Dated, ridiculous and absurd. "Mondo Cane" to modern men's eyes, looks like this. And its subject wouldn’t have place even in the worst sensationalist show of the worst regional TV. But if we try to imagine the 1962 society and the dissemination of information of the time we realize how "Mondo Cane" was surprising and innovative, and why it has so much influence on the world of cinema.

We are in 1994 and the genre cinema is dead and gone for a while. It does not seem to get over it, a certain Al Passeri, a pseudonym of the Italian Alvaro Passeri. A guy who has worked a lot (and as well in major productions) in film as a sculptor and special effects artist, and that one day decides to become a director.
He shoots a few horror films, in spite of his old statement "I don’t like horror movies with bloody effect" but with a jaunty "We talk about the Americans but we must be careful not to romanticize ideas and procedures that we have known since years" . It must be said that these sentences he told to the newspaper “Unità” in 1982, and that after all one in ten years has the right to change his ideas. But the right to make films not everybody should understand his own limits and realize that not everyone has the skill to sit behind the camera.
Passeri doesn’t have these doubts and as mentioned, in 1994 she shot this "Plankton”, His debut. A film outrageously trashy, that for some reason someone tried to arrogate the direction. As revealed in 2010 by Nocturno, Massimiliano Cerchi, an Italian transplanted in USA and director of direct-to-video films, has often tried to “steal” the filmography of Passeri attributing different movies. One thing which alone does not make much sense (Passeri is not Fulci) and that generated a lot of confusion among journalists and audience. Confusion on confusion. Because " Plankton " is nothing that a container of rambling things that strike the viewer heavily since the first images. On a poor script that recalls the angry monsters, Passeri creates a trash carousel, so trash that is nice. Among short flash-back, badly fitted, open images more than gratuitous of tits (there is a girl in front of a mirror that says she should buy a bigger bra), moments with jokes or advice on constipation by a hi-tech bathroom (?) stereotyped horror characters and finally, after a lot ', an (un) healthy splatter.Passeri, we said, has often worked on special effects and the creation of monsters and therefore is normal to think that at least in this aspect we can see something well done. But no. Fake Monsters and plastic fish move with great awkwardness, sometimes in stop-motion and in the company of poor digital effects also for its time. Then there are some weird scenes, as yellow vomit on the lens of the camera, fluids coming out of vaginas and monsters coming in and out from the bodies, perhaps after having had sex (do not miss the orgasm of the monster).
The POV from monster-fish eyes is probably something we will not soon forget and is the symbol of a story about creatures of the deep that get angry y a lot. Five young persons (three women, two men) are having fun in the sea and then wrecked. They find a yacht (?) and they go on it. It’s a super hi-tech, luxury and uninhabited boat. The five are put at ease. The boat is actually a laboratory whose scientists, disappeared, found some archaic sea beings, capable of living out of water, to speak and to possess the humans. The monsters that never miss in a horror movie kill even the guys while they dance, they laugh, and they have sex and promise eternal love. They are joined by the enigmatic figure of one of the scientists of the boat. He is catatonic and he can’t help them. Useless.
A trash pearl this "Plankton" a film that tried to keep floats the genre cinema. But it finally drowned.