"When did you start fucking fish?"

Five bright young teenagers decide to go for a ride in a small rowboat on the open ocean. Strangely, they come across an abandoned yacht with a bizarre biology laboratory! Bob and Julie decide to make love on the boat, but radioactive plankton from the lab infects them.

With back-cover copy like that, there was no way I could pass up renting Creatures from the Abyss (original title: Plankton), an Italian horror movie that was made in 1994 but looks like 1982. I expected quality rubber-monster effects, thin excuses for nudity, and bad dialogue, and I was not disappointed.

What I did not expect was the wacky impenetrability of the plot and the characters' motivations. Emotions surge and subside without rhyme or reason: our hero, before anything particularly bad happens, flies into a fish-stomping, beaker-smashing, scenery-chewing rage in the bio lab. ("Carnivorous fish that can breathe on land!? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!?!?") Much later, once everything has gone to hell and demon-fish have started popping out of people's backs and mouths like ichthyological jacks-in-the-box, our heroine pauses for an extended hand-washing scene that includes a good minute and a half of her whining about the water not coming on while the rest of the bathroom is looking like a scene from Poltergeist. ("Yes, I know my friends are turning into fish-demons and the toilet is nigh to exploding, but where's the soap dispenser?") When the inevitable tentacle emerges from the drain and tries to drown her in the sink, her boyfriend bursts in, sees her struggling, and asks her, "What's going on?"

But it's weirder than that. The yacht is equipped with an approximation of Genuine People Personalities: the ultrafeminized winking whale clock on the wall chirps the time every damn time we pass it, the shower flirts aggressively with the characters while they wash, the emergency siren whines that it can still hear footsteps after it has told everyone to evacuate. The fish and half the characters are motivated by the same plankton-induced sex madness (how often do you see that phrase?), which results in more demon-fish tentacle bondage than you might expect. Throughout the movie we're treated to a spooky™ fish-eye camera angle scuttling about on the floor and menacing our heroes' toes, but we never find out what it is. The one actual fish we do see is a small and distinctly wingless halibut-like critter that somehow swoops and bobs through the air, harrying our hero like a little bi-plane from the end of King Kong.

A woman gives birth to caviar.

I still have no idea what was going on with the fish. It had something to do with living fossils, or radioactive plankton, or mass psychosis, or AI run amok. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle, or Sasquatch; who knows? I know the radiation hatch was opened at the end, oh my God no, but as we'd never seen the radiation hatch before it's a little hard to figure out how that fits in. My inner monologue went something like this: "Wait, is the ship in league with the fish? It's contagious? What's contagious? Why is there a skeleton? Hey, didn't he die a minute ago? Why are they doing that? A Porky Pig impression? What?"

Highly recommended.