Freakish Fish People of Sci-fi #4: The Island of the Fishmen

The Island of the Fishmen (1979) is like an Italian fish stew (Zuppa di Pesce) with a little bit of everything thrown into the pot: a shipwreck, sketchy prisoners, an uncharted Caribbean island, a lost underwater city, a well-meaning but mad scientist, an imperious, evil colonizer, a Voodoo queen, and the ethereally beautiful Barbara Bach for maximum sex appeal. It’s a dish that looks tasty enough at first glance, but a few too many ingredients, too many cooks (we’ll get to that later), and indifferent execution make it something less than delectable.

Lt. Claude de Ross (Claudio Cassinelli), a military physician, and a handful of prisoners manage to wash up on the shore of an uncharted island when their prison ship sinks. The group’s good luck turns sour when it becomes evident that some sort of dangerous predator is stalking them. Several of the men go missing or are butchered by the unseen thing.

De Ross and the survivors continue to explore the island, where they find evidence of Voodoo ceremonies. They encounter a beautiful woman on horseback (Amanda Marvin, played by Barbara Bach), who cruelly tells them to leave at once, that the island is no refuge for them. The men soldier on, and soon discover a stately plantation house owned by the stern and arrogant Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson), who is hosting the beautiful Amanda and her doddering scientist father, Prof. Marvin (Joseph Cotten).

De Ross eventually gets to the bottom of the mystery: Prof. Marvin has perfected a technique to transform humans into fish-human hybrids for the “noble” purpose of allowing humanity to live in the ocean when land-based resources are exhausted. Rackham is using Marvin’s fish people for his own nefarious purposes -- having them dive to the underwater ruins of Atlantis just off the coast of the island to retrieve its priceless treasures.

Rackham uses implied threats to Amanda to keep the Prof. in line. Rackham also uses his mistress, the scary Voodoo Priestess Shakira (Beryl Cunningham) to recruit unwary natives into the ranks of the fishmen and to keep order on the island.

It looks grim for the doctor, the professor and Mary Ann Amanda, but the beautiful woman’s mysterious telepathic link to the fishmen may just save the day for the trio.

“-The fishmen are revolting! -You can say that again!”

Director Sergio Martino and the screenwriters mix a huge, heaping cup of The Island of Dr. Moreau with tablespoons of Voodoo and Atlantis mythology, and add just a dash of H.P. Lovecraft and Universal’s The Mole People for flavor. There’s even a standard-issue simmering island volcano that of course explodes right on cue at the end.

The recipe seems like a promising enough variation on H.G. Wells’ Moreau, but ultimately the ingredients don’t mesh. As noted above, much of the problem boils down to the execution, or, to belabor the metaphor, the stirring of the pot. (Note: This review is based on the New Worlds Pictures 1981 release of Island retitled Screamers. That version added a prologue sequence and cut footage from the original Italian production - more details below. To be fair, the faults listed here are at least partly due to a "re-heated" U.S. version that sacrificed story continuity for cheap, gory thrills.)

The fishmen are modern science’s version of Voodoo-created zombies -- creatures without a will of their own who perform dirty work for their masters. (This is belied, however, by their mental connection with the empathetic Amanda, which eventually leads to them turning on their hubristic and greedy master.)

Although the film cleverly aligns Western mad science and the dark arts -- Rackham utilizes both for his malevolent purposes -- it doesn’t fully exploit the Voodoo angle, and Shakira spends most of her time acting as a mere henchperson for Rackham (although certainly a beguiling one).

Richard Johnson as Rackham scowls and sneers at everyone concerned in his best Snidely Whiplash imitation. It’s a wonder he got the fishmen to do his bidding in the first place, as he seems to have never heard the adage “You catch more fish with honey than vinegar” (or something like that). Their uprising is very reminiscent of the Mole people’s revolt against the cavern-dwelling Sumerians in the 1956 Universal film (both have more than a hint of modern class warfare underlying the story).

"I now pronounce you fish man and wife."

The Fishmen become “Screamers”

Speaking of exploitive capitalists (and I mean that in the very best sense of the term), Roger Corman’s New World Pictures picked up the distribution rights to The Island of the Fishmen, and after filming an additional prologue scene with actors Cameron Mitchell and Mel Ferrer that included gory killings to juice things up for the drive-in market, New World released it as Something Waits in the Dark.

