Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

1954

Directed by Jack Arnold
Starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning and Antonio Moreno
Ladies and gentlemen, February is upon us, which means that it's time for some love.  But not the pussy kind.  The kind that also features some red stuff, as we look at horror films that are all about being in love.  With that, it's also time for another segment in tearing back the curtain of this here blog.  Last summer, I was in the planning stages for what I was going to do for Halloween season and there seemed to be only one option - a sequel to the Universal Monsters megareview that I did the previous year.  And then that Empire Pictures box set came along.  Looking back, I'm kind of grateful, since I'd already covered most of the heavy hitters in the Universal pantheon and most of the marathon would have just been sequels to said films.  However, there was ONE villain that I hadn't touched on yet.  And that would be the one featured in the movie in question today.

I WAS already plenty familiar with the Gill-Man and his evil exploits from Revenge of the Creature, the second movie in this series that was lampooned well on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  After watching this film, I was incredibly grateful that this one had 100% less John Agar cavorting around in tiny swim trunks.  Shudder.  This movie...is about 7 times as good as that one, no exaggeration.  Universal was a factory in creating these things, mostly based on classical villains from literature, but they were just as good at creating their own.  The Gill-Man and the Mummy represent.  But I still have no interest in seeing an MCU-esque intersection of all these characters.  Call it glandular.  Yeah, Lick Ness Monster cliche #4 rears its ugly head once again.  Let's get to the description.

The movie starts with the ubiquitous thing that a lot of 1950s horror and sci-fi films hang their hat on - a scientific expedition.  Most specifically, a scientific expedition set in the deep Amazon.  The kind of deep Amazon complete with stock footage of dangerous animals.  Led by Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno), they find a creepy skeleton with a webbed hand.  Foreshadowing alert.  That's essentially your setup, establishing that something is out there in about five minutes of screen time.  Folks, writers used to be a lot more economical.

It doesn't take long for all of the side characters to show up in the form of the various researchers that Maia recruits in this new mission.  Your star is Dr. David Reed, played by Richard Carlson, and he's approximately 171% as likable as John Agar.  Of course, Reed has a smokin' hot girlfriend named Kay, and Julia Adams in 1954 was a sight to behold.  Film-makers in the '50s really were amazing at finding hot, classy women.  You just have to watch a lot of movies from this era to get it.  Does this count as a comeback for the Skeevy Paragraph?  You make the call.  There's also Mark Williams (Richard Denning), the boss of the whole show who Spielberg HAD to have cribbed from when portraying the Gennaro character for Jurassic Park as he immediately is thinking about the financial rewards of the discovery and becomes obsessed with taking the Gill-Man alive.

Yeah, the Gill-Man.  It also doesn't take long for him to show up in this movie, a bipedal fish humanoid who has this interesting little mix of intelligence and malevolence.  There's also a dose of King Kong-style infatuation as he immediately takes a liking to the presence of Kay, and who could blame him?  There's a reason why this movie is in my February Love and Red Stuff series of reviews.  Two of Maia's assistants are the first ones to bite it at his hands just because he can, but the movie actually does have a decent body count for an earlier scary flick.  For what it's worth, Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning took the reins of playing the Gill-Man during the land and underwater scenes, respectively, and do a great job lugging around what had to be very uncomfortable pre-CGI thick rubber suits and seeming menacing in the process.  The thing is definitely a memorable villain.

The climax of the movie takes place in the titular Black Lagoon, which, as a crusty steam captain played by Nestor Paiva (who shows up in the sequel, amazingly) helpfully informs them, has never been escaped from by any human being.  Gulp.  This place is the home of the Gill-Man, and said Gill-Man has taken Kay hostage.  Three guesses as to how this all works out.  Spoiler alert - it involves bullets.

The people behind the scenes at Universal Studios at this time definitely knew what they were doing when it came to crafting big-budget horror films that felt like events, and this is definitely no different.  From a script standpoint, it's almost perfect, with every character that's meant to be likable actually BEING likable, especially Dr. Reed and Kay.  But the movie's best performance is definitely Denning as Mark Williams.  Every horror movie needs at least one dislikable character to give us a "stand up and cheer" moment when the villain corners them, and this flick has one of the best examples of this I've ever seen, no exaggeration. 

Special effects wise, Creature From the Black Lagoon was pretty impressive for its time, especially considering just how much of a bitch water makes everything in relation to filming.  Underwater filming is especially cumbersome, since you need something like 47 divers and wranglers for every actor involved.  I studied and researched that statement for hours.  The only thing that I can gripe about with this movie is that the character of Dr. Maia isn't terribly interesting.  Don't get me wrong; he's there to be the one who brings all of the more interesting characters aboard, but...eh, fuck it.  I can't think of any solid way to put it.  Nobody ever said I was good at this.

For the all-important rating, this film gets a solid *** 1/2 out of ****.  If you're into classical creature features, this one actually has the word "creature" in the title!  Check it out.