stevedee

I couldn't get through this movie. The battle scenes are realistic, but that's about all that is realistic. The dialogue is comical, the characters are wooden stereotypes and the melodrama is the cheesiest I've seen in a movie made after the 1930's.

According to this movie, the blacks were all happy living as slaves and loyal to the states the enslaved them, the whites treated the slaves like family, everyone in the south was against slavery and the God fearing confederates did absolutely nothing to provoke a northern invasion.

Now let's get history straight; the southern states rebelled because the nation elected a republican, the south wanted to expand slavery into the frontier territories, the south's entire economy depended on slavery and it was the rebels that fired the first shots in the civil war. I would also mention that based on the numbers of liberated slaves that took up arms against the confederates, I doubt they were as loyal to their states as the movie would have you believe.

I even found fault with the battle scenes. Unfortunately when you use Civil War reenactors as extras, you get a lot of fat old men. I would imagine that not too many soldiers were fat, and at this early stage in the war the rebels were not yet taking old men.

I was a bit disappointed in this film. Based on some of the amazon reviews I read, and Roger Corman's stellar reputation I thought that I would be seeing the creepiest, grossest most graphic `amphibious monsters killing the men and mating with the women' type movie imaginable.

I had a few problems with this film. First of all the whole sub-plot of the conflict between the Indian who wants to preserve the river and the redneck fishermen who want the cannery to be built was completely unnecessary and boring. C'mon, you have salmons mutating into humans and terrorizing a town, isn't that enough? The other problem is that you have a director who gives the whole thing a made for TV look, with absolutely no atmosphere. What you wind up with is a good premise that was ruined with poor execution.

There are some fairly graphic rape scenes between the monsters and the women, although they really just consist of a guy in a fish suit laying on a naked woman as she struggles and screams. What they could have done to make it grosser is have these mutant salmon-men with their ugly fish faces French-kissing the women, or, if they wanted to add a more perverted twist, show the women as enjoying having sex with the mutant fish-men. Anyhow they really could of made much more of that aspect of the film then they did.

The other area for improvement in my opinion, would have been if all the fish-men were about four feet tall like the one shown in the finally. There was something really viscous and scary about that one as opposed to the man size creatures.

I reluctantly put this DVD on the other night, thinking it to be another lame horror film typical of the genre over the last ten years. Boy was I wrong. This film may have some of the creepiest imagery since "Carnival of Souls". In addition to the nightmarish imagery, this film also included an Urban Legend, an intriguing mystery and a twist at the end, all these things kept me completely engrossed in the film from beginning to end.

I did not see the original, so I am only reviewing it based on it's own merits. The plotline does have some flaws but not enough to distract from its overall impact. The fact that the story centers around television and video proves that a ghost story does not have to take place in an "old dark house" to be scary.