That version was a box-office dud, so, not wanting his investment to go to waste, Corman had his protege Jim Wynorski work up a lurid trailer for yet another release, this time under the title Screamers:

“Wynorski’s first big success came when, on a $40 budget, he recut the trailer for an unsuccessful Italian-made horror film called Something Waits in the Dark (1979). Wynorski’s ‘Coming Attractions’ reel, which lured potential ticket-buyers with the promise of seeing ‘a man turned inside out,’ incorporated new footage of ‘this guy running around, covered with slime … all his veins hanging out, chasing a girl in a bikini.’ The film, retitled Screamers (1979), opened in Atlanta, Georgia, on a Friday. Early Saturday morning Corman phoned Wynorski and demanded that his new material be edited into the film itself, to appease the disappointed audiences who ‘rioted in the drive-ins last night, tore out the speakers, tried to lynch the manager…’ [Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, Renaissance Books, 2000, p. 167]

Let that be a lesson: you can push fishmen and drive-in goers only so far…

Freakish Fish People of Sci-fi #3: Spawn of the Slithis

This third installment of Frightful Fish People takes us to the scenic Venice area of westside Los Angeles, with its famous beach, canals, boardwalk, murals, street performers… and occasionally, radioactive humanoid-fish mutants.

The protagonist of 1978’s Spawn of the Slithis is Wayne Connors (Alan Blanchard), a terminally bored high school journalism teacher whose newshound instincts are revived by reports of animals and people in Venice’s canal district being killed and the flesh sucked off their bones (yikes!).

The amateur sleuth sneaks into the house of a murdered couple, and finds a mysterious mud-like substance at the scene. He takes samples, which he delivers to a scientist friend, Dr. John (Dennis Falt). After Dr. John analyzes the stuff, he tells Connors that it appears to be Slithis, a rare organic form of mud resulting from radioactive contamination, that can absorb the properties of any lifeform it comes into contact with. According to Dr. John, Slithis first appeared near an atomic plant in Wisconsin, but authorities suppressed the findings to avoid a panic.

More murders take place. Connors interviews one survivor, a homeless veteran, who swears he saw a huge man-like lizardy-fish creature. Later, Connors talks to yet another expert, a nuclear scientist, Erin Burick (J.C. Claire) who confirms the presence of Slithis in the Venice area due to a leak from a nearby atomic energy facility. Burick speculates that Slithis can evolve into highly complex forms... like a murdering, face-sucking fish creature. (Burick has hideous facial scarring from a presumed lab accident -- this character definitely got my attention the first time I saw the movie.)

Connors tries to get the police involved, but they prefer their own cult ritual murder theory. Connors and Dr. John take it upon themselves to drain the canals at the main lock to prevent the Slithis creature from getting ready access to the town, but the murders continue in the harbor.

The intrepid duo hires a SCUBA expert (Mello Alexandria) and his boat to collect mud samples near the energy plant to prove their Slithis theory. But, evidence or not, they soon realize that the police will do nothing and that they will have to capture the creature themselves.

You’ve got to have more faith in your monster suit

Spawn of the Slithis, released just a year after Star Wars revolutionized cinematic sci-fi and turned the genre into a gold mine, is a throwback to the ‘50s era of rubber-suited, atomic age monsters.

Producer/writer/director Stephen Traxler reportedly made his retro drive-in movie in just 12 days for a paltry $100K by spending long days shooting on location around Venice, Marina del Rey and Santa Monica. (Traxler’s only other directorial credit is a failed TV pilot/TV movie, Sam Churchill: Search for a Homeless Man, shot in Santa Barbara and broadcast in 1999.)

While that area of Southern California is scenic and funky and deserving of some cinematic attention, the film is slowed down considerably by lingering shots of local landmarks (including a whole scene devoted to -- wait for it -- a turtle race held at a local bar).

It also doesn’t help that some of the expository dialog is repetitive and long-winded -- various characters, including two scientists, go on and on about the origins and properties of Slithis, while the actual product of the gunk, the flesh-sucking creature, is given relatively little screen time.

To add insult to injury, most of the meager time the creature does get is so dark it’s hard to make him out. The rare close-ups and medium shots of the thing reveal a suit that’s not half bad. It’s not as if this is some Val Lewton-esque exercise in stimulating the audience’s imagination and fear of things in the shadows. Drive-in monsters should be seen and heard. But it seems as if Traxler didn’t have enough faith in his monster to put it out there unabashedly.

There he is! Lookin' good Slithis!

Traxler does try to mix things up with “fish-eye” POV shots of the creature stalking the streets and canals of Venice. And he provides a pretty good nighttime climax of the fish-man attacking the monster-hunters on their boat, which echoes classic scenes from Creature from the Black Lagoon and Jaws.

And then there’s this line, voiced by the boat’s captain (Alexandria) in his best Quint imitation: "Remember, this thing is just a fish, and I’m one hell of a fisherman.”

