Plankton

This film has so much in common with things happening in the evil dead, but it's got flying killer fish and a strange boat. This was made in the nineties? No way! Looks like it was made in the early eighties. Now I won't trash this movie to much,(there's enough trash in it already) it's strange, oversexed sick and has some terrible effects (although that may be a work print that I saw, even though it was translated to English). I bought this as a rather dodgily titled 'Piranha 4' Video CD when I was in Malta (where I also managed to catch a documentary on Italian horror movies on the TV, what luck!) I paid my £5 pounds and couldn't wait to get back to England to see it. I stuck it in and got drunk on vodka, I'm not sure if that effected my enjoyment of the film, but it was GREAT! Not in a classic movie way or in an Evil Dead way, but in the way it was just so wacky sick and crazy that you just keep watching! Don't expect anything more than trash and you will be in for a good time, just best watched when drunk I think :) Oh yes and look out for some great fake explosions.

Mike (Clay Rogers), Bobby (Michael Bon), Margareth (Sharon Marino), Dorothy (Laura di Palma), and Julie (Ann Wolf) are as insipid a bunch of horror movie characters as you'll ever see. With Mike representing the only working brain they have among them, they end up taking a motorized raft out into the ocean. However, their gas was left behind, and they are soon stranded out there, while a storm rages. Then they encounter a vast yacht which is part pleasure ship, but mostly a biological laboratory. The air headed group is ultimately terrorized by the marine life on the vessel.

"Creatures from the Abyss" is crude in pretty much every department, including script, acting, and effects. The dialogue is lousy, yet sometimes very funny in its lousiness; one of the gals comments that the fish on display "have an evil expression". You won't care about the characters, and will thus likely enjoy seeing them subjected to a variety of comeuppances. All of that said, this 1990s Italian product does often get by on sheer outrageousness. It's rough going for a while - VERY rough going - but the viewer eventually gets rewarded with some priceless, over the top creature effects gags. Best of all is a classic case of coitus interruptus when one of the two participants begins mutating. The effects may be crude, but they ARE plentiful, and they're frequently fun.

All of this nonsense is set to a silly electronic score credited to Elikonia Group. Production design and lighting are adequate for a production budgeted at roughly $250,000. Among the young actors, Rogers comes off the best, but this is basically because his egghead character isn't as annoying as the others. And, for those who are interested, Wolf does bare her breasts.

The capper is that the automated systems on the ship are given electronic voices, which chatter away in the most inane way possible.

Overall, this is worth at least one look if you're enticed by the prospect of unearthing obscure cheese.

Five out of 10.

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.

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.

I was expecting this movie to be entertaining, I was let down big time. There was not one entertaining scene in the whole movie. Even the acting was bad. Avoid at all costs, resist the temptation.

Don't think I'll ever eat fish again after seeing this movie.