So there’s a sub-genre of movies–mostly horror–that are fascinating to me in how niche they are: they have an Italian director, usually with American/English actors, and all the filmed audio is thrown out the window in favor of re-recording it in the studio later. Why do this? Some say that because the film will have to be re-dubbed into foreign languages anyway, why not, but it’s still… jarring. This movie is jarring and weird.

Plankton, AKA Creatures From the Abyss, is about a group of “teenagers” who come across an abandoned oceanic science boat, and that’s when the killing starts. Well, first comes the nudity and sex with dubious consent (it’s totally consensual until one of them turns into a fish monster), THEN the deaths. One guy turns into the mentioned horrible fish monster. One girl has her head crushed by the fish monster bursting out from her… skull? The back of her neck? Somewhere. Another girl has caviar oozing out of her crotch while shouting, “My babies! Mommy loves you!” The last girl harpoons herself in the face before turning into a monster, and the last guy survives the ship exploding, but probably not the point-of-view monster fish that gets him right before the credits roll.

This movie is fucking bonkers. It’s somehow lower than Troll 2 on the quality scale. The horrible dubbed audio is only the beginning. There’s a clock that’s supposed to say what time it is as you walk past it, but it’s consistently wrong, even admitting it doesn’t know what time it is at one point. The bathroom has an AI that wants you to fondle yourself in the shower. There’s a surviving scientist with a syringe of… something that seems important, but at the climax the syringe is knocked out of his hand, the fish monster eats his face, and that’s the end of that. I’m having Captain Boomerang’s pink unicorn flashbacks and I don’t like it.

It is, however, hilarious. “Mommy loves you!” has been an in-joke at Movie Night for years, and I would like to propose another line from this movie to be repeated until we all die: “Professor, how long have you been fucking fish?” I encourage you to share it with all your friends and loved ones, as well.

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