AQUANOIDS
PLOT-A woman battles the sea creatures that killed her mother many years ago.
VIOLENCE-People are torn up and eaten by the creatures, some are shot with harpoons, testicles are crushed, and a girl gives birth to a monster baby.
SEX/NUDITY-Four quick topless shots, and two very brief (mostly clothed) sex scenes.
WHY I WATCHED IT-I really dug Cinemacabre's previous flick MANIACAL. The producers really seem to have a firm grasp on what horror audiences want.
THE DOPE-At the closing of each episode of his 80's cable show DRIVE-IN THEATER, Joe Bob Briggs (one of my personal heroes) always left us with the same sentence: "The drive-in will never die." Here we are in 2003, Joe Bob's show is a fond memory, and you're damn lucky if you've got a drive-in theater near you. Even the ones still in operation only show the latest Hollywood releases. To me, there's something wrong about watching THE MATRIX at a drive-in. I'm just old enough to remember going to see movies at the drive-in, and I actually saw some "drive-in" movies. By that, I mean stuff with young characters in peril, running from monsters and madmen, showing a little skin and a lot of blood. Are those days gone? Yes. But thankfully, the drive-in movie still lives on, floating through late-night cable airwaves, and lurking on video store shelves. AQUANOIDS is a drive-in movie, in every sense of the word. It has all the right elements in all the right places, but adds modern speech and cheeseball humor to the mix as well. Too often, I see horror movies that get so caught up in trying to be clever and cool that they forget to be fun. AQUANOIDS doesn't bother with that...it's a total creature feature and it's here to bring you a good time. The story is simple, the editing swift and inventive, and the acting is b-movie perfection! It's clear to me the folks who are responsible for AQUANOIDS knew excatly what they were doing, and they pulled it off in a very satisfying way. If you like HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, PIRANHA, or even CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, you just might find yourself adding AQUANOIDS to your list of waterbound monster classics.
MEMORABLE SCENES-A coroner gleefully extracts some gory guts from a dead body, and stops to take a bite of his sandwich in the middle of it. Another guy watches this and pukes. I never get tired of seeing stuff like that.
NOTES-Visit the CINEMACABRE website for release info and DVD edition details. Below are some images from the movie, courtesy of Mark Gordon.
(July 2000)