Mad scientist Dr. Kurt Leopold (Marshall Grauer) uses his special formula, Zaat, to turn himself into a walking catfish (although he looks more like a mutant seahorse to me). After polluting a local pond with Zaat, the lumbering catfish man takes revenge on those who scoffed at his work, and then goes about trying to create a catfish woman to be his mate.
The first fifteen minutes of low budget Floridian monster movie Zaat (AKA The Blood Waters of Dr.Z) are enough to sort the men from the boys: anyone not seriously dedicated to Z-grade trash will surely soon fall by the wayside at the sheer banality of the opening scenes -- underwater wildlife footage with a monotonous voice-over, and tedious shots of scientist Dr. Leopold as he goes about his work. At the quarter-of-an-hour mark, things momentarily pick up when Leopold turns into catfish man (the creature played by Wade Popwell) and goes on the prowl, but it's still far from great, any amusement to be had at the shoddiness of the monster costume quickly wearing off.
The rest of the film is mostly long, drawn out scenes of badly lit and very boring 'action' as the monster roams the countryside and town while the authorities investigate, but, every so often, director Don Barton throws in something so bizarre that one can't help but sit up and take notice. A prime example is the hippie musical interlude in which a group of long-haired layabouts sit and sway while a man sings and plays guitar. The town's sheriff arrives and taps his hand appreciatively, before leading the hippies on a Pied Piper style procession to the town jail, where he locks up the youngsters for their own safety. It's a really weird scene that has zero bearing on the plot -- the hippies are never heard of or seen again.
Another head-scratching moment comes when the creature gets a headache and needs some aspirin (at least I think that is what happens): breaking into a pharmacy, it knocks back some meds (getting a little woozy in the process) and then trashes the place. Again, just a really incongruous scene that serves no real purpose other than to pad out the runtime (not that the film needed padding out, the finished mess clocking in at an excruciating 100 minutes).
Other bits that are notable for their eccentricity include the monster taking time out to draw a picture of sexy blonde INPIT Agent Martha Walsh (Sanna Ringhaver) -- he's actually not a bad artist for a fish -- and an unconvincing shot of a supposedly giant catfish destroying a miniature matchstick model of a fence, the only remnant of a Kaiju-catfish sequence cut from the final film on account of it looking so crap.
To be honest, I probably would have rated Zaat a rather generous 3/10 for chucking in these truly weird moments amid the deathly dull stuff, but the film commits a crime against trash cinema that is unforgivable: sexy Agent Walsh is about to undress when she is interrupted, zipping up her red jumpsuit just as things were getting interesting, and then she takes a shower without any nudity. Just what kind of cheap, exploitative, Z-grade monster movie is this? I'm left no other choice than to deduct a couple of points.