Freakish Fish People of Sci-fi #2: The Monster of Piedras Blancas

Much like the first entry in the series, The She-Creature, the Monster of Piedras Blancas is a prehistoric humanoid reptilian amphibian (or amphibious reptilian, or whatever) that likes to hang out along a section of the California coast and kill any landlubbers who are unfortunate enough to cross its path. (As I noted in the first installment, I am using the term “fish people” very liberally to include not only humanoid fish monsters, but ambulatory amphibians, crustaceans, cephalopods and other assorted mutant sea creatures.)

Although I didn’t know it when I first saw the movie, Piedras Blancas is a real place. It’s located in the central part of the beautiful California coast, just up the road from San Simeon and Hearst Castle off of Highway 1. The area is known for its historic lighthouse and elephant seal watching. (However, the movie was actually shot in Cayucos, CA and at the Point Conception lighthouse in Lompoc.)

The Monster of Piedras Blancas is a cautionary tale about the dangers of people feeding wildlife. The film opens in a very Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon-like way with a wicked-looking claw suddenly appearing from behind a rock and grabbing a big metal food bowl. Later, we find out that the grizzled lighthouse keeper Sturges (John Harmon) has been looking after his monster friend and feeding it ever since he discovered the thing hiding in a cave near the beach.

Sturges, probably driven batty by his lonely job, started feeding the creature fish, then gradually added meat scraps from the local store to its diet. So now the creature has decided it likes people -- for meals. And it has a distressing habit of playing with its food by decapitating it first.

When townspeople start turning up dead, the best the old coot can do is to warn his daughter Lucy (Jeanne Carmen) to stay away from the caves near the beach. Fortunately, Lucy’s boyfriend Fred (Don Sullivan), the town constable Matson (Forrest Lewis) and the town doctor Jorgenson (Les Tremayne) seem to possess all their marbles, and eventually they form a posse to hunt the creature down -- but not before it’s taken a considerable bite out of the town’s population.

The Hand-me-down Monster

Jack Kevan, who produced the film, was a make-up and special effects artist who helped create some of Universal Studios’ most iconic monsters, including the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), the Xenomorph from It Came from Outer Space (1953), and Monster on the Campus (1958).

With his Universal Studios connection, he supplied the Piedras Blancas monster with the claws from one of The Mole People (1956), and feet from the Metaluna Mutant of This Island Earth (1955). (For more on the making of the Monster, see my post on “How to a Monster: FFB’s Low Budget Creature Effects Awards.") 

"The Fiend that walks lovers' beach with the feet of the Metaluna Mutant!"

The monster is credited with being a living-fossil offshoot of the Diplovertebron family of prehistoric amphibians dating back 300 million years. In his review of the film, sci-fi historian Bill Warren concedes that the monster is scary for a B movie, but lacks the logic and elegance of Universal’s exquisitely designed Creature (well, duh!):

[T]he Monster of Piedras Blancas seems to be designed solely to be scary. It follows no obvious logic, and while individually its various characteristics may seem plausible, and though it’s well designed in that all its body parts seem to hang together (although it has the Mutant’s fee and the hands of the Mole People), it completely misses on the basis of amphibious monster logic. … The head is preposterous. It has inexplicable stubby little horns, huge flared nostrils (in a sea creature?), and a mouth which, though full of sharp teeth and inclined to drool, seems to be incapable of being opened: there are two extrusions from the upper lip which are fastened to the lower. It’s a monster all right, and certainly ugly -- but it does not make sense. [Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies, Vol. II, McFarland, 1986, p. 320]

While there's always a place for logic and consistency, Warren seems to miss the point here. Nightmares are inherently illogical, and although this unpretentious B movie can’t hold even a tiny cupcake-sized candle to Universal’s Creature, it was nonetheless effective enough to cause a sleepless night or two for some Monster Kids back in the day (including yours truly). 

Freakish, Frightful Fish People of Sci-fi B-movies, Part One: The She-Creature

Last year I created a series of posts on Amazing Animal People of Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror. For the first post on Lota, the panther woman from the Island of Lost Souls, I observed that

“[O]ur myths and folklore are full of awe and wonder at the animal kingdom. From the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt, to Native American animal shapeshifters, to werewolves and other were-beasts of European folklore, we have long been fascinated with the idea of taking on animal attributes and becoming something more than mere human.”

The series did feature one representative from the reptile kingdom, The Alligator People (1959), but I decided to save examples from the surprisingly robust B-movie fish/amphibian people category for another day (and that day is today).

Of course, the greatest anthropomorphic amphibian of them all is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the movie, the Creature is the last, lonely remnant of some evolutionary dead-end. For Universal Studios, he was an evolutionary bridge from the aging Gothic horrors of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man to the space aliens and radioactive monsters of the Atomic Age.

More so than other human-animal hybrids, the Gillman and his kind speak to humankind’s primordial origins. According to one popular meme, at some point in our deep, dark evolutionary past we were sea creatures that sprouted legs and learned to crawl on land.

