A fledgling filmmaker (James L. Edwards) gets his first paid gig making a documentary about a local lake. While shooting scenes for the movie, he captures footage of a slimy monster lurking about the lake. It turns out that this creature is the last refugee from Atlantis, and a mad scientist (Christine Morrison) wants to use it to help her take over the world.
Humanoids from Atlantis isn’t nearly as polished (or as much fun) as writer/director J.R. Bookwalter’s other films like Robot Ninja and The Dead Next Door. He might’ve realized this as well as he used his non de plume “Lance Randas” in the credits. Speaking of credits, even though the movie runs a mere forty-seven minutes, it is still heavily padded with long opening and closing title sequences and a slow-moving opening crawl that sets up the plot.
Although Bookwalter made entertaining and fun pictures in the past that transcended their no-budget roots, this one is more or less shot-on-video schlock in just about every regard. The creature is really cheap too as you can easily spot the seams in the mask and gloves whenever he attacks someone. The acting is bad as well, and to make matters worse, it's all bloodless and tame, so there’s no real reason to sit through it.
Bookwalter thinks that by having characters say shit like, “This is like something out of a bad B-Movie!” every ten minutes or so, it lets him off the hook for making an intentionally bad B-Movie. He even tries for the old “It’s only a movie” twist ending finale to assure the audience that all the acting, effects, and… well… everything was bad on purpose. That doesn’t give him a pass. It just makes it that much more annoying. Oh, and there’s only one humanoid too. I’m surprised the characters didn’t mention that fact as they are so adept at picking everything else out that’s wrong with the flick.
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