water, and then then all of a sudden all this blood comes up and then somebody, I don’t know, drops a cigar or something into the spill gasoline and the the ship blow the whole boat blows up. Yeah.

Todd: There are a lot of these explosions, you know, just just for everybody’s Todd calm everyone down. If you spill gasoline on the ground and you drop a fire into it It’s just gonna catch on fire. It’s nothing is going to explode, but you wouldn’t think that from this movie everything in this movie explodes when fire touches it.

Craig: Yeah Including this boat.

Todd: It’s so in the beginning, we’ve got a kid. The the kid is the first one to die, Jackie. This is the boy of Deac, I think, who’s the guy in the boat. And then, you know, everybody else in the boat dies as well. And then, we go into the house. I think of I think it’s Jim’s house.

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: Uh-huh. And, we see him chatting. They’re Todd chatting about the cannery with some friends, and their dog starts barking. And so they let the dog out, and the dog goes out and sniffs around in some trash and follows this trail into the woods and gets attacked. Then later, Jim’s wife, Jim and his wife come out in the morning because they they don’t know where the dog is, and they find the slime on the garbage, and they follow quite literally a trail of slime out into the woods like some Hansel and Gretel thing and, they find their dog kind of in pieces, I guess. You know, just a big pile of mass. So, right away, you’ve got a kid killed and a dog killed. So, this movie is really going for the gut right at the beginning. Well, yeah.

Craig: And then just 30 seconds later, we cut back into the town where all the It it almost feels stupid to talk about the plot because it’s Yeah. It it almost feels stupid to talk about the plot because it Yeah. Really doesn’t matter. You know, like, okay. So all the dogs get killed and, like, Slattery who’s the one who doesn’t like the Native American guy anyway. He’s, like, it’s weird that all of our dogs killed got killed except for Johnny Eagle’s dog. And then there’s like a big festival like they’re having salmon festival or something and so everybody in town is at this dance and the the representatives from Canco, like Canco. Great name. Great name, guys, for the cannery company, Canco.

Todd: There’s so much creativity to find this script.

Craig: Like, the representatives are there and, like, they’ve got some scientists there with them, doctor Susan Drake, which you’re, like, why do they have a scientist? This doesn’t make any sense.

Clip: But Doctor Susan Drake here, great little scientist, has been conducting research at our labs upstream for the last 7 years. And she says now that they’ve got the handle on how to make salmon grow bigger, faster, and twice as plentiful.

Craig: And then, Johnny Eagle comes in the hall or whatever carrying his dog who is also now dead, and it seems pretty obvious that Slattery killed his dog, because Slattery believes that Johnny Eagle is the one responsible for killing all of their dogs even though he’s not because it’s the humanoids from the deep.

Todd: Yes. Which we

Craig: know. Right.

Todd: And the think about this this whole scene. Alright. First of all, I think most of this is incredibly boring. Like, all of this drama isn’t even that interesting, quite frankly. The thing that’s hilarious about this scene is they have this party going on. It’s almost like a barn party. It’s like a dance. It’s kind of country. You know? Yeah. Yeah. But all of the adults in this are acting like teenagers. Like, this one guy arrives with with his girlfriend. I think her name is I can’t remember. We saw her earlier. She had a negligee on. She was walking through the house. It looked like she was being stalked, and then this guy surprises her. So she has a house, but they show up to this party and he whips out a flask out in the parking lot and is like, I brought this. And she’s like, oh, that’s crazy. And she sits on his lap, and they’re sipping from this flask before they go

Craig: in. I was like, really? Like, how old are you guys? I thought they were supposed to be teenagers. I think they were supposed to be teenagers because I think that girl ends up being the daughter of 1 of the fishermen in Slattery’s gang.

Todd: Are you kidding me? No. Kind of like, attention to all, like, teenagers. Oh, come on. She’s in

Craig: her house.

Todd: You know

Craig: I get what you’re say I yeah. I get what you’re saying. Yeah. She’s in her house in, like, in sexy sexy lingerie for, like, a negligee for, like, no reason. Like, she’s just, like, looking at herself in the mirror and stuff. Like, it’s dumb. That they’re making out in the

Todd: in the back of the of the pickup later.

