Review of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) by Edith N — 14 Jan 2008

I think I'm going to have to use the words "festival of cheese" again, here. These movies are delightfully bad, except the first one; its actually very good underwater camerawork brings it just barely above the line between bad and good. It's lovely, and I'm not sure I'm prepared to accept that. I mean, lovely enough so I'm prepared to watch it through a second time to get the commentary, no. But lovely nonetheless.

There is an attempt at a scientific explanation, here, but it doesn't really matter. They throw around words like "Devonian" in a failed attempt to convince us that anyone in these movies actually knows what they mean, but we don't really need them to. Evolutionary remnant? Sure, that works. But so would mutation or alien or magic. All that matters is that there's this creature, see, and it lives in the Black Lagoon. (The Black Lagoon is a section of some river in the Amazon Basin, but that doesn't matter, either. It's somewhere remote and vaguely forboding; that's what matters.) And we get some serious but vaguely dumb scientists and a beautiful woman in a white bathing suit, and look! It's a horror movie, sort of!

The thing is, there's no horror, really. As I've said elsewhere, I'm not easily scared by movies, but still. I mean, would it have been scary to me in 1954, when the first one was made? Maybe. In 3-D, yet. Maybe. But I doubt it. It's higher quality than the Giant Leeches (in that it's not actually a swimming garbage bag), but its repertoire is pretty limited. Even "Hulk smash" is more complicated than this. Here's a hint. Don't bring a known killer amphibian monster to Sea World and give it an open-topped tank that tourists can walk right alongside. This, it turns out, is a [i]bad[/i] idea. (It is also worth noting that, while the Black Lagoon is clearly freshwater, the Creature is swimming in that tank with, like, sharks. Like I said; dumb scientists.) Almost everyone attacked by the thing does something really stupid to antagonize the Creature. Can it help it if it's surrounded by morons?

As I said, though, the underwater camera work in the first one is really very good. I'd like to see how well it holds up in 3-D, but no one ever seems to release DVDs that way. In fairness, I don't know if it's possible to, but I feel as though someone ought to try. Either way, it got credited as "The first underwater movie shot in 3-D," and I can only assume that [i]Revenge of the Creature[/i] was the second. Unfortunately, what is striking in the first one does not seem to be done as well in the second and third, or perhaps it's that we've seen it before, and it doesn't impress as much a second time. But I'm not going to rewatch the first one to find out any time soon, even if it weren't almost overdue. (And I've renewed it twice; no one got around to watching it with me.).

Of some note to anyone who's seen movies in the last forty years or so is, in [i]Revenge of the Creature[/i], a brief and uncredited appearance of Clint Eastwood (nearly ten years before [i]A Fistful of Dollars[/i] and four before [i]Rawhide[/i]) in his first screen appearance, of which I'm sure he's heartily embarrassed. He plays a lab assistant so dumb that he doesn't notice that he has absentmindedly placed a large white rat in his own pocket. Of some note to MST3K fans is a lengthy, credited appearance by Rex Reason. Here (in the third and preachiest installment of the trilogy, [i]The Creature Walks Among Us[/i]), he is Dr. Thomas Morgan, who lectures us a great deal about how stupid people are. (For example, he seems to be appearing in this film of his own accord.) However, we know and love him as Dr. Cal Meacham, really stupid genius in [i]This Island Earth[/i]. Having these two together in one trilogy is . . . kind of alarming, actually. Let us never speak of this again.