Easily set in the category of "entertainingly bad" and also a movie from when I was still a teenager, I am simultaneously shocked I had never seen it before, and also not shocked at all because my love of really bad vintage films is a more recent thing for me; I generally didn't like wasting my time on garbage like this when I was in my late teens and twenties (ah, the irony). I mean....the first time I saw Tetsuo The Iron Man in my twenties on VHS I thought it was garbage; now I have that director's entire filmography on my shelf. The more things change.....!
Alien From The Abyss is another low budget "filmed somewhere in the Philippines where SAG-AFTRA can't find them" type of films, directed by Italian hack/auteur Antonio Margheriti (I mean that in the best possible way), Alien from the Abyss is a lovely case of how to make a big budget concept come to life on a shoestring budget, and it actually does an entertaining (if not good) job of it. The story revolves around a reporter and her cameraman, who sneak on to a remote island with an active volcano to find evidence of corporate malfeasance. Specifically, the corporation is disposing of nuclear and toxic waste by dumping it into a volcano.
A tangent! The volcano is a lovely set piece. They have a miniature, filmed from one very specific angle, and any time they want to show the volcano they have someone pick up a pair of binoculars to look at it....always from that same angle, no matter where they are on the island.
So our lead character and her cameraman quickly get into trouble as private goons try to catch them, and meanwhile we have a mad scientist and the corporate bad guy up to no good, then there's a secondary protagonist introduced in the form of a skeevy snake harvester on the island, and somewhere around the halfway point in the movie something happens, and the eponymous Alien from the Abyss awakens in a lake, melting and clawing everything in its path. We also have lots of miniature shots establishing various facilities to be destroyed later, in some glorious miniature set pieces that any fan of Godzilla movies will admire.
The creature is, for most of its run primarily just a long black claw that snakes around causing all sorts of problems. The mad scientist (hammed up by the actor, making for one of the more memorable characters in this movie) has a way of injuring it, but he's ultimately just a delivery mechanism for the protagonists to nab the weapon when he gets mildly bumped and dies. The last sequence in the film grants us full view of the immense alien, which stands twenty or so feet tall and is held up by a crane, a sort of floppy kaiju sized mannequin. Even despite this, the special effect is surprisingly good for the kind of movie this is; it's well worth a watch for this effect alone.
Alien from the Abyss is a bit of a mess, as most movies of this caliber are, but its got plenty of memorable moments and set pieces, and the actors really do give it their all. I watched the Severin Films UHD release of the restored version and have to say it was worth my time. As with all such films, it rests in the category of a solid B! If you are ranking it against actually good movies I'd probably call it a D+, though. But if you want to watch something you might have stumbled across on Saturday late night TV at midnight? B for sure.
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