Craig: Yeah. And, you know, it’s it’s I think it’s supposed to be suspenseful, like, you think they’re gonna get attacked, but then they don’t and it really just turns into Slattery’s gang, you know, like, beats up Johnny Eagle outside of the dance hall or whatever, and then Jim who’s the nice guy like, Jim’s also for the cannery, but he’s a nice guy so he doesn’t want people picking on the Native American or whatever. So, like, it’s, like, you know, it’s like the Sharks and the Jets, like, duke it out outside or it’s also boring. And as you said, it is very boring. But the good thing the good thing about the movie is that it it’s only an hour and 20 minutes and it moves pretty quick.

Todd: It does move quickly. It gets past us very quickly.

Craig: And that’s when we get to the good part, which is just, like, random people kind of running around and the humanoids kind of stalking and finally attacking and killing them and raping them. Don’t forget about the raping.

Todd: You can’t forget about the raping. It’s an important aspect of the story. So this same couple that I was talking about, the horny couple running along the beach over and over and over again, and he gets attacked in the water, gets his half of his face torn off. And, you know, the the makeup effects in this are pretty good.

Craig: Yeah. I think really good, actually.

Todd: And, he gets his face pulled off and the girls pulled away and she’s raped. There’s a woman and a ventriloquist in a tent and I feel like this is This is so so random, but I feel like This is my favorite part.

Craig: I know. That’s the best part of the movie.

Todd: This movie’s attempted humor, and I feel like like it’s the one attempted humor that this movie goes. And and this would be my second criticism of this movie is that it doesn’t have, like, the sense of humor that I feel like it should. Like, it’s almost fairly humorless in the way that everything is presented except for this scene. Yeah. And I think the movie would have been a lot more fun, you know, had it not been just so dead serious about itself. Yes, there’s there’s some funny dialogue, basically.

Craig: Hey, honey. Why don’t you take it off? Let’s see some skin. Nothing comes off till I see it. Okay. How’s this? Oh, come on. Show me more than the head. Well, the head’s the best part. Oh, come on. So you? Okay. It ends up the same way that everything ends up. You know, the guy gets killed right away, and then the girl who is completely nude running down the beach with her boobs flopping around gets attacked by one of the humanoids. At this point, we’ve seen the humanoids in their full glory, and they just look so ridiculous, but I mean if I I feel like they were going for the style of fifties sixties b movies, and if that’s what they were going for, they nailed it. You know, the it’s it’s clearly just guys, like, in rubber suits dressed in, like, seaweed and and slathered in Vaseline. I I wrote down that I thought that they kinda look like swamp thing meets pumpkin head. Yeah. I thought I don’t know. I think

Todd: they were better than than your I mean, I thought they

Craig: were Oh, they look so silly.

Todd: I did look silly, but I’ve I guess I’ve just seen so much sillier, you know? I mean, it it was clearly I think they only had, like, 1 or 2 of these costumes. So they had to do a lot of creative filming in order to, you know, make it seem like there were a lot of them. But I thought that the 1 or 2 costumes they had, yeah, they were clearly guys in rubber suits, but, they were slimy. They were detailed.

Craig: Yeah. They walked in That’s true.

Todd: Kind of a kind of a cool way. You know? Like, they were they were trying. The people inside the suits were were trying to make themselves seem a little un inhuman and that they were kinda crouching a little bit, and their arms were just a little longer than normal, and they were moving them around. It’s kind of some unnatural ways. But but, yeah, you’re right. I mean, what we eventually hear, and I maybe I’m jumping too far ahead, but what we eventually hear is these are basically mutated fish.

Craig: Yeah. Oh, it looks great. I love it so much. Hold on. Let me do it because it’s so funny to find the scientist. So, like, once a couple of people have disappeared or whatever, then they’re gonna go, you know, out looking for them to see what’s happened and the scientist wants to go, the lady scientist, and they keep saying, like, Jim and Eagle who go out with her keep talking about how it seems like you know more than what you’re letting on and she’s like, no I don’t. No I don’t. And and then they find all these humanoids and have like a big humanoid battle, like they kill, like, I I don’t know, 5 or 6 of them or whatever and then she confesses that she did know all along. She’s like, I warned them, I told them, and the story is that they were doing DNA testing where they somehow genetically modified these salmon embryos and then there was some big storm and one of the tanks was breached, so the salmon embryos escaped and then some prehistoric fish that hadn’t evolved in 1000000 of years ate the embryos and that made them start to evolve super fast to the point where they were like these humanoids and because they have these great big heads that means they have immense brain capacity. So they’re learning quickly and they’ve realized that man is their only natural competitor. So what they’re doing is that they’re trying to kill all the men and rape all the women so that they can continue their evolution towards dominance. Now, that is just genius. Jurassic Park owes everything to this movie.

