What are you having for dinner? How about a nice plate of DNA 5?
A company called Canco wants to build a cannery near the small fishing village of Noyo. They have been doing DNA experiments using growth hormones on salmon to make them grow bigger. The experiments backfire and a mutant creature is created that wants to do nothing but spawn and kill its competition. And every dog in town.
Interspersed with fish on women rape scenes are conflicts between a Native American (Johnny Eagle) and some of the town’s people concerning the cannery. The town people want the cannery because it means jobs to them. Johnny thinks they are polluting the waters. Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow) is the head bad guy. He is not above violence toward Johnny or anyone else that wants to stop the cannery.
Directed by Barbara Peeters the movie was tamer until Roger Corman decided it needed at lot more sex. In other words rape scenes. Peeters refused to do them stating that they were gratuitous so Roger brought in another director, Jimmy Murakami, to do the scenes. In the end some of the extra scenes were deleted from the final print but enough were put in that Roger was happy.
The creature themselves are actually quite good. They are slimy looking. With big heads and giant brains, webbed hands, grotesquely long arms and tails. What are they? The theory, according to Dr. Susan Drake (Ann Turkel), is that 3000 of the salmon that were genetically treated with DNA 5 escaped and other life forms feed upon it. Specifically the Coelacanth, a prehistoric fish that had been discovered still existing in the area. The DNA 5 treated salmon caused the Coelacanth to mutate at an accelerated rate until they became humanoid and decided the next step in their evolution was to mate with human women.
I hate to throw that word out but this one is definitely a classic. Titled “Monster, humanoids from the deep” now it’s just lovingly called “Humanoids from the deep”. This is one of Roger Corman’s babies. It stars Doug McClure, and Vic Morrow, and is your basic sexploitation movie. There are a lot of explosions, a lot of human heads being ripped off, a lot of rapes, and of course a lot of female nudity. Everything you would expect from Roger Corman.