The Creature From The Black Lagoon

What distinguished Jack Arnold's pictures from mutant spinoffs/knockoffs is even more imperative to sci-fi today than it was in 1954: wonderment. Creature from the Black Lagoon opens with a brief take on the birth of the universe, milky gaseous clouds exploding into one another with a booming "In the beginning..." voiceover so amiably straight-laced it actually seems the opposite of pretentious. Anyone who's seen Arnold's masterpiece, The Incredible Shrinking Man, will immediately recognize this tendency toward cosmic philosophizing, less a feature of misanthropy than an atomic-era ginning-up of the audience in advance of something almost secret—something they've never seen before.

"The record of life is written on the land." By introducing the creature as a force of pure nature, Arnold effectively stacks the deck against his human characters before we've met any of them. With wailing trumpets we land somewhat bumpily in the Amazon, where a sagacious archaeologist, Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno), digs out a bizarre humanoid reptile claw. He links up with a hunky Speedo-wearing marine biologist, David Reed (Richard Carlson), and his fiancée, Kay (Julie Adams), on an expedition downriver after the full skeleton, the whole trip underwritten by Mark Williams (Richard Denning), a square-shouldered, glory-seeking competitor for Kay's affections.



By the time they get back to Maia's camp, his native lackeys have already been torn to shreds. The creature is loose! Arnold cannily withholds a full master shot of the monster for a solid half-hour, emphasizing his scaly legs, his goop-covered feet, and those claws popping out of the water, pawing at quarries and armrests against the same three-note orchestral stinger. Arnold's angles do their best to get rid of him as quickly as they can, but he always relapses into frame, usually at the most inconvenient time possible. Gawky, somber, the monster's power comes less from his alien-ness than from his uncanny humanity—and soon enough, the team refers to him as "the gill-man."

In the lagoon itself, it's another story. There's a silent-movie grandeur to the long takes of Reed and Williams in their diving gear, their faces behind glass while the creature smoothly glides between sunspots. In these sequences, the monster suit looks considerably more realistic than it does above land, which most likely explains why they go on for so long—all in the interest of adding to the monster's mystique. Williams becomes obsessed with bringing its corpse back to the states for gold and glory, while Reed wants to take it alive for research purposes. Harry Essex and Arthur Ross's screenplay has fun wavering between the two men's perspectives, Reed looking foolhardy and naïve as the body count goes up, but Williams looking more and more megalomaniacal in light of his jealousy.

A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills. Though the creature will destroy anyone who stands between him and Kay, who he continually sweeps up in his arms to drag off to do God-knows-where, it's Denning actually forms the movie's (human) conscience. An aspiring romantic stuck in a chiseled man's-man persona, he's all about the kill, as the audience must inevitably be as well. It's still a man's world—or is it? (Steve MacFarlane, Slant)

The Revenge of the Creature and The Creature Walks Among Us are okay follow ups, each with some good production values - location shooting, nice action. But neither really builds on the Creature's character in any substantial way. Revenge is numbingly predictable. The Gill Man is reduced to a goldfish in a bowl getting poked by an electric prod, which incidentally would almost certainly shock everything else in the water too. There are about eight minutes of classy rampage action and the rest is scientific doubletalk, travelog filler and abortive suspense scenes with the creature turning Peeping Tom to spy on Lori Nelson in her bathroom. (Even giant Tarantulas tend to do that over in Universal City). Some scenes, like the one where the Creature swims 'with' Lori and tickles her heel, cover the same ground as the original. The posse that tracks him down at the end isn't very interesting but the nighttime photograpy is. Also, the cast of the first film generates a theatrical smoothness in the dialogue scenes, but most of the dialogue in Revenge doesn't even pretend it's worth listening to - Lori Nelson's offhand explanation of icthyology shows that she can barely pronounce the word.

The top thrills are brief but memorable - a car overturned, a baby menaced, the Gill Man snatching his late night date from the dance floor of a restaurant bar.

By the time of The Creature Walks Among Us Universal was cutting corners and its monsters were relegated to the lowest tier of production. Ambitious fantasies like The Mole People ended up looking like PRC groaners of ten years before. Writer Arthur Ross (reportedly the true auteur of the first film) tailored a cost-cutting sequel with a clever ruse: Instead of another difficult shoot with those pesky rubber full-body suits, Walks uses mostly outtakes from the first two films to show the Creature in his original amphibious form. Then he's surgically transformed into a more easily managed monster with just a head mask, new hands and new feet. A gunny-sack zoot suit covers the rest of him. Voila! Except for a few new shots showing his capture, the earlier full crew of latex wranglers are replaced by one or two guys touching up a couple of hunks of rubber. Any big actor can don the gear, and he doesn't have to stay in an unbearable rubber suit for eight hours at a clip.

So our former Gill-Man is reduced to a shuffling lummox in a sheep pen with a lot of vague new feelings that aren't fully articulated by the script or the direction. The Creature kills a mountain lion as if deciding he's now the protector of wooly rights. Some fish, as they say.

Although it never really gels into a theme statement, screenwriter Ross keys the monster into his simple soap opera plot. Obnoxious big boss Jeff Morrow creates a hostile atmosphere that drives his wife to lure other males into compromising situations. She's played by Kiss Me Deadly's "No" girl Leigh Snowden as a brazen tramp. Halo-pure Rex Reason observes virtuously from the sidelines but apparently steps in to claim Snowden's dance card at the finale. Almost predicting the violent rebellion of The Birds, the Creature observes the cruel human interaction. When he can't stand any more he rips free of his cage to smite the offenders. So he has also become a moral judge as well. Soon he'll be ready for greater things. 

But at least he's integrated into the drama of the movie, and The Creature Walks Among Us has the germ of a solid monster idea lacking in most formulaic efforts. Doubtless this was all made possible simply because the studio didn't care about the picture. You can bet that few top execs sat all the way through it at screenings.

Director John Sherwood made this film and The Monolith Monsters, both good efforts. But by then the studio apprentice system was shutting down and bigger assignments didn't follow as they had for Arnold, who had broken into direction years earlier. Still, Sherwood manages the best-directed scene in the whole trilogy when the Creature invades the mansion house to punish the abusive Jeff Morrow. Excellent blocking shows the monster paralleling Morrow through a series of rooms, and he spots his prey out of the corner of his eye at the same time we do. The Creature barrels through a window to cut off Morrow's escape. The simple action scene is beautifully laid out for maximum involvement.


The ending almost works, but not quite. The escaped monster stands atop a sand dune and decides to return to the sea. We're aware that he can no longer breathe underwater, so he's a goner for sure. But does the Creature know that? Is he going home, or committing suicide? If the final shot of him lumbering past the camera to the surf weren't so artlessly filmed, this could be a truly enigmatic and thought-provoking ending. (Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant)