Alien From The Abyss — Alien From The Abyss (Blu Ray)
Alien From The Abyss is a highly entertaining slice of euro-exploitation pie. The late 1980s film moves sinister-big-corporation-up-to-no-good thriller meet’s jungle adventure. Onto a face ripping ‘n’ gut ripping creature feature in its last half. With more than a few cheesy lines, gunplay, snakes, and a crab-clawed ‘n’ towering intergalactic monster. Here from those fine folks at Severin is a region A release of the film- featuring a new scan of the picture, a few interviews, and an archive doc regarding the film’s director.
Alien From The Abyss( aka Alien Degli Abissi, Alien From The Deep) is a 1989 Italian production- filmed in both the jungles of the Philippines and Italy. The film was directed by Rome-born Antonio Margheriti. Between the late ’50s and late 90’s he had fifty-five credits to his name-these went space opera Assignment: Outer Space (1960), atmospheric chiller Horror Castle (1963), tame Mondo doc Mondo Inferno(1964), action revenge fare Death Rage(1976), gut-munching natives caper Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), gory ‘n’ gritty Namploitation The Last Hunter (1980), and sci-fi/prehistoric adventure Yor: The Hunter from the Future (1983).
The film opens up at sea- as Greenpeace members blond ‘n’ ballsy Jane(Marina Giulia Cavalli), and baseball-capped ‘n’ video camera carrying Lee (Robert Maruis) are nearing an isolated island. Up above them is a chopper owner by the evil Corp that runs the island, and they are shooting down on the pair. they sneak off the boat on a dinghy, landing on the island's coast. We keep getting dodgy stock footage of a volcano that is meant to be on the island. They find a rather creepy ritual voodoo camp in the woods- Lee starts filming, and when a masked face appears you think things may go all Cannibal Holocaust, but it’s just a small local boy who leads them to a small camp. From here they make their way to the large nuclear plant run by the evil Corp, and fairly soon find out & film them dumping nuclear waste in the volcano.
As the first half of the film unfolds. Lee is captured, Jane meets up with slightly creepy glasses-wearing herpetologist Bob(Daniel Bosch). And evil Corp kingpin Col. Kovaks- played by Charles Napier( Rambo: First Blood 2, The Silence Of The Lambs, and The Blues Brothers) raging in the corps control room, as he tries to track down the footage the pair filmed, & control the facility that seems to be going into meltdown. There are also death-defining stunts like jumping from a 100-foot-high chopper into the water, general trudging through the jungle, gunplay & snakes.
In the films, last half an hour or so we find out the plant's issue seems to be caused by something large moving under a nearby lake- and we get some more grainy and atmospheric underwater video footage. And fairly soon faces are being ripped off, limbs are being severed & guts are been squished- as twenty-foot, large crab clawed, and black pipe/ exoskeleton creature is on the roam destroying all it comes across.
The film runs just over the one hour and a half mark. And it’s a decidedly pacy affair- moving from its thriller meets jungle adventure. Onto its spurting red & slightly wacky creature feature second half. The three leads Cavalli as Jane, Maruis as Lee, and Bosh as Bob- are fairly stand Euro cult actors. The standout here really is Napier- who gets angrier/ wound up/ sweary as the film proceeds.
All in all, Alien From The Abyss is a highly eventful & entertaining ride into Euro exploitation, with the films wonderfully blurring 'n' blending different genre tropes/ stealing elements from other films in the way only Italian exploitation can.
Moving onto this recently locked region A Blu Ray. And we get a new 4k scan of the film- this is a nice bright & bold affair. On the extras side we get two new interviews both with Antonio Margheriti son Edoardo- he worked as assistant director on quite a few of his father’s film. The first interview (12.52) regards the film to hand, and the second (13.31) regards the doc he made on his father. The final extra is the doc he made on his father The Outsider(61.00) this is from 2013, and is a great look at the career of Antonio Margheriti- with its title coming about from the director's focus on making films for the British market, which was very apart from many of his peers.
Put simply Alien From The Abyss is a hell of a lot of fun, with its blending of thriller, jungle adventure and gut-ripping creature feature genres. This new Blu-ray from Severin features a classy ‘n’ clean new 4k scan, as well a small- but-nice selection of extras.