Todd: This woman is genius too because she figures it all out, like, within 10 minutes of, you know, examining a body and talking about it. It’s it’s pretty good. Now granted, she was one of the people doing the testing, but this is another one of those movies where, you know, she could look at something and then start rattling off all the stuff that she’s discovered, you know, from this one little specimen that they found. I mean, it’s it’s great. It’s a great back story.

Craig: Well, that it was just and it’s funny because like while she’s explaining this, they’re showing all this footage that’s supposed to be, I guess, like microscope footage and I have no idea what it actually was. I mean, like, they’re trying to science it up. And the woman, I mean, like, they’re trying to science it up. And the woman who played the doctor, I’ve mentioned her before, Anne Turkel, when she was asked why she took the movie, why she took the role, it’s not like she was some big superstar, but she had worked. She said, I took it because it was an interesting story based in actual scientific data and with no sex in it. And I’m like, lady

Todd: What script did you read?

Clip: Don’t don’t

Craig: quit yeah. And don’t quit your day job because I wouldn’t necessarily call this actual scientific, you know, research. Oh, God. But it’s funny, you know, we skip some stuff. There’s more of the cultural stuff like the the white guys bomb Johnny Eagle’s house and that leads to another kind of, attack by the humanoids on Johnny and his white friends and, you know, there’s there’s some cool action stuff going on like 1 girl, the girl who was having dinner with Johnny and her boyfriend at Johnny’s house, like, she’s driving her truck and her truck gets attacked by the humanoids and, like, she runs one of them over, but then another one attacks her from behind through the glass, you know, he like the humanoid is in the truck bed and he attacks her through the glass, and then she drives the truck off a bridge and the car explodes. So you know, there’s some action going on. It’s not boring in in that regard, but it’s it’s just you know it’s just a string of things happening and you don’t expect any kind of intelligent commentary or you know, I’m not even looking here necessarily for any sort of intelligent plot like you know, have the fish people come out and attack people, like, that’s that’s what and they do, you know. They do. And and I another one of my favorite parts because it’s so melodramatic is, like, they have this big huge long conversation about the science because they’ve killed a bunch of these humanoids, like, they have their remains in the lab and they’re studying it or whatever and they figure out all this stuff about the genetic testing and then she’s like she’s like I have no idea how many of them there are, but they’re nocturnal hunters. And Jim, it’s like a close-up on his face, and he’s like, oh, my Todd. The salmon festival.

Todd: It just occurs to all of them that there happens to be a party going on down the street.

Craig: And then this is when again, it’s only an hour and minute long movie and this is when there’s like 20 minutes left in the movie and so it cuts to the salmon festival and that’s the party and, like, I feel like I’ve waited a whole hour to get here and then it’s pretty satisfying because it’s just a a huge, you know this huge group of people basically at a county fair and the the humanoids from the deep attack. You know, they come out in mass and it’s a huge attack and it’s fun. It’s fun to watch.

Todd: Yeah. They kind of attack like zombies. They’re like bursting through the floor of the of the dock, you know, coming up. They’re crawling over. They’re getting people just left and right. People are running. And like I said earlier, it’s it’s, you know, it’s pretty gory, you know, there’s quite a bit of blood being spilled. I’m almost a comical amount of blood in some cases where like a humanoid will slash a guy’s, you know, stomach or something. It’s just like this huge gushing geyser coming out or something. But I think my favorite thing was the DJ from k k f s h, K Fish.

Craig: K Fish. Yeah. Who kept

Todd: who kept calling it the Salmon Festival? This is madman Mike Michaels broadcasting live from the big salmon fest. We’re down here at the K Fish Craig, the big fish.

Craig: We keep singing salmon like And now

Todd: I’m sitting here with this year’s little local beauty, miss Salma. Sandy. How you doing, Sandy?

Craig: Was anybody gonna correct this guy? Poor actor. He reminded me of Rick Dee’s kids of the eighties. Oh, yeah. The he he he’s is super super funny and, like, he totally sexist, like, you know, the whole movie is entirely sexist, but, like, he’s he he comments on some girl that’s, like, going around that has k fish on her butt, and he’s, like, if you catch her, you get a free visor. And, like, he’s got, the salmon queen, you know, there with him, like, in the booth, but and and she’s like in a bikini or whatever, which eventually when the humanoids attack her, bikini just conveniently comes off. Pops off.

Todd: Oh, that happens whenever.

