User Reviews

Tirelessly prolific veteran Italian exploitation picture director Antonio Margheriti's cinematic oeuvre is a very mixed bag, running the gamut from delightfully sleazy ("Cannibal Apocalypse") to nice, spooky, dripping with sepulchral atmosphere fright film fun ("The Virgin of Nuremburg," "The Long Hair of Death") to entertainingly goofy sci-fi ("The Wild, Wild Planet," "War Between the Planets") to pleasingly tacky spaghetti Westerns ("The Stranger and the Gunfighter," "Take A Hard Ride") to the unavoidable occasional dud.

This sci-fi/horror/conspiracy thriller sadly constitutes as one of Margheriti's dullest and least satisfying features, mainly because it's crucially bereft of the gleefully trashy verve which distinguishes his more enjoyable efforts. In its place there's no sex or nudity, mild profanity, tame violence, an interminably draggy pace, a wearily drawn-out narrative, and tepid action sequences; in short, everything a solid, rewarding little B-movie needs to seriously smoke is noticeably absent here. The blah plot offers a tediously trite'n'tired mishmash of boringly overused clichés, centering on your standard evil corporation illegally dumping radioactive waste into a dangerously volatile volcano located on a remote obscure island. Two wet-nosed bleeding heart liberal limp dishrag Greenpeace workers discover the pernicious goings-on and spend the rest of the film being hunted down in the dense tropical jungle by the usual assortment of greasy company flunkies. Oh yeah -- and there's a lethal, clawed, slime-drooling, steam-expelling extraterrestrial subterranean creature the pair also uncover and do their best to protect from the conglomerate's vile, greedy clutches. Token semi-name rugged, craggy-faced, firm block-of-granite character actor Charles Napier portrays a typically malevolent nasty army colonel on thespic automatic pilot throughout, wearing a fixed scowl on his puffy, roughhewn mug and grumbling all his dialogue in a deep, earthy, barely audible rumble mumble. Napier's given precious little to do that's worth seeing, an unfortunately malady that infects this dismally dreary clunker as a lethargic whole.

An investigative couple, Lee and Jane, go to an island to spy on a chemical corporation and discover they are getting rid of nuclear waste by tipping it into a local volcano, which might be a mite dangerous. He is captured but she escapes and bumps into Bob, who collects snake venom. They are pursued by the company security men. Halfway through the film an alien, presumably, from the deep, turns up with a snapping claw and starts killing everyone. There are explosions and gunfire but its mainly rather hilarious, particularly the English language dubbing in the version I viewed which doesn't make sense from one line of dialogue to the next one.

The cast does include Charles Napier but even he can't do much with his part as he is reduced to shouting inane lines all the time. The other characters are mostly irritating. It might all be clearer in the original Italian but the plot doesn't really make much sense. Was the alien a result of the chemical company's nefarious activities or did it just happen to be passing by and stop off for a snack? Who knows?

...If compared to "Miami Golem","Alien 2 on Earth" and many other fanta-horror flicks from US and Europe.Dawson mixed with a certain success the war cliché with the alien cliché. More and more he threw in some environmentalist morals, as he did in Indio I and II.And all three aren't bad at all.Great shoot-outs,despite they are often useless as "Predator" 's ones.The Alien is not built by the SFX sensation Edoardo Margheriti-Dan Edwards, it we can note it immediately.The creature moves with some sort of stop-motion, so it's a bit strange that he could kill so easily its enemies. The monster, that many lovers of this film have rechristened "Big Claw" -because the remaining claw is its most seen part on this flick-, is the less valuable feature of the movie.Its end in the volcano was a worthy end. Luckily the effects of its venom are ravaging! The explosion are a must.The actors acted decently, especially Pigozzi and Napier. Marina Giulia Cavalli (Actual Italian TV movie and sit-com main actress) offered also a good acting with her great body.I still love you Mari Julia...Oh God what I would have given to see you wrapped into a topless amazon robe or a military outfit. It's entertaining and violent, very violent.It was partially filmed in Latina, inside Recordati industry.But the biggest part of the scenes were naturally filmed in the Philippines that the late,great Anthony Dawson loved so much.

