6. IT CAME FROM THE SEA: Some kind of threat from below the brine.

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.