Aquanoids, Creature From the Black Lagoon meets Romper Room

In between her appearances as a cast member on TV's "Romper Room" and her role as The Hallmark Channel's "Pet Lifestyle" Expert for Marie Osmond,  Laura Nativo starred in 2003's "Aquanoids."  In this heartwarming story, Nativo plays a beautiful marine biologist attempting to save a coastal California town from the sea-creatures that ate her mother.  This film is what we get when we mesh several movies together, including "Jaws," "Humanoids From the Deep," "Piranha," and "Creature From the Black Lagoon."  The strengths of this flick are that it gladly pays homage to these films, and the energetic performance of Nativo as Vanessa DuMont.

The plot:  As the movie begins, two naughty skinny-dippers are eaten by an aquanoid (a creature that looks like our friend in "Creature From the Black Lagoon").  Sixteen years later, the daughter of the eaten skinny-dipper is now a short-short and bikini-top clad marine biologist searching for aquanoids off the coast.  She finds them and flees into town with this warning for the mayor, "An aquanoid, close the beaches now!"  They didn't listen to Chief Brody in 1975, so why should they listen to Nativo?  The mayor passes this cryptic warning off as "...a hysterical female who saw a large fish."  Of course, swimmers, divers and boaters start getting mauled by these aquanoids, but the mayor has pressured the coroner to declare these killings as boating accidents.  You gotta love this coroner, as he dissects these victims he throws on the tunes (polka/accordion music).

As the plot progresses, Vanessa and another bikini clad do-gooder take their scooters (yes...scooters, not car) around town and post signs warning of dangerous waters.  Seeing a threat to the summer dollars of their town, the mayor and his buddy (a developer) then try to kill these two women, but fail several times.  In a scene straight out of "Humanoids From The Deep" the mayor's daughter is raped by an aquanoid and dies giving birth to it's offspring.  Not wanting to let on to the existence of aquanoids, the coroner tells a dumb cop that the dead fetus is just a deformed child.  When the cop is still suspicious, the crafty-coroner informs him that one out of five-million babies look like this. The opportunity for a bad joke here is too inviting.

Will our bikini-clad heroines survive the attempts on their lives and kill the aquanoids?  Will the mayor come to terms with being a grandfather to an aquanoid?  Will Vanessa learn the identity of her real father?  Yeah, I forgot to mention that sub-plot.  Whatever you say about this movie, Nativo is pleasant to look at and delivers a spirited performance.  I just saw "47 Ronin" today, and I guarantee you that her acting abilities top those of Keanu Reeves.  For beach fun during a cold winter, see "Aquanoids."