"Julie! Grandpa! What are you doing here?!"

So here we are countless millennia later, sprouting so much extra body fat that we’re ready to start crawling again, if we can even manage that.

Who knows? In some parallel universe, a prehistoric butterfly may have fluttered its wings, causing an Alamosaurus to sneeze, which altered the flight of a flock of Pterosaurs, which affected wind currents just enough to generate a superstorm, which wiped out a struggling group of mammals that otherwise would have successfully competed with land-crawling fish, which evolved into 21st century Gill people, who watch horror movies about hairy, smelly mammals that can **GASP** walk around on two legs.

But thankfully, we live in a universe where hairy, smelly apex mammals make cheesily entertaining movies about fish-human hybrids. Here then is the first exhibit in Films From Beyond’s aquarium of the damned.

Speaking of prehistoric amphibians that have the ability to lumber around on land and take out clueless humans, the She-Creature is perhaps second only to her cousin from the Black Lagoon.

The She-Creature’s cracked premise was inspired by the story of Bridey Murphy, which was all the rage at the time. Under hypnosis, housewife Virginia Tighe recounted all sorts of details about her past life as Murphy, an Irishwoman who lived in the first half of the 19th century. The story was serialized in 1954, and a best-selling book and movie came out in 1956, generating a huge wave of interest in reincarnation. 

Not content to just exploit the reincarnation angle, American International Pictures decided to make it drive-in friendly by tacking on a monster.

The sinister hypnotist Dr. Lombardi (Chester Morris) has a young woman, Andrea (Marla English), under his thumb, and uses her to prove his theories on reincarnation.

Lombardi conducts public sessions in which Andrea is able to summon not only the memories but the actual spirit of Elizabeth, a 17th century English woman. Lombardi further wows audiences with telekinetic tricks and dire prophecies of doom.

Lombardi and Andrea become a sensation, and the hypnotist publishes a best-selling book that makes him rich. But Lombardi, not satisfied with mere wealth and fame, has a dark secret. Under deep hypnosis, Andrea can cause her earliest incarnation, the fearsome, primordial She-Creature, to physically manifest itself. Lombardi uses his control of Andrea and her prehistoric self to kill his rivals, but typically for B-movie madmen, his scheme backfires.  

The She-Creature gets cosmetic surgery

The She-Creature was the product of the fertile imagination of monster-maker extraordinaire Paul Blaisdell, who was also responsible for some of the more memorable creatures of ‘50s sci-fi: Marty the Mutant from Day the World Ended (1955), Beulah the Venusian vegetable monster from It Challenged the World (1956), and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), among others. (For more on Paul Blaisdell on this site, click here.)

The She-Creature is Blaisdell’s most iconic creation, and a gift to B sci-fi movies that kept giving. The suit, or at least parts of it, was used in several more movies and TV specials, including Voodoo Woman (1957) and Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959).

Blaisdell was a freelancer who worked up his creations for next-to-nothing on next-to-nothing budgeted movies. His wild imagination and meticulousness made up for lack of big bucks.

In his book Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker, Randy Palmer devotes several pages to the painstaking work that went into creating the She-Creature. Under one photograph of the suit, he sums her up nicely:

[The She-Creature] was built up from over 70 lbs. of foam rubber and latex. The bony protuberances on her elbows, claws, knees, and heels were carved out of white pine. The ‘lunch hooks’ in the creature’s abdomen were also made from pine. Using his stomach muscles, Blaisdell could make the lunch hooks open and close, but director Edward L. Cahn never utilized the effect in the movie. [Randy Palmer, Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker, McFarland, 1997, p.86]

[Note: At this point I need to fess up for all the sticklers out there. The She-Creature is not a fish person per se. In fact, she has breasts (see below), which technically makes her a sea mammal. However, she is so iconic, I couldn’t in good conscience leave her out of this series. So, I am playing fast and loose with the term “fish people” to include sea mammals, amphibians, crustaceans and other assorted ambulatory, bipedal sea creatures that aren’t mutated fish. Just so you know.]

The director couldn’t be bothered with utilizing the creature’s horrific abdominal hooks, but he did want to make sure movie-goers knew exactly what her gender was:

“When [director] Eddie Cahn got a good look at Paul’s first female monster, he decreed that the creature wasn’t top heavy enough. ‘She’s gotta have bigger boobs,’ Cahn decided. Paul transported the costume back to the workshop for an evening of alterations. When he returned to the set the following day, Cahn took one look at Cuddles’ new set of double-D knockers and exclaimed, ‘Holy Christ! Well, at least now you can tell it’s definitely a woman.’” [Palmer, p. 91]