Humanities Movie Reviews

The peculiar genius of schlock-king Roger Corman is in full bloom with this extremely gory, pointedly offensive homage to 1950s monster movies (with a generous helping of Alien thrown in for good measure), in which a legion of mutated salmon-men terrorize a small town in their search for unwilling female companionship. (Potential viewers should be warned that this movie goes to great lengths to show what earlier films in this genre had only implied.) A guilty pleasure for exploitation fans with a strong stomach and a twisted sense of humor. For what it's worth, director Barbara Peters has claimed that additional shock scenes were inserted by producer Corman without her knowledge. The glop-intensive special effects were devised by Rob Bottin, who later went on to gross out the masses with his work on Seven, Robocop, and John Carpenter's graphic remake of The Thing. --Andrew Wright

The peculiar genius of schlock-king Roger Corman is in full bloom with this extremely gory, pointedly offensive homage to 1950s monster movies (with a generous helping of Alien thrown in for good measure), in which a legion of mutated salmon-men terrorize a small town in their search for unwilling female companionship. (Potential viewers should be warned that this movie goes to great lengths to show what earlier films in this genre had only implied.) A guilty pleasure for exploitation fans with a strong stomach and a twisted sense of humor. For what it's worth, director Barbara Peters has claimed that additional shock scenes were inserted by producer Corman without her knowledge. The glop-intensive special effects were devised by Rob Bottin, who later went on to gross out the masses with his work on Seven, Robocop, and John Carpenter's graphic remake of The Thing. --Andrew Wright