Revenge of the Creature

Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Directed by: Jack Arnold
Written by: Martin Berkeley
Starring: John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bromfield, Nestor Paiva, Ricou Browning

In the sequel to Creature form the Black Lagoon, gill-man is captured and removed from his lagoon, to be put in a research centre and experimented on by scientists. Poor gill-man. He retaliates by escaping and abducting a beautiful she-scientist. Naturally, her fiance doesn't appreciate this too much.

The movie's pretty damned funny. I laughed often. The Creature's just so... funny looking. His eyes are weird, especially out of the water. He's kind of pathetic, too. I mean, he suffers a lot in this one. Much more than in the first. They keep doing all kinds of nasty things to him, such as electrocuting him. You can't help but feel bad for the guy.

Still, in that situation, I probably wouldn't go after the girl. That always seems to be his weakness. It was his downfall in the last movie, too. "'twas beauty killed the beast..."

Inferior to The Creature from the Black Lagoon for many reasons, but mostly just because it's a sequel. And they used all kinds of footage from the first one too. It's always funny when they do that.

It has it's good points, though... I think... well, like I said, it's very funny. My favourite part being when The Creature throws a guy against a tree. The guy sort of glides along the ground, as if on strings...

The next best part is probably the screen debut of Clint Eastwood, as some sort of assistant guy, doing something with rats. I wasn't really paying that much attention to the dialogue at that point. I was laughing at Clint's hair. It really amuses me that this legendary, Oscar winning actor/director got his start in Revenge of the Creature. It's just so perfect. He had a talking role, too, which was pretty impressive. It was a much bigger part than the one he had in Tarantula, that's for sure. He was pretty cute, too.

Also amusing was the resemblance of Lori Nelson to Kate Winslett. (Maybe they'll get Kate to play her in the remake. How depressing would that be?). Mind you, Kate Winslett's quite a bit better looking than Lori Nelson (who I would assume is quite old, or dead, by now).

The whole thing was kind of lame, though, and not good lame, like the first Creature, but cheezy lame, like most old-timey horror sequels. The creature spends far too much time on land in this one, and the aquarium isn't nearly as attractive as the lagoon. Still, you get everything you expect from the title. The Creature does do a lot of revenge, and there's just barely enough violence in it to keep me awake. (Though I'm not entirely clear on how the Creature kills people. He sort of just... shakes them to death. I wish I could do that)

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