MY CALL: A not so classic, Roger Corman sea monster installment that is NOT worth anyone’s time. MOVIES LIKE Up from the Depths: Demon of Paradise (1987), Humanoids from the Deep (1980), Piranha (1978) and Piranha II: The Spawning (1982).
Roger Corman sure does like to ruin a fine day at the beach doesn’t he? Demon of Paradise (1987), Humanoids from the Deep (1980), Piranha (1978) and Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) all ruin family vacations by the sea. Also, for whatever reason, the vacationers never seem to leave after the first few bodies start piling up, do they?
Meet Rachel. She’s never prepared when people take photos of her.
Here’s her face when she found out how this movie did at the box office.
In this Shakespearian plot, an underwater earthquake releases a man-eating sea monster to terrorize the Hawaiian archipelago. After a tourist in Hawaii emerges from the water covered in guts and shark heads wash up on the beach, the resort manager assumes his competition is dumping chum in the water to make him look bad in this hokey Jaws rip-off.
Judging by the attitude and the movement of her right arm, I’m guessing she was trying to flash a gang symbol of something.
The resort manager gets Rachel, a resort employee, to investigate the matter. She turns to Greg for help. Greg works on a small charter fishing boat. When they fail to solve the problem, Greg’s fishing boat captain and the resort manager decide to put a bounty on the monster, encouraging even resort guests to band together to kill it with spears and spear guns. Not sure why, but no one thought about nets and literally fishing for it with high-test line and over-sized hooks off of charter boats. Seems like a good idea to me.
This face is tough. I’m guessing she’s thinking something to the tune of “Did I just fart?”
This movie proceeds at a devastatingly slow pace, even more so than normal for this kind of low budget monster movie. The kills seem few, brief and unexciting, and we almost never see the monster for more than a couple seconds at a time. When something actually does happen, we never really see anything happen. Typically all you see is a POV shot of whatever the shark monster is about to bite, then a cloud of blood in the water, followed by a splash where the victim has just disappeared.
