Creatures from the Abyss (1994)

 

Director: Alvaro Passeri

Screenplay: Richard Baumann and John Blush

Cast: Clay Rogers as Mike; Michael Bon as Bobby; Sharon Marino a Margareth; Laura di Palma as Dorothy; Ann Wolf as Julie; Deran Sarafian as Prof. Clark Dewison

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Whilst the name is frankly generic - the alternative Plankton whilst silly feels more fitting and is important to the plot - the whiff of Italian cinema is immediately there when five young adults (three women, one man, one horn dog) board a raft on the beach. This is late era Italian genre cinema, though it feels of the eighties, in the nether regions of the genre industry slowly fading away after its golden decades. Within this, in his directorial debut (and as producer), you have Alvaro Passeri, whose CV in a variety of positions, alongside being a legitimate one-man band between visual effects to animatronics, scales the drastically different sides of Italy's rich filmmaking history. Somehow Passeri can go from being an unaccredited sculptor on Tinto Brass' infamous Caligula (1979) to working on animation for Cinema Paradiso (1988), and here after two decades or so of work between anything from special effects to even the makeup department for Atlantis Interceptors (1983), Passeri decided to make a film.

His later films, finishing in 2003 with Psychovision, come in the early 2000s era of low budget straight-to-DVD cinema, which of green screen and digital effects being embraced more. Plankton, which it will be referred to, is a toe in the old lurid era of weirdo Italian genre films, feeling like a nautical cousin to the oddity Alien 2: On Earth (1980), cheese for the cave crowd, which is apt as Passeri is credited as an assistant production designer for that older film too. Plankton is definitely as mad as a box of frogs; even if it cannot qualify as truly abstract or surreal due to how grounded by an attempt at a conventional plot, in its own excesses it feels strange, where stranded on the middle of the ocean at night, a logic gap where the group shake off finding a corpse floating pass them to hang out on an abandoned ship is actually a sign of how over-the-top this will get.

This film lives in its own logic, and it lacks of logic through an honestly enjoyable way, where the problems with its structure if any for is entirely one character, having to put up with one very obnoxious character, a combination of two slasher/horror film tropes of the joker, who plays pranks on the other cast, and of the sex obsessed one trying to sleep with all the women. Thankfully, even the film finds a way to use him, as a film which manages to come up with some truly strange images, alongside a sense of self awareness which is even found in the English dub version for how broad it is. Set on an abandoned ship for nautical science, researching prehistoric fish, even the ship itself is bizarre for how it is inexplicably an Italian love hotel from a strange psychotronic genre film. White fur; a polar bear on a platform; a clock on the corridor wall, a one-eyed creature, who talks; and not least a shower which is connected to the rest of the bathroom appliances (with an actress filmed as the onscreen figure) which qualifies as the horniest I have ever witnessed in a film for how lustily it talks of even using toilet paper.

The variety of ways Plankton gets weirder as it goes is actually surprising, more so as this a) an Italian genre film which is sleazy but managed to be suitable for fifteen year olds in Britain for a lack of overt gore or incredibly explicit sexual content, and b) is ultimate about sentient floating fish and fish-people mutations, which adds to the silliness. Yes, someone punches a flying fish at some point. Yes, there is first person from a fish stalking the cast. Yes, there are flying fish depicted through dated effects, but compensates by memorable practical work. Yes, as the plot references prehistoric fish being mutated by radioactive waste being dumped in the ocean, you can make a joke this is effectively a film about irradiated sea bass, despite being a different species, and even feels like an escalation of the plot of Airplane! (1980), the famous disaster film parody where a passenger plane is in trouble due to fish related food poisoning, as eating still living mutated fish from the fridge does cause body transformation after a period of time. There is more of a self awareness throughout too as, in the middle of the final where fish mutants terrorise the ship and everything is going to blow up, I found myself laughing as the warning system is self conscious and warning people to shift.

Even in terms of sleaze, it feels drenched in it just from the love hotel decor. That is even before a sex scene involving mutation which, despite being in a film certificated as being suitable for fifteen year olds, feels like something from a Frank Henenlotter film, with proper body horror practical effects, and a legitimately gross twist on becoming pregnant very quickly in an interspecies relationship. (Or that the one surviving scientist onboard, a catatonic mess, is a male one who went mad and whose diary, when read, feels like a Freudian-William S. Burroughs smash-up of madness and sexual kink mingling with ichthyology). Italian genre cinema can be legitimately great - superbly made, haunting or/and transgressive and politically minded - but fans are made too for how strange they can be, and the sense of this being aware of this without being ironic is special for those with the acquired taste for it. When a fish man exists by way of a stop motion Ray Harryhausen tribute, you find a film by Alvaro Passeri who clearly loves making inventive images even if the film is as capable of being dumb as a brick and ridiculous. Even the later comes with a sense Passeri intended the later, and having never even heard of him before this film, only that Plankton was a film which existed, makes him a fascinating new discovery for me to appreciate now.