See this movie,and taste it. It's so funny! 8 out of 10

The true joy of Italian exploitation cinema is that sometimes, you expect a complete ripoff and are instead rewarded with something if not better than the original, then at least different. Shocking Dark AKA Terminator 2 seems like it's going to be one James Cameron movie and ends up being another. Night Killer was sold in Italy as a sequel to Texas Chainsaw Massacre- it was released using that film's Italian title, Non Aprite Quella Porta 3 (Don't Open the Door 3) - and has elements of A Nightmare On Elm Street yet at heart it's a very deranged portrait of a marriage gone wrong and a woman on the verge. One only has to look at perhaps the most successful ripoff ever, Zombi 2, to see how Lucio Fulci took the basic idea of ripping off Zombi AKA Dawn of the Dead yet somehow going further and stranger than George Romero.

Alien from the Abyss AKA Alien from the Deep has a poster that might make you believe that you're about to see one of the many remix remake and ripoff versions of Ridley Scott's Alien (there are a whole bunch in this article).

Yet this movie does what the Italian genre directors do best and get inspiration and then go their own way.

It's directed by Antonio Margheriti AKA Anthony M. Dawson. He made plenty of movies that cashed in on other films' successes, including Codename: Wild Geese (The Wild Geese), The Last Hunter (The Deer Hunter), Hunters of the Golden Cobra, Jungle Raiders and The Ark of the Sun God (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Lightning Bolt (a James Bond-style movie) and Tornado: The Last Blood (Rambo: First Blood Part II). He also made Castle of Blood and its remake Web of the Spider, And God Said to Cain (which inversely was pretty much remade in America as High Plains Drifter and inspired Eastwood's Unforgiven), the giallo Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye, Yul Brynner's last movie Death Rage, the John Saxon shocker Cannibal Apocalypse. And, of course, he made Yor, Hunter from the Future.

Margheriti was the master of lighting, which he needed as he would set up multiple cameras to get shots from every angle, as well as different levels of close-up, giving him coverage faster so he could shoot fast. He was also great with miniatures and, as you can tell from this movie, he seemed to just love exploding things.

Instead of space, this movie is quite earthbound. Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli, billed here as Julia McCay; she was born in Portland, Oregon but found fame in Italian movies like Fashion Crimes and Complicazioni nella notte) and Lee (Robert Marius, Cop Game, Warriors of the Apocalypse) are ecological activists trying to discover why E-Chem is dumping toxic waste into a volcano. Colonel Kovacks (Charles Napier!), the man running the show, tries to take them out with his henchmen and helicopters. Lee gets captured, but Lee runs into the jungle where she meets Bob (Daniel Bosch), a snake farmer who falls for her and gets rebuffed quickly. He literally milks snakes of their venom for a living, a fact that really makes her upset.

While all this is going on, Dr. Geoffrey (Luciano Pigozzi, using his Alan Collins name; if you've seen any number of Italian exploitation you've seen Luciano) tries to warn everyone that the toxic waste and magma are combining to send a message into space that's soon answered by a ball of fire that falls from the sky. Inside that burning bit of cosmic comet is an alien that looks like HR Giger but made from elements you can discover at your local Rome - or the Philippines, this was made there - Home Depot. Don't take that as an insult. I absolutely love the monster in this movie and am obsessed with his gigantic lobster claw.

Just when the movie is getting a little too Romancing the Stone between Jane and Bob - they flirt like no two human beings ever have before, saying dialogue that feels alien and insane like "Don't you touch me, you snake squeezer!" and man, they're either going to kill one another or have the best sex anyone ever has had in a jungle movie that forgets that it's supposed to be Alien - the M-16 carrying bad guys bust in and his trained snakes attack, leaping out all over the place and wasting bad guys left and right. Did I cheer? You know I did.

Keep in mind that the alien doesn't show up until an hour into the movie, which would have upset me when I was young but old me finds that absolutely perfect. And by alien, we mostly just see his oozing black claw bathed in Italian horror lighting and so much fog. Instead of having a cool suit to fight the alien in, like the Power Loader Ripley wore in Aliens, our heroes just have construction equipment. Oh yeah, and a flamethrower, which Dr. Geoffrey delivers just in time to get stepped on by the xeroxomorph.

The word balls gets thrown around like, well, balls and the monster is more like a puppet, plus there's a obvious mannequin death scene as all good Italian movies must possess. Napier is a real life special effect, starting the movie at eleven and going into numbers beyond the charts, eating scenery as if he's Donald Pleasence in an Italian Wendy's.