Craig: Fighting with her boobs out. She puts up a

Todd: better fight than anybody in this film.

Craig: She does. I think she makes it too. I think that she gets away, but then, also the other funny thing about them is like you see them eventually starting to get attacked, the the radio DJ and the Salmon Queen, but you also see other people listening to the radio and the DJ continues to narrate everything that’s happening somehow somehow. I don’t know. I mean, as they’re being attacked, there’s so many funny parts, like, you know, they they they try to make it all, you know, scientific there for a second and then after the oh my Todd the salmon festival, before the humanoids, like seconds before the humanoids attack, Jim and the doctor and Johnny Eagle show up and they just dump one of the humanoid bodies out on the floor, like, this is what we’re dealing with. And everybody’s, like, oh, no. And then in that exact instant, like, then they’re besieged by this whole army of the humanoids. And they’re they’re, you know, they’re they’re chasing people around and they’re slashing at the men and killing the men and, like, raping the women like right out there in plain sight. And I have to give credit where credit is due here because what you said was right. They they really only had one of the humanoid suits that they could do whatever they wanted with, Like it was a full suit, it had full motion, and then they had 2 other humanoid suits that they could use, but they weren’t entirely complete so they had to shoot them from, you know, specific angles to make sure that they didn’t look wrong. But I would have never known that because it they did a good job of however they did it through editing or whatever. It looks like there were a whole bunch of them, you know, like like, I don’t know, 20 or more of them chasing people around. So clearly some effort went into that and they pulled it off because I never would have thought there was only one good suit and something else that I thought was funny was originally the director had planned for the stuntmen for the movie to be the guys in the suits And then the stunt men saw the suits and they’re, like, no, those are too fucking stupid. We’re not doing it. And so they had to hire additional actors to play the guys in the humanoid suits. But That’s pretty bad.

Todd: If you’re the stunt man in a Roger Corman film and you look at something and go that it’s too stupid.

Craig: And look, you know, you said you say you know they’re not bad. They they do look kind of realistic, especially I guess it must have been maybe that one suit in close-up. You know the face it kind of looks kind of like a meld between a fish and a human face, but it is detailed and it is slimy and it looks you know kind of organic I guess. So it’s not terrible. I mean you mentioned that their arms are unnaturally long and they are and I could imagine you know that it was the guys in the suits were like you know holding sticks that extended the arms. And that’s that’s kinda what it looked like, but you know it it’s very much Creature from the Black Lagoon. You know in that vein and I know that going into this movie, so I’m not gonna be super critical of it and and you know, I would be scared if those fish guys were running around chasing me and Yeah. Rape raping people and stuff. So

Todd: They mean business. They mean business. And this movie does nothing else if not deliver the goods. I mean, you know what you came for and this movie gives it to you in spades. You know? I got it all. There’s no real hero, like, in this movie. They’re trying to portray Jim and the doctor Susan a little bit kind of as a hero, like, they immediately take off on their boat into the dock while everybody’s getting attacked and they feel they’re safest on the boat, I guess. And they never really get attacked which is weird, And he’s like spray this gas spray this gas out all over the water and so if they’re slowly cruising along while all this pandemonium and mayhem is happening on the on the shore, she’s like, squirt squirt squirt squirt squirt squirt

Craig: squirt squirt squirt squirt squirt squirt. And, like, I didn’t even understand what their objective was. Well, that’s like that all about that. Like, they get out on the water, and all of these humanoids are killing and attacking people on the shore, and they’re just squirting the gas in the water. And eventually, like, they ignite it and there’s fire and, like, there’s clearly, like, some sort of, like, air jets under the water. They’re, like, shooting up bubbles. I don’t even know what that was supposed to be, but the Wikipedia synopsis says that they are setting the water on fire so that the humanoids don’t have anywhere to retreat. Okay. Well, that’s great. I mean, just trap them on shore with all the people.

Todd: There were some shots, some sort of close-up shots of, like, fire in the foreground and humanoids right behind it kind of, like, writhing around, like, maybe they were getting burned or something.

Craig: Oh, yes. When you

Todd: look at it, even from this even from the shots, it looks so lame. There are 2 or 3 fires on the top of the water in the middle of this dock. It’s doing nothing. Mhmm. And then we get random shots back, to we’re trying to do a little bit more drama with, Jim’s I I figured out later it was Jim’s wife. Right?

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: Yeah. Jim’s wife and and kid, who were back at their house, And there’s a humanoid stalking them at their house. There’s also this, sort of half baked idea that John Eagle saves Hank’s life.

