Creature From the Black Lagoon

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Directed by: Jack Arnold
Written by: Harry Essex & Arthur A. Moss
Starring: Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno, Nestor Paiva, Whit Bissell, Ricou Browning

Man, The Creature, despite all of it's many flaws, has a certain charm that allows me to forgive it. I'm not sure that it's necessary to summarize the plot - it's your standard Damzel in Distress monster movie, this time about an aquatic gill-man rather than a giant gorilla.

I remember watching this as a child. I thought it was really stupid, and I hated it. Now I have matured and can fully appreciate all that is Creature. All there is to appreciate, anyway.

It isn't very scary, and the effects are out of date, but it's sweet in a weird way. The Creature itself is kind of cute in it's own special way, and Julie Adams is very good looking for the time. Most of the girls in these types of movies are kind of lame, but she was cool. I guess.

Also, even when I was little, I really liked Richard Denning. I don't know why. I just like him. He was married to Evelyn Ankers (who appeared in such films as The Wolf Man, Ghost of Frankenstein, Son of Dracula and others.)

I also appreciate the incredible swimming skills of Ricou Browning, who also appeared in the other two Creature movies. He had to swim around in a monster suit. I mean, that must be kind of hard, right? He also directed underwater sequences in a couple of James Bond movies, apparently. Good for him. God, I hate that Bond. He's such a little womanizer. Well, I wouldn't sleep with him. (With a possible exception for Pierce Brosnan. And maybe Timothy Dalton. Oh, and Sean Connery, but other than that...).

The film is also quite well shot, and well directed, which make it look not nearly as cheap as it may well have been. I don't know, they could have spent a lot of money on it, but I somehow doubt it.

I'd forgotten all about the sort of weird science-fictiony feel to the whole thing, kind of typical of '50s monster movies. They kept going on about travelling into outer space and crap like that, and pressure, and evolution and fossils and other space-aged things of that ilk. On the flip side, there's that whole thing about God creating the world at the beginning there. Of course that quickly gives way to the world taking millions of years to cool, and things crawling out of the sea, so I can't get too distraught.

Come to think of it, that movie's pretty radical, considering everything.

I hear that their going to remake it in a couple of years. See, that disappoints me. The Creature really only works because it's a '50s sci-fi movie. It would really piss me off if it were anything else. In fact it did. In disguise, mind you, but the disguise was thin. It's basically the same plot as say Anaconda, or even more closely, The Cave. A research team goes down into some mysterious cave (or the amazon river) searching for the fossils of some prehistoric creature or something. I forget the specifics of that movie. It was really shitty. Anyway, instead of fosils they find actually living creatures which kill them and stuff. Same damn plot. It even had sort of the same characters. The guy, the girl, the other guy, the old guy, the guy that's an asshole. Only differance is that it's set in a cave in Romania instead of a river in South America. And the monsters are kind of differant, but that's beside the point.

And to further my argument (such as it is), according to IMDb (my favourite website), they're getting the guy that played one of the monsters in The Cave to play the Creature in the remake. I mean, come on. Can you be any more obvious? I think not.

And for that reason (if the reason is coherant at all), I probably won't go see the remake when it comes out. I don't really have the funds to go see a movie anyway, but I won't whine about not being able to see it. (Actually, knowing me, I'll probably chicken out, ditch the boycott, and want to go see it anyway. I'm a little flaky like that.)

END COMMUNICATION