CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS

Five friends venture out to sea with an inflatable boat until they get lost. When night falls, the young people spot an apparently deserted ship and board it. It is a luxurious yacht, equipped with all comforts and a laboratory where many strange frozen fish are kept. Soon, the passengers of the ship realize that the crew has been decimated by a mysterious creature and that genetic experiments were being conducted on the fish on that ship. If you thought you had seen everything in the realm of beast movies, make sure you haven't missed "Creatures from the Deep" (or "Plankton" as it is known abroad), where the threat to fear are voracious frozen fish, or rather, at the origin of it all, radioactive plankton, that is, the set of corpuscles and microorganisms carried by the water. In short, whichever way you put it, you can be sure that a threat of that kind is not common in the horror cinema. In the director's booth, there is Al Passeri (who is not a pseudonym of Massimiliano Cerchi, as indicated by IMDb, but they are two different people!), known above all as a special effects specialist for some films from the 1980s such as "Shark Hunter", "Wild Beasts - Ferocious Beasts", "Predators of Atlantis" and "Warriors of the Year 2072", who with his production company, Production Film 82, tried to continue the tradition of Italian genre cinema when no one practiced it anymore. "Creatures from the Deep" dates back to 1994 and we all know how difficult it has been to continue producing horror films in Italy after the 1980s (a trend still very current), so Passeri and his team make a film thinking about foreign sales and much of the artistic and technical cast is foreign, as are the locations which are partly American (precisely Miami, especially for the exteriors). The film in question, however, it must be said, is of disarming poverty. Wanting to perpetuate the memory of a respectable genre film industry with films like "Creatures from the Deep" is frankly damaging to national memory. If already from the meager subject one can guess that the film will certainly not be a "masterpiece", one could at least expect a tasty B-movie (or even a C-movie, why not) ... it is not so improbable, is it? And instead we have the worst of the worst, exactly what we would never have wanted a film of this kind to be. The involuntary comedy is constantly present and sometimes due to the total inability of the director to do his job. If on the one hand the direction of the actors is totally non-existent - already the cast is quite 'canine', but these young people are visibly disoriented, left to their own devices - the construction of certain scenes in the way we see them is also totally wrong. Take as an example the long introduction, in which the young people on the inflatable boat alternate with scenes on the yacht with the monster that causes havoc. The long sequence is poorly constructed, the frequent scenes of the monster's tongue that strikes like a whip are inserted at the wrong moment and make you smile - but in the long run they annoy - for the pedestrian way in which the synchronization of the images and the insertion of the soundtrack have been managed. Thumbs down also in the special effects sector, sometimes represented by outdated computer graphics that make the fish appear so stuck on the film that they disturb. But "Creatures from the Deep" uses different techniques for the creation of the creatures; if the CGI is frankly unviewable, the stop motion effects are no less crude, almost endearing. The only one that saves is the transformation scene, created with prosthetics and more traditional effects (surely more suitable for Passeri himself), well made and the only truculent scene of a film that otherwise seems ashamed to show that blood and those guts that during the 1980s made us famous in the world. The rhythm is also absent and for a good three-quarters of the film nothing happens at all, until the hectic finale made of explosions and rigid monsters. The only thing that pushes to keep watching is the frequent presence of trash scenes and absurd delusions that from time to time season the plot. In short, "Creatures from the Deep" is the classic Z-grade movie that can only be watched with the intention of mockery, a sum of Italian trash for export that makes us miss the good old (cinematographic) times gone by more and more.