Amazon Streams: Five Treasures drug up from Prime's Post-JAWS Riverbed (+ AVALANCHE)

The great Sergio came off an entry in the burgeoning cannibal genre (Slaves of the Cannibal God) before making this film for New World, which, in fandom circles, has gotten a bad rap, but that was surely due to bad VHS reproduction (it's a film clearly meant for widescreen); now, on the gorgeous new presentation print, its Victorian era 'aquatic research post'-steampunk Jules Verne-y sets impress and the endless supply of weird monsters (with big pointy teeth) amaze. The cast includes Joseph Cotten (safely in bed where he can't harm anyone, all these ailing old stars lucked out with so many wheelchair and bedridden parts), Barbara Bach (in lots of wet clothes) and Martino's go-to hero, Claudio Cassinelli.

It all begins with a great sequence at a remote beach visited by a Victorian era treasure seeker and his worried young wife, led along by then-perennially scruffy Cameron Mitchell. One look at that gorgeous natural cave formations with the oceans of fog machine fog rushing through the flood lights as ominous atonal synth mashes thudded in warning, and I knew I was hooked like a marlin. The story then moves forward to a prison ship lifeboat helmed by a ship's doctor and a Dirty Dozen style crew of cutthroats. The monsters attack their boat, some make it ashore, and in comes Barbara Bach and her husband, the island's mysterious plantation owner--played by that other Martino mainstay, Richard Johnson. But it's Cassinelli who follows Bach through the day-for-night jungle where he sees her wading into the muck to feed green drugs to a bunch of smitten fish monsters. Dude one sip of that stuff, movie-watching wise, and I'm high as hell.



Martino uses the same stars and--presumably--locale as his also-recommended fun romp The Great Alligator (also recommended, see: Great Monsters of the 70s). Filmed clearly in gorgeous Bronson caverns, Sardinian shores and studio lagoons, it's a quiet gem that is finally getting its due: even Joseph Cotten seems to be awake and Bach's round-eyed ethereality has never been more vivid. We all remember those hormone-awakening poster of her in the pond, the monsters creeping up on her beautiful legs; we figured no movie could live up to that kinky promise, and we turned out to be wrong.

There's a job that genre films need to do, and doing any more than what's expected can either lead to lionization and classic status (ala The Terminator) or the abyss of pretentiousness from which only solid genre pros like can pull a film out of. And like Corman films there's something rare, women. New World has many strong woman characters, playing more than victims and models --they play scientists, journalists, CIA analysts. Pretty women with guts and intelligence are all over New World movies in ways they just aren't elsewhere. Exemplified by Barbara Steele and Mary Woronov, they fill the sails of these films with strong oomph. I'm talkin' about get-up-and-go.

Frye and Wolfe bury the hatchet with some boozin' (that finger Wolfe is waving stands for 'one' as in "I'll have one drink with you and that's it!")

And, well, even if--as a movie--Up from the Depths is terrible, like, say, Corman's own Creature from the Haunted Sea or one of those Asylum films on Syfy during Shark Week, it's still a lark. Longtime Corman scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith directs with a nice leisurely hand, figuring that if he follows the JAWS chalk marks while keeping an eye out for island charm, he'll coast by with a film that barely does a thing. Virgil Frye (yes, that Virgil Frye) does a pretty good Nick Nolte meets Tom Waits impression as the drunkard Tom Waits-ish charter boat captain. Timothy Bottoms is beach boy recruiter - hanging out at the hotel bar to lure over would be fishermen, and treasure divers, promising a wild adventure. Hell, I like that the one tourist guy kind of knows it's a scam, his wife certainly won't let him forget it, but it's affordable, it's a charter boat rental and dive with a lot of pirate ghost story and bottle-passing along the way - i.e. I'd like to charter that boat and drink with Frye and Bottoms while fishing and diving, even knowing the treasure bit was crap. Meanwhile to counterbalance their collective macho cool, balding beanpole Kedric Wolfe overacts as the owner and manager of a a new resort, so determined he'll be a success he all but throws people to the monster rather than admit one exists. But he's way less fun than Hal Holbrook in Jaws. By 1979 that character was a full-fledged archetype, and nearly every movie that followed had to have a guy with a lot of money invested in his beach community or property determined to keep tourists coming in no matter how dire the warnings. In his way, he's necessary for these films to be effective as, without his greed, everyone would know to stay out of the water and that would be the end of the movie. He's important to the food chain!


That's where Susanne Reed comes in - she's the enterprising freelance writer/photographer hired for the publicity (or am I mixing her up with Claudio Cassinelli in the very similar Great Alligator?). Naturally she and beach bum Bottoms hit it off, while Wolfe freaks out more and more, reacting to salty dog Frye like he's the plague. Naturally the intrepid good guys hunt the creature, and eventually there's a contest to kill it, and what follows is a hilariously savage detour into a comedic riff on the early Jaws bit where all the outsiders besiege Amity to shark hunt cuzza Mrs. Kintner's $3000 reward. Griffith gets that we don't ask much from these films, and that we don't much care about consistency of narrative approach. We just want, to paraphrase a Corman film from 1967, to get loaded. The vignettes of various savages, rednecks and so forth all preparing for fish hunting does my old Irish heart a treat.

Of course, it's not very "good" (a stunning 2.8 on imdb), and the ending is a total wash (we don't even see the final battle -there hasn't been a more 'whoops we ran out of $$' rush to cut to the credits since Cat Women of the Moon) but fans of the New World style will forgive it, for sight gag Shop of Horrors touches abound in every termite-chewed corner. This is the New World edition of Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea. And if that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.


And Hey! Guess what else is on Prime? Creature from the Haunted Sea, (above, in original superior black-and-white) with which Depths would make a most excellent double bill. The quality of that isn't great but this looks so clear and lovely you can all but feel the ocean rocking you to sleep.