Craig: Yeah. The mean guy, like, that, you know, these guys that have been adversaries the whole movie. And and, like, they try to redeem it. Hank is his name, but Slattery is what I’ve been calling him. Slattery. Yeah. He’s he’s just been a big douchebag throughout the whole movie, and they give him a moment where, like, this little kid runs up to him and he’s like, please come help my sister. And, like, there’s this little girl, like, hanging off of a collapsed dock and he goes and and he saves her. So the guy who’s been a jerk through the whole movie puts himself at risk to save this little girl, which okay, great redemption whatever. But then he starts getting attacked by the humanoids and then Johnny Eagle saves him. And it’s like this dramatic moment where Slattery is, like, deciding, am I gonna take help from this guy, my enemy? Like, come on. Todd die? Right. He’s so stupid. But he good. He does. He takes Johnny’s hand and Johnny saves them, and that’s, you know, the end of their story.

Todd: Suddenly, he sees him in a whole new light apparently.

Craig: Wow. And and and the cultures were at peace.

Todd: And then the the funny thing is the movie just kinda ends. Are are we worried they’re gonna be more?

Craig: Well, that’s the thing. Okay. So you you talked about Jim’s wife is kinda being attacked, and then so Jim’s, like, all, you know, after a lot of this stuff has gone down, then it’s like he remembers, like, wait a minute, where’s my wife? And somebody says, oh, I dropped her off at your house. Not my house. Yeah. Not my house. And so he goes racing home. Meanwhile, his wife’s at home and she gets attacked by 2 or 3 of the different humanoids, and she totally takes care of business all by herself.

Todd: She does.

Craig: By the time that Jim gets there, she’s already killed them all. So that was completely pointless drama.

Todd: Yeah.

Craig: But then, yeah, you’re right. Like, I found that really surprising too. The movie really just ends, Like, then after that scene at their house, then it’s the next day and they, Jim and his wife, go back to the festival and it’s kind of the aftermath. Like, kind of the last thing that we had seen at the festival was that people had really started to fight back and it it appeared to be working, like as long as they kept their wits about them and you know kind of grouped up on the humanoids, they could take them out. It wasn’t really that big a deal, but they come back and they see all this aftermath and you know everything’s destroyed and burn up and people are injured and killed or whatever and Jim’s like, where’s the doctor? Where’s doctor Susan? Is she okay? Is she okay? And somebody’s like, yeah. She went back to her lab. Chill out.

Todd: Dude, she’s like right over here.

Craig: But no. She went back to her lab. So we cut back to the lab, and it’s her with the first girl, the teenage girl who was raped, and she’s like birth coaching her, like this girl is pregnant and and about to have a baby and then they totally rip off Alien and have the humanoid baby burst out of her pregnant abdomen and then that’s the end, which is fine but it leaves so many questions like, did they win? Are there more humanoids? Is the humanoid baby gonna be a problem? Like, but it’s a B movie. I had to keep reminding myself of that, like, this isn’t supposed to be some sort of, you know, realistic drama. It’s a B movie. They fight the monsters. They’re done fighting the monsters. It’s over, you know, like that’s just it and and leave it open for a sequel and and apparently there was a sequel planned in like 91, but it never happened. The movie was remade.

Todd: In the meantime, 11 years of fans waiting on pins and needles waiting for that part

Craig: 2. Right.

Todd: Yeah. There there was a remake. It was a made for TV movie, I think.

Craig: Yeah. I think it was for Showtime or something.

Todd: Yeah. With a decent cast,

Craig: on

Todd: it, but I haven’t seen it.

Craig: I haven’t seen it either. Robert Carradine, Clint Howard, some other folks, you know, pretty big name people. And I I don’t know anything about it. I went to the IMDB page for the remake and the only really interesting thing that I read was that they Todd down both the violence but and especially the sex and even though it was an R rated film, the only other thing well, I guess 2 other things that I read, the all of the like salmon festival stuff, they just reused the footage from the original movie. And then, I I read a review, just a fan review, that said that it was far and above way better than the original, but you know take that with a grain of salt. It was just some random fan on the Internet. Who knows? I don’t know.

Todd: Well, there’s some interesting stuff connection to this movie. James Horner does the score, and the score is not bad. He did this in, like, 14 days. And

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: He he did that

Craig: a lot. Huge. Right? Like, he’s done Oh, yeah. Huge movies.

