Creatures from the Abyss

Five teenagers go motorboating one night, and suddenly find themselves in a rainstorm. Bikini-clad, they board an abandoned ship adrift at sea and end up fighting off .... something or other, on board the yacht. It's too dark and badly photographed to tell for certain. A circle of some sort was placed over the lens to simulate the creature's point-of-view, for scenes of it stalking these soon-to-be-fish-food fools.

Dead, mutated piranha in the freezer don't deter these nitwits from further inspecting the contents of this abandoned ship. Hell, they even cook them up and eat them for dinner. After poking his girl's ass with a dead fish, a guy finds some unidentifiable goo on a shelf, puts it to his mouth and tastes it! Yes, these characters will live a long a healthy life.

Thawed, mutated piranhas from hell go on a rampage, chowing down on these braindead cyphers for most of the rest of the film's run time, which was probably 15 minutes too long, incidentally.

There's a bit of nudity (which distracts from the gore) and gooey, vomiting effects and gore (which distracts from the nudity) in this badly dubbed grade Z-flick, which looks like it was filmed several years earlier and sat unreleased for quite a while, from the looks of the awful looking mullets, and the guy in the white speedo. But there are a few unintentional laughs, the girls look good and wear as little as possible, so it might be fun for fans of zero budget sleaze to watch this in the right frame of mind.

What can I say for Plankton or known as Creatures from the Abyss I loved it..It reminded me of the good old days of late night cable TV on a Friday/Saturday night.Director Max Cerchi did a fantastic job directing a very cool Horror B film. What I liked about the story a young couple and their friends decide to go for a fun day at the beach take a trip on a small boat then run into trouble out in the middle of the ocean their boat is taking on water things look bad but luckily they come across an abandoned yacht boat, they go on board little do they know the looming is some kind of mutant crustacean danger that lies in their future. It seems that weird biological experiments were being conducted before the crew mysteriously vanished. Soon the horror ignites as the couple and friends begins to truly grasp the terror that awaits them when monstrous killer plankton come calling. I loved the cool special effects which included some interesting stop motion animation.

Creatures from the Abyss" or Plankton has a lot of cool B-movie stuff. Special effects range from fair to outlandishly silly. It did make me laugh a few times.

Boasting some pretty good Rick Baker-esque special effects and Deran Serafian in a small role, this pretty lame Italian movie deserves some recognition. Cerchi gets some credit for still making gore flicks while most of the other Italian directors (Ruggero Deodato, Sergio Martino, Lamberto Bava, and Enzo G. Castellari) have moved on to lower-key TV movies. As for plankton, it's half Piranha - half The Thing, with people turninging into monsters, raping women, and causing general mayhem. The ultra-grimy, sleazy, and over-sexed feel of the film makes it hard to enjoy. Only available in Italian language work-prints floating around.

"Creatures from the Abyss" is an insignificant and very nasty Italian romp that 'borrows' elements from every notable underwater SF/horror film made in the past 25 years. It rips off the obvious classics like "Piranha", "the Abyss" and "The Thing", but it also steals ideas from B-movies of which I never assumed they would have inspired anyone to do the same. Like "DeepStar Six", "The Blob"-remake and even Roger Corman's "Humanoids from the Deep". Don't even consider buying this flick if you got any good taste left in you, as this is really bottom of the barrel camp! We're talking atrocious acting, hilariously bad dialogue ("Hey, that fish has an evil expression!") and grotesque gore that somewhat resemblances the artwork of Screaming Mad George. Nonetheless, I loved watching it simply because it's such dumb and brainless entertainment that doesn't require any involvement whatsoever. The plot centers on five stupid teenagers who planned a nice day at the beach with their rubber boat. They're overcome by a storm and seek shelter on an Oceanographic Research yacht (let's ignore for a moment that they supposedly drifted off to the middle of the Atlantic on that ridiculously small motorized raft...). Despite the ominous setting of the abandoned yacht, they throw a little dinner party and have some sex. Until, finally, one of them (who at least has a little brain capacity) discovers that giant amounts toxic waste poisoned the plankton in the ocean. Seeing that this plankton is an essential food source for many ocean organisms, the fish have mutated and eaten the crew. Some sequences rate very high on the repulsive-scale, like a girl vomiting sea-creatures or a dude transforming into a rancid monster during a sex-act. The nauseating gore actually is the only reason to check the film out, since there's not much tension or intrigue. It's an unusual type of gore for an Italian film, I'll give it that, as it doesn't handle about zombies or mad raving cannibals for a change. The English dubbing is downright painful and easily one of the worst I ever beheld...and that has got to mean something.

"Creatures from the Abyss" is an Italian film made in the 90's. The only Italian genre director who still meant something during this decade was Michele Soavi and he sure as hell didn't have anything to do with this production. That should give you a little idea about how "good" this film is. It's sick, ugly and monstrous! You can either take that as a warning or a recommendation.

This is actually a surprisingly nihilistic little modern day B monster movie shot on DV, with a premise so stupid that no matter how idiotic the execution it still worked. A group of teenage dingbats stage their own private party on a deserted excursion yacht found floating aimlessly in the middle of a raging storm. The reason the yacht is deserted is because mutant fish monsters have evolved in about two days from a radioactive toxic waste spill and first mutated with the crew, and now they are ready to breed.

The slimy prospects of the lustful monster fishies is indeed realized during a hilariously over the top transformation scene that stands as the film's centerpiece: While attempting to score with one of the chicks, one of the guys (who has been exposed to the mutating waste) suddenly starts growing tendrils & spines and heaving out gobs of muck. What makes it funny is that the girl starts to like it, and the animated stop motion & prosthetic effects do not pause to consider how fake they look and instead concentrate on getting a few laughs plus gross out factor. The film has a reckless abandon to it crossed with a perverse sense of humor, nudity, and gross out gags.

In other words this is a party movie, not SCHINDLER'S LIST, and should be consumed only in the company of friends at social settings where alcohol is served and consumed in what might be deemed as an irresponsible manner. You'll need it for most of the warm up portion of the film -- after a nice frenetic Lost In The Storm sequence the movie settles down into cliché mid 1990's teen party footage for a while, but once the kids start disappearing and the monsters (interestingly depicted as first by only a fish-eye view of their own perspective as they stalk the idiots) start trying to glom onto them it starts to be actual fun. The "bad" or dated or low budget effects make it all the more enjoyable, including a downright nihilistic conclusion for this sort of fare.

Colorful, slimy, and over quickly -- try adding beer for optimal effect.

6/10 for this kind of stuff.