All hail Italy and let's not forget Tito Carpi, who wrote this, and also was the writer of more than a few other movies that I like, including the Sartana movies, the perfection of Marta, Escape from the Bronx, Sinbad of the Seven Seas, Warriors of the Wasteland and Tentacles. Oh man! And Joe D'Amato's Il porno shop della settima strada, Thor the Conqueror, Rush and Giovannona Long-Thigh.

Franco Gaudenzi, who produced this with Gianfranco Couyoumdjian, was the man who made so many Bruno Mattei movies happen like Desire, Zombi 4, Born to Fight, Night Killer, Robowar, Strike Commando 2, Zombi 3, Double Target and more. As for Couyoumdjian, well, he produced Zombi and Dr. Butcher, M. D.

What I'm trying to figure out right now is the career path of this film's composer Robert O. Raglan, who went from being a Chicago ad exec to the music for a wild collection of movies, from Weekend With the Baby Sitter, The Thing With Two Heads and Abby to The Glove, Grizzly, Mansion of the Doomed, 10 to Midnight, Evils of the Night, The Supernaturals, Assassination, Messenger of Death and more. What an incredible resume! He was paired with Andrea Ridolfi on this.

Man, how can you not be entertained by this? There's a scene where Jane literally does a laundry list, saying "I'm singlw. Catholic. Angelo Saxon. And I don't trust men who milk snakes" which made me laugh out loud. Cavalli is really spunky and cute in this and Margheriti is the least scummy of Italian genre directors as she just teases nudity whereas Mattei would have had her running through the jungle nude and reenacting that worm scene from Galaxy of Terror.

NOctoberween #15 (The Week of Gutter Trash 6): Alien from the Abyss (1989)

(8/10): So here we have one of many ripoffs/cash-ins on the Alien Films, and this is one that is worth checking out, but you might want to exercise patience with it as it takes a bit of time to get the titular alien.

Alien from the Abyss is about a group of people who are trying to get footage of a corporation that is disposing high amounts of waste into a volcano causing high amounts of pollution.

They end up being spotted and one hides the tape but gets caught, two of them get killed and one escapes and is rescued by a man who is living in the jungle in isolation studying snake venom to cure infections and diseases.

She manages to convince him to help her attempt to rescue her cameraman, meanwhile while the corporation is doing studying underwater a diver finds something, that something ends up killing him and then destroying a boat and the dock.

The scientist who works for the company finds a strange object on the shoreline and takes it in for studying as there's a strong possibility that it came from whatever killed those people. He finds that it's otherworldly and that it is nearly indestructible with their technology.

Our two protagonists are venturing through the jungle towards the facility when they feel a huge quake and see that something big is moving underground. They manage to get out and continue towards the building where they rescue the cameraman who has now been a subject of heavy interrogation through torturous means.

They attempt to go back for the tape but the cameraman is attacked by a giant slimy black arm with a huge pincer and then after feeling like the slime from the arm is able to be passed on like an infection he ends up killing himself.

Now it's just our protagonists trying to escape the island alive and shut down the shady corporation, but they have not just the entire company out there but an enormous unidentified creature that leaves nothing but destruction in its wake.

Directed by Antonio Margheriti, this film honestly feels like it's two different movies smashed together; A Corrupt company that has a group of people attempting to expose it and then you have your Alien Ripoff.

The acting and dubbing isn't great and the pace can be an issue, trust me I was even questioning where the alien is and when it's going to get interesting, but when the alien first comes into the picture the wait is actually pretty worth it in my opinion.

The crew finally gets to demonstrate some of their effects, and while the cameraman falling to his death is low key pretty funny as it looks so fake the rest of the effects are, well I don't know how to say it without saying what really made the movie for me.

The gore effects are okay but not the greatest, it looks best when it is more like a pulsating infectious tumour on a character's body, however the effect that stole the show was the alien.

Firstly the alien actually has a pretty cool and unique design, it's somewhat of a mix between a crustacean, a UFO and a giant robot and it's pretty big, possibly even a bit bigger than the Alien Queen. To be quite frank, even though it moves around a bit clunky, which you could just say is the robotic parts of it, it's heavily detailed and I think it just looks sick.

To be honest if you want to watch it, I'm not really one to say skip until the last so and so minutes but exercise patience and maybe even just have it going in the background so you can still watch it but you don't have to put your full attention on it until the last half hour, either way I thought that it was pretty cool once it got going but that's just it, it needs time to get interesting.