Todd: He start he started out, you know, with Roger Corman. He was one of these guys who started out with Roger Corman, did a lot of scores for him and went on to be huge. And, Vic Morrow, you know, you mentioned, Hank, though the Hank we were talking about mostly Hank Slattery. The way I know him is he was in the Twilight Zone movie from the eighties. He was the guy that, was in the one segment that had the unfortunate accident where there was a helicopter crash during the

Craig: accident. Right. Mhmm. He got stabbed. Killed in that accent?

Todd: Oh, yeah. He and the 2, young, like, Vietnamese kids who were with them all got decapitated in that. It was pretty pretty horrible.

Craig: Right. Oh, yeah. It was horrible. Gosh. I I hadn’t made that connection, but now that you mentioned it, I can picture him. That’s that’s absolutely right. Wow. Oh oh,

Todd: and the other person. And I actually noticed this when I was watching the credits of a name stuck out to me, Gail Heard, one of the production assistants. And I was like, I wonder if that’s Gail Ann Heard. And sure enough, I went to IMDB, and it is Gail Ann Heard. And I I mean, I don’t know if you, are that familiar with the name, but she is a major major producer. Like, she produced Terminator. She produced most of James Cameron’s movies, especially early on. Right now, she’s the one of the 2 executive producers on The Walking Dead. She just went on to be become massive. In fact, she was married to, James Cameron for a little while.

Craig: Yeah. I feel like we’ve talked about her before at some point, because it sounds And this was

Todd: her very first, you know, anything, I think, on a movie, was the production assistant on this film. So whatever she learned here, she took it and bagged it up Yeah. And did something better with it, I guess.

Craig: Well, you know, that’s the thing. I mean, we joke or whatever, but you’ve gotta start somewhere and you know a lot of people got their starts with Corman. You know, we’ve talked about, Bill Paxton and James Cameron and you know all of these. Corman makes these cheesy movies, but he’s made like 5,000 of them. You know, like he he’s been a very successful guy in his field. He he’s certainly not for everybody, but he’s clearly doing something right.

Todd: Well, he knows the business and he knew exactly what he was doing and he claims to this day that he never lost money on any movie, and he’s made 1,000. It’s it’s that’s a that’s a massive Craig. But, again, it’s it’s the right film for the right market. It delivers exactly what they want. He knows what people want. He’s willing to fire a director and hire another one to get it. And then Mhmm. You know, he ends up getting what he wanted, which is a boatload of money from from this film. So Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, this is something that, you know, we all have to consider, especially the horror genre is that movies are a business. Like, 1st and foremost, honestly, they’re a business. And we we try to think of them as art. We try to think of them as, you know and and people jump into it and and talk about movies from an artistic sense. And and and it’s true. They are art. And we can have very good movies made and very artistic movies made, but either the best movies are gonna disappear forever or or ruin careers if they don’t sell. That’s the that’s the long and short of it. And So that’s kind of the great irony of this business is that some of the best movies are lost forever, and some of the worst movies we’re sitting here talking about 40 years later on the podcast.

Craig: Well, and and some of these movies you know, I I think a lot of the reason that we go to movies in general regardless of genre is just kind of for escapism, you know, to kind of lose ourselves in something for a while and, you know, sometimes you just wanna have fun. You don’t wanna have to think about it too hard, you know, you just wanna, you know, watch some fun stuff happening on screen for a while, you know, you go to the bathroom you don’t miss anything. There’s there’s no pressure, you know, and and I can appreciate that. I didn’t I didn’t love this movie but I didn’t hate it, you know. It was competent. I I was entertained. It’s only an hour and 20 minutes. I don’t know if I would necessarily watch it again, but I had a good time watching it. I would give it a enthusiastic one and a half thumbs up.

Todd: I’d be without heaping too much praise on this movie. Everything you said is true. It goes by quickly. It delivers the goods And, as you’ve often said, the the worst thing a movie can do is be boring, and this movie is definitely never boring. Well, not

Craig: for a short period

Todd: of time. That’s about it. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Well, thanks again for listening to another episode. If you enjoyed this one, please share it with a friend. We’ve We’ve got a couple more summer movies coming your way or the rest of this month. And then we’re gonna go on to a month of request. So if you haven’t yet requested a film, check out our Facebook page. Just look up 2 Guys in a Chainsaw on Facebook. Like us there. Let us know what you thought. Send us your requests our way, and, maybe we’ll do them. Until next time, I’m Todd. And I’m Craig. With 2 Guys and a Chainsaw.