Humanoids from the Deep

Humanoids from the Deep is a horror and science fiction film set in a small fishing town on the Pacific Northwest coast. When a new cannery begins marketing scientifically modified salmon, the local waters produce something else entirely: a breed of amphibious creatures with altered genetics. The creatures attack the townspeople, killing men and assaulting women as part of a reproductive drive. A fisherman named Jim Hill and the researcher Dr. Susan Drake join the effort to stop them, while other residents, including the hot-tempered Hank Slattery, react to the mounting violence with suspicion and panic.

The film was released in 1980, the same year as Jimmy T. Murakami's Battle Beyond the Stars and before his later work on Heavy Metal and When the Wind Blows. Barbara Peeters is also credited as director, with a screenplay by William Martin and production by Roger Corman and Martin B. Cohen. The cast includes Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow, Cindy Weintraub, Anthony Pena and Denise Galik among twenty-seven credited performers.

Response to the film has been generally modest. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.7 from around 12,000 votes, and on TMDB a matching 5.7 from roughly 281 votes. A critics' rating of 5.5 from eleven reviews places professional assessment close to the audience scores, with neither group rating the film highly. The eighty-minute production belongs to the low-budget creature-feature tradition of its era.