La regina degli uomini pesce (1995 TV Movie) User Reviews

THERE'S A MOUNTAIN WITH SMOKE COMING OUT OF IT

[nogodnomasters · 4/10 · 6 January 2019]

Nothing like a bad Italian film for tweens. In the future, the world is destroyed. Our movie follows 2 kids who live in the sewers of NYC and are known as "rat eaters." They find the "Book of Destiny" and take it as it appears to attract rats, their favorite food. Eventually a Mad Max type of guy helps them Escape From New York City and they meet Socrates who transports them to Mysterious Island that has an evil queen and fishmen who look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Their task is to rescue hand full of people and the dog and who the heck knows what else.

The film jumped from one film to another. The script was fairly bad. Not recommended for adults and might be punishment for kids.

Parental Guide: No f-bombs, sex, or nudity. Brief mention of breasts. PG-13 type of swearing, i.e. SOB etc.

Shameful

[JHC3 · 1/10 · 26 October 2004]

This follow-up to Sergio Martino's "The Island of the Fishmen" (1979) is set in the future. Two teenage boys prowl the sewers of post-apocalypse New York and survive by hunting rats for food.

They are illiterate and have only superficial knowledge of the world prior to the great holocaust. The early scenes depict the boys' struggle to escape the ruined city and the warriors who rule it with an iron fist. Once outside, they encounter an elderly man named Socrates who takes them to a pristine tropical island somewhere in the Atlantic or Caribbean. The island is ruled by an evil queen whose oppresses the population and exploits a species of horrible fishmen. The outsiders join a young princess who hopes to overthrow the queen and free her sister and a prince from powerful spells. The film is something of a science fiction/fantasy that is suitable for young viewers.

Sergio Martino has a fairly long resume as both a director and a screenwriter. "The Island of the Fishmen" was set in the nineteenth century and benefited from fairly decent production values and a decent cast. Unfortunately, Mr. Martino didn't leave it at that. "The Fishmen and Their Queen" does not qualify as a sequel. Instead, it is a fragment of a film that fills in gaps through the shameful use of re-edited footage from two previous Martino films: "2019: After the Fall of New York" (1983) and the first fishmen film. The acting is horrible, the storyline is implausible and juvenile, and the final result is boring. Though evidently intended for teenage viewers, the film is so bad on so many levels that it seems to lack appeal for even the target audience. For fans of Martino's original work, this is one to avoid. For parents who think their twelve or thirteen year olds will like this, look elsewhere.

Belated (and lousy) sequel to "Island of the Fishmen".

[Coventry · 1/10 · 18 November 2005]

I wasn't even aware there was a sequel to "Island of the Fishmen" until I purchased the specially restored DVD-edition of the original, which also loudly announced the world-premiere of "The Fishmen and their Queen" on disc. Hey, at least now we know why it was such a well-kept secret. This is a seriously stupid and useless movie, unworthy of the cool original. I'm actually surprised that Sergio Martino himself is responsible for delivering this incoherent nonsense, because he stands as one of the best directors of Italian horror and he surely knows better than to exploit his own successful classics…or at least I thought he did. The script is never original or adventurous, only tedious and extremely childish. Martino incomprehensibly blends two premises of his previous movies ("Island of the Fishmen", of course, and "After the Fall of New York") and turns it into a light-headed, bloodless fairy-tale/fantasy flick. Two teenagers escape from apocalyptic New York with the help of an insane race car driver (best part of the entire movie) and head to the open sea, along with an old seaman. They arrive on an island where time seemingly stopped, ruled by a ravishing yet malicious queen. The further events taking place on the island are imbecile, infantile and totally uninteresting. The titular mutant fish-creatures are totally irrelevant to the "plot" and they're only shown through re-edited footage of the 1979 original. Most of the filming sets and scenery look impressive, but that's because you've already seen them in the above-mentioned movies. The only new aspects are the attractive female cast-members (Ramona Badescu, Natascia Castrignano), but that hardly enough to make a sequel worthwhile. The poorly written dialogues are unintentionally hilarious and, on top of it all, the film also suffers from a terrible dubbing. The ending is so incredibly lame it even makes Disney's "Bambi" look like a petrifying horror movie. Trust me, no matter how exceptional it may seem to come across a copy of this extremely rare movie…avoid at all costs!

I LOVE IT!

[BandSAboutMovies · 5/10 · 7 October 2021]

Sergio Martino can do no wrong. Seriously, even when he's combining footage from Island of the Fishmen AKA Screamers and 2019: After the Fall of New York into one TV movie, I can't be anything but entertained.

Two teenagers are stuck in the hell that is the end of all things, with radioactive waste everywhere and barely a chance to survive against the horse-riding, masked and completely berserk (and great) Exterminator Warriors. When an old man named Socrates and his magic dog Lampo take them to the island of the fish people - who are ruled by a stunning queen (Ramona Badescu, who also sang the movie's theme song) - everything seems like it's about to get better,

Man, I love the scene where one of the kids waves to one of the mer-men and they wave back in an action that was meant in anger in the original film.

Well, it turns out that the queen has enslaved the fishmen and is trying to destroy a masked dwarf that the kids save along with Selva the jungle girl, whose sister - and rightful queen of the island - has been turned into a wooden statue. That means that our heroes must set free the fishmen and save the transformed ruler.

This movie makes less sense than any other late-period Martino movie and I'm counting Uppercut Man and American Tiger in that. This is as dumb as it gets, ending with a spaceship leaving Earth for no reason other than there was no crane that lowered a god in either of the two movies strip-mined to make this one.

Speaking of American Tiger AKA American Rickshaw, the first time I went to Scarecrow, I wanted to see just how deep their library was. Even before Cauldron Films released the film on blu ray, Scarecrow had it on VHS. That made me believe in them.

Wonderfully bad!

[u-scum · 7/10 · 21 October 2018]

I want to make more of the points hinted at in the previous reviews. Whereas they see certain things about this movie as a negative, I wish to make it clear that, however tedious some folk may find this, lovers of trash cinema may well find something else here. Yes, it is very sad that Martino stooped this low, but, to be fair, many other directors have done the same over the years (Lucio Fulci, Peter Jackson, etc). What I loved about this barmy pic is that it seems like it was scripted by Alan Partridge, or at least the dubbed version anyway. Yes, there is a fair bit of 'sampled' footage, especially in the first thirty minutes, and the new footage of the fishmen shows either some bad recreations or some costumes degenerated through almost twenty years of storage. No, it's not a high point for Sergio, but I enjoyed it for all the wrong reasons. The only thing it did lack was a proper helping of sleaze but I believe it was made for TV so make do with some casual racism and inappropriate teenage love.