![]() There is a point to my reference to drive-in cinemas. It was directed by John Sherwood whose best monster movie was The Monolith Monsters (1957), but that’s another story for another time.Ĭreature From The Black Lagoon, of course, puts as much emphasis on the monster’s terrifying appearance as on its humanity and, in this respect, it is a good example of the decade’s most popular film genre, the monster movie or, as it used to be called at the drive-in cinema when I was much younger, the ‘Creature Feature’. Subsequently the second sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), was not shot in 3-D (the boom was almost over anyway) and is a distinctly minor contribution to the genre. ![]() Unfortunately, the film does not exploit the pathos in the situation of a natural creature locked up in a glass-and-concrete surroundings (a situation better handled in King Kong) and, although directed by Jack Arnold, the sequel is rather second-rate. Eventually he breaks out, kills a man, does a lot of lurking, abducts another lady and is eventually shot. In this the Gill Man is recaptured and exhibited in an ocean park in Florida, where scientists (including a young Clint Eastwood) attempt to teach him to speak. Snyder, and was so successful that a sequel was shot and released a year later: Revenge Of The Creature (1955). The film’s original idea was conceived by screenwriter Maurice Zimm and the screenplay was by Harry Essex, who had worked on It Came From Outer Space (1953), and Arthur Ross. I decided to exploit this fear as much as possible in filming Creature From The Black Lagoon but I also wanted to create sympathy for the creature – or ‘my little beastie’ as we called it.” You know the feeling when you are swimming and something brushes against your legs down below? It scares the hell out of you if you don’t know what it is. Speaking of this sequence, Arnold later told me, “It plays upon a basic fear that people have about what might be lurking below the surface of any body of water. In fact, Steven Spielberg acknowledged his debt to Creature From The Black Lagoon when he made Jaws (1975). In most ways the film is quite conventional but these and other underwater sequences, excellently directed by Arnold, lift it out of the ordinary. The best scenes by far are underwater, particularly those in which the creature swims below and parallel to the oblivious woman, mimicking the lazy movements of her body in what is almost certainly a mime of sexual intercourse. But, just like King Kong, he meets his downfall because of his lust for a woman and, when he dies, we feel sympathy for him as we did for Kong. The Gill Man possesses intelligence and manages to thwart attempts to capture him permanently for study, but he turns the tables on his captors by causing deaths and preventing the others from leaving his black lagoon. ![]() The story involves a team of Amazon explorers (sci-fi stalwarts Richard Carlson, Witt Bissell, Richard Denning and Julie Adams) who discover a gilled man, a missing link in mankind’s evolution. A little overrated perhaps, but it’s still one of the best of the fifties, skillfully directed by Jack Arnold with solid acting, a consistently eerie atmosphere, suspense, and a first-rate monster made up to horrific perfection. Although the effect could not have been created more simply – actors in a rubber suit made by Bud Westmore and Jack Kevan – this memorable creature has become one of the most popular monsters in cinematic history. A humanoid creature with gills and, apparently, some intelligence, it is graceful and swift in the water (as played by Ricou Browning), menacing and ungainly on land (as played by Ben Chapman). The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) was an archaic survivor located in the remote headwaters of the Amazon river. These films insisted that their monsters could really exist in the real world, sometimes as prehistoric survivors in forgotten corners of the globe, but more commonly as mutants created by radioactivity and nuclear weapons.īut the first of the 1954 monster movies was an example of the former group. An interesting thing about the monster boom of the fifties is that the monsters were not supernatural. After 1951 there was a strange gap for a couple of years filled in only by a few low-budgeted horrors like Superman And The Mole Men (1951) and The Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms (1953), but the dam really burst in 1954. The Thing From Another World (1951) made a lot of money and initiated the fifties boom of monster movies – there had been previous monster movies of course, but not many, the most famous being King Kong (1933). The Gill-Man returns to kidnap the lovely Kay, fiancée of one of the expedition, with whom it has fallen in love.” (courtesy IMDB) The explorers capture the mysterious creature, but it breaks free. “A scientific expedition searching for fossils along the Amazon River discover a prehistoric Gill-Man in the legendary Black Lagoon.
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