EDITOR’S NOTE: Mermaids of Tiburon was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 5, 1964 at 4:00 p.m.
Mermaids of Tiburon —also known in its sleazier, recut reincarnation as Aqua Sex — sits right at the intersection where nature documentary stock-footage aesthetics crash headlong into exploitation softcore, low-budget adventure, and pure, unadulterated cult weirdness. If you’ve ever laid awake at 2:00 AM wondering what Sea Hunt would look like if Roger Corman directed it after spending a long weekend at a nudist resort with Timothy Carey, the universe has answered your prayers.
Our tale begins innocently enough at Marineland of the Pacific. We meet Dr. Samuel Jamison (played with stoic, jaw-line-heavy woodenness by legendary Hollywood stuntman George Robotham, here credited as George Rowe). Jamison is a serious marine biologist, the kind of guy who looks like he measures his life in atmospheric pressure and oxygen tanks. Enter Ernst Steinhauer (John Mylong). Steinhauer rolls up with a massive, extraordinarily rare flame pearl that looks like it was plucked out of a fantasy novel. He claims he pulled it out of the waters surrounding the remote Mexican island of Tiburón. He wants Jamison’s scientific backing for an expedition to see if there are more.
Jamison agrees, but when he arrives in Mexico to meet Steinhauer, the old man has mysteriously vanished, leaving behind a trashed hotel room and an undeniable stench of foul play. Unfazed by the obvious crime scene, Jamison charters a boat to Tiburón anyway. What he doesn’t know is that he’s being shadowed by Milo Sangster, played by the terrifying, wild-eyed icon of fringe cinema, Timothy Carey. Sangster is a cackling, unprincipled lunatic who murdered Steinhauer for his map, stuffed his corpse into a oversized trunk and hired an unsuspecting, happy-go-lucky local skipper named Pepe Gallardo (Jose Gonzales-Gonzales) to haul him and his bloody baggage out to sea.
Once Jamison reaches Tiburón, the narrative engine practically grinds to a halt to make room for what director/writer photographer John Lamb really wanted to film: endless, drifting, hypnotic underwater footage. Jamison dives in and stumbles upon a pod of wild mermaids. Led by May 1955 and February 1956 Playboy Playmate Diane Webber (as the Mermaid Queen), these sirens swim through shimmering underwater archways, flanked by their domestic pet killer shark.
Other mermaids include Gaby Martone (My Tale Is Hot), Cathy Crowfoot (The Girl With Hungry Eyes) and Jean Carroll (The Legend of Lylah Clare).
After Jamison proves he’s a peaceful scientist and not a threat, the Queen leads him to an underwater grotto lined with colossal, set-piece giant clams loaded with flame pearls.
Then, Timothy Carey arrives.
Sangster starts hurling lit sticks of dynamite into the serene waters like an angry cartoon villain, stunning Jamison and sending underwater shockwaves through the mermaids’ sanctuary. What follows is a slow-motion battle of wills involving stolen boat-side fistfights, magnesium flares dropped onto open caches of explosives, Pepe meeting a tragic fate in the jaws of a shark and Sangster chasing sirens into narrow rock fissures with a speargun until his scuba tank runs dry, trapping him inches from oxygen.
The backstory of Mermaids of Tiburon is just as fascinatingly desperate as the film itself. Lamb was an accomplished underwater cinematographer who initially set out to make a relatively benign, visually impressive adventure film. He shot stunning black-and-white 35mm footage beneath the waves, capturing genuinely graceful underwater choreography. There was just one small problem: when the film debuted in 1962, the box office was stone-cold dead. Audiences didn’t want a dry marine biology narrative with a couple of tail-flapping ladies.
Realizing he was sitting on a commercial dud, Lamb went back out to the water with his camera and a handful of gorgeous models—most notably Webber—and shot retroactive inserts. He stripped the women out of their modesty, threw bare-chested footage into the edit and re-branded the movie as Aqua Sex for the exploitation market. Because the original mermaid tails were expensive, cumbersome and hard to swim in without full production support, Lamb had the actresses shoot the new nude scenes wearing standard scuba flippers!
This updated nude cut was picked up by Roger Corman’s Filmgroup and toured military bases across the country.
Watching it now, it’s ponderous, rhythmic and at times feels like a travelogue narrated by a man who took too many pain pills. Which is why I love it. There’s a hypnotic beauty to Richard LaSalle’s haunting musical score paired with Lamb’s crisp black-and-white aquatic photography. Long stretches of the film pass without dialogue, just dreamlike drifting through underwater kelp forests, sunbeams cutting through glassy waves and models gliding past giant clams. And whenever the softcore dreaminess threatens to put you to sleep, Timothy Carey shows up with a box of explosives.
Carey is the chaotic evil counterweight to the film’s serene, dreamlike tone. Watching him snarl, sweat, and wave lit flares around open gunpowder on a tiny wooden boat is worth the price of admission alone. He operates in a completely different movie than everyone else and the film is infinitely better for it.
You can watch this on Fawesome.
