Tag: animal attack movies

Really Awful Movies: Ep 255 – Humanoids from the Deep

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Humanoids from the Deep is one of our favorite creature features. Exploitative, Roger Corman-produced uber-trash, this one follows the typical Jaws template of a besieged fishing village whose inhabitants are trying to come to terms with something that’s pure evil.

Featuring some genre favorites like Doug McClure and Vic Morrow, you won’t help but fall for this movie. After all, “they hunt human women…not for killing…for mating.”

Corman’s company, New World Pictures was the distributor. And Humanoids from the Deep was directed by Barbara Peeters (who subsequently tried to distance herself from the exploitative finished product). There’s a peppy musical score composed by James Horner in his debut.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 251 – Killer Crocodile

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A Killer Crocodile creature feature, that’s Italian to boot? No need to say that twice. We’re there. As straightforward a concept as you could possibly devise, this one is about…you guessed it…a killer crocodile (lest you thought this was a rom-com about a shy teacher who meets a beau in fin-du-siècle Paris).

In an undisclosed location (wherever was cheapest to film in 1989) Killer Crocodile was directed by the multi-named Fabrizio De Angelis (sometimes rendered as Larry Ludman), an oft-collaborator with Italian genre legends, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci, etc.

An amorous twosome is on a beach. The guy breaks  out a classical guitar and woos his lady friend with song. But Leonard Cohen he is not, and she doffs her top and runs into the water. Bad move. There’s a…well…killer crocodile about.

Radioactive waste is discovered in a swamp: in barrels marked “toxic waste,” so there can be no confusion whatsoever. Ecologists are floating down the river Joseph Conrad-style, collecting samples of river water. And when the body count begins to rise, they surmise that the radioactivity created a monster-sized croc. What a croc!

The film stars Richard Anthony Crenna (son of actor, Richard Crenna) and was followed by an unheralded sequel, Killer Crocodile II, in 1990.

There’s atonal weirdness lost in translation, gobs of bal-peen hammer exposition, a croc that looks like it was constructed as an after-thought for a soap box derby, and a wildly unhinged investigative journalist. In other words, extraordinarily fun.

So, how does this one fare as compared with Lake Placid, Alligator, or Rogue? That’s where you come in, dear listener.

On the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we absolutely love nature run amok movies, aka natural horror flicks. They’re so wonderful, even if they unabashedly rip off the Top Dog of the genre, Jaws.

Send us suggestions for animal attack movies we should cover!

Really Awful Movies: Ep 233 – Backcountry

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People lost in the woods. Common fodder for horror, right? It’s a terrific conceit, and we as Ontarians have a particular affinity for it as there are thousands upon thousands of kilometers of remote green-space in our gorgeous and at times dangerous, province. Backcountry, like any self-respecting horror film, exploits these very real, visceral fears.

Around these parts, the wilderness itself can kill you. After all, the province of Ontario is nearly 3X the size of Germany. It might be tough for a European to conceptualize. We have SO MUCH space, and most of us are populated along a tiny strip by the US border. It’s easy to wander off the trail and be stuck in a precarious position. As what happens here.

Director Adam MacDonald sets the table beautifully with a believable couple, the male half (Alex), an arrogant outdoors man with confidence to spare and his girlfriend (Jenn) more concerned about being safe in the deep, dark woods.