a review of 凶煞鱼怪

HOOPTOBER, NIGHT SIXTEEN: This one was a lot grosser than I was led to understand, so I did a bit of reading and learned the meaning behind the two credited directors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoids\_from\_the\_Deep... Apparently Corman thought there wasn't enough sex in the movie as delivered by director Barbara Peeters, who had worked on multiple Corman sexploitation films throughout the 70s, and had hoped to use this film to branch out into other genres. Corman "fixed" this by hiring an initially uncredited Jimmy Murakami (the director of Battle Beyond The Stars) to shoot a bunch of additional scenes depicting multiple female characters getting graphically assaulted and raped by the monsters. These scenes are easy to spot because they look really clunky in comparison to the rest of the film, with the lighting cranked up to show off the extra nudity, while also unintentionally revealing all of the zippers and seams in Rob Bottin's otherwise well-done monster costumes. Prior to the reshoots, the rape plot thread simply didn't exist in the movie, and the fishmen were just mauling townsfolk. Peeters was NOT happy about this at all, asked for her name to be taken off of the film, and was refused. She stopped working at New World Pictures and started directing TV shows through the early to mid-80s. As it is, this is a perfectly competent low-budget "Jaws" ripoff with a lot of similarities to a previous Corman film, Joe Dante's "Piranha", but also a clear influence from the nascent slasher genre, inspired by 1978's "Halloween." Coincidentally, this film also opened exactly one week after one of the most successful "Halloween" imitators, the original "Friday the 13th." The movie doesn't do a lot that's new with either the killer-fish or slasher formulae, aside from a subplot that draws parallels between white settlers stealing land from Native Americans and the monsters invading the town. But all of that gets scribbled over by the reshoot material, and the final product feels about a dozen times more unpleasant because of it.