“Creatures From the Abyss” AKA “Plankton” was released in 1994 and was directed by Alvaro Passeri. It is an Italian horror film and your basic teens in peril movie. Correction, it’s not basic is wacko.
Five stupid teenagers go out in a rubber dingy. I don’t know why. Who they are really doesn’t matter much since all of them are either dumb, annoying or both. For the record they are Mike (Clay Rogers), Bobby (Michael Bon), Margareth (Sharon Marino), Dorothy (Laura di Palma), and Julie (Ann Wolf). Which is which doesn’t really matter that much either since I’m OK with all of them ending up dead.
Anyway, they stay out in the dingy till way past dark and then they run out of gas in the outboard motor. They try rowing, but it’s dark on the ocean and they can’t see much. Then a rain storm comes up and they start bailing out the little dingy. In the distance they see a huge yacht. They manage to paddle over and board it.
They wander around the ship and discover that it is an oceanographic research vessel. And it appears to be abandoned. There is no one piloting the yacht. The ship has a laboratory, staterooms and is weirdly luxurious, kind of like a pimp boat. The living quarters have silver wallpaper, the bathroom actually has a potty mouth, really it talks dirty to you, and the artwork is X-rated.
In the lab they find strange mutated fish. One of the guys, I think the jerk’s name is Bobby, found some white powder and thinks it is really a drug manufacturing ship disguised as a research vessel. They find one scientist unconscious. He is Professor Clark (Deran Sarafian). He’s sort of alive but both bleeding and foaming at the mouth and pretty much out of it most of the time.
Since there is still a raging storm outside, the kids hang out and drink from the well stocked bar. A couple of the girls check out the kitchen for food. They cook a fish they found in the fridge. One of the girls eats it. During the night she wakes up and runs to the bathroom to throw up. She throws up some weird looking insect-like creatures along with fish bits.
One of the guys, Mike, tries to find out what the researchers were doing. He determines that they found some strange prehistoric creatures in a trench that were thought to be extinct. The one that took down the crew seems to be a variety that is carnivorous and can live out of water. Apparently it can pretty much fly through the air too since one of them comes to life and bites one of the girls in the neck.
Mike does some more research and finds that these fish, when there are no female fish around, turn gay. It also appears that the scientists have encouraged the mutation process and have, it is alluded, been having sex with the fish. (I did not make that up.) The fish started their genetic mutation due to the plankton they were eating. The plankton was contaminated by radioactive waste. It not only contaminated the fish, it made them horny.
The white powder that Bobby found is actually dried plankton. He apparently took some of it. Then he had sex with one of the girls, Julie I think, and turned into a giant mutated prehistoric fish person. She is blissfully ignorant of his metamorphosis until his eyeball falls into her open moaning mouth. At that point I almost gagged. I did scream OMG at the TV.
Then it gets weird.
How was the movie? It was bizarre, gross, creepy and just plain nuts. OK, It’s bat shit crazy. It’s so insane that you forget that none of these idiots can act and that the dialogue, when there is dialogue, is ludicrous. Your brain is busy trying to process what it saw and pays no attention to the lack of plot. There are so many bells and whistles that you could experience sensory overload. It you are looking for a gross-out movie with no real point to it, “Creatures From the Abyss” AKA “Plankton” is the movie for you.
Oh, and there’s also gratuitous nudity.