Creature from the Black Lagoon Review: Originality? In a Universal film?

Universal had proven that it was EXTREMELY difficult to be original. By 1940, they had pretty much exhausted their bank of original ideas and had begun churning out the same tired plots and characters over and over again. By 1950, they were in the middle of the much ballyhooed Abbott and Costello era. Something odd happened then. Somehow, in the midst of the parody and recycled storylines, a man by the name of Jack Arnold was given the green light to make a movie that was different. Not only would it not take place in England, or The Deep South, or a non-descript Eastern European country (sometimes Transylvania, sometimes Visaria, sometimes neither), but it would present a fairly original story and most impressive of all, a fully original monster. I pretty much doubt that the gill-man of Creature from the Black Lagoon COULD have looked any different, but before the man-fish showed up on-screen in his first film in 1954, nothing like it had ever been seen before. To call the gill-man impressive from that standpoint is selling him short; even though the creature lacks the presence of say, vampires or werewolves, it has become a mainstay of monster-dom and is well-loved in horror circles.

While most 1950s movie monsters were either aliens or atomic mutations, the gill-man has a slightly different origin. It becomes clear almost instantly what that origin is when Dr. Carl Maia, a paleontologist (HINT HINT) digs up a very odd fossil. It looks mostly like a human hand, but with webbing between its fingers. He’s so excited about this discovery that he leaves his dig in the Amazon to head back home to receive more men and funding for a heftier excavation. In his excitement, he fails to notice the very much alive man-fish hand that momentarily creeps out of the water before sliding back beneath the surface of the river.

He returns to his bosses with the fossilized webbed hand and the promise that they could find the entire skeleton of a brand new species if they send back more men. Marine biologist Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson from It Came from Outer Space and Valley of Gwangi) is excited by the prospect. He’s long been looking for some sort of link between the aquatic world and the land-living creatures and has somehow overlooked pretty much every single amphibian in the universe. The boss, however, Dr. Mark Williams (The Black Scorpion’s Richard Denning) wants a guarantee that they will find the full skeleton. Evidently, the hand itself isn’t proof enough for him that there is something out there. Lucky for David and Carl, a promising young grad student Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams’ career is STILL going on, she’s been in episodes of “Lost”), David’s girlfriend, is able to convince Mark that there can be no guarantees in the world of science, but a find like this could mean lots of fame and fortune for all of them. Kay knows just what buttons to push; at the promise of fortune, Mark’s eyes light up and he practically drags the rest of the team on a boat with him. Along with them are another scientist named Edwin Thompson (Whit Bissell of I was a Teenage Werewolf and I was a Teenage Frankenstein) and Captain Lucas (obviously the captain of their boat, played by Nestor Paiva from Mighty Joe Young and Revenge of the Creature).

When they get to the site where Carl found the original hand they are confronted by bad news and worse news. The bad news is they are unable to find the rest of the skeleton and conclude that it must have somehow been washed down the river. The worse news is that something has killed the small handful of crew that Carl had left behind when he returned home for more supplies. At this point, pretty much everyone wants to go back home and return with a better stocked crew. They’ve come to dig up fossils, not to fight any sort of wild animals (although with their spear guns and regular rifles, they seem decently equipped to do so). Mark is determined to leave with something or not leave at all though, and when the captain tells them that the particular tributary they are on terminates in a small lagoon not far from where they are, that pretty much seals the deal; they will continue on in search of the rest of the fossil.

The fact that Mark wants to greedily push forward despite the death of two men while everyone else thinks they should go back home and be happy with what they HAVE so far should clue you in that Mark is going to be WRONG. The lagoon, however, looks so beautiful and isolated that the other members of the team get caught up in what they originally came to do. When you’re surrounded by such a setting, it’s easy to believe you might find the relics of a creature that time and evolution forgot and get caught up in the pursuit of knowledge. David and Mark perform a sweep of the lagoon in a quick look for the fossil. They don’t find it, but they do find plenty of limestone that’s nearly identical to the rock upriver where the initial hand was found and are thus encouraged to continue their search.

While the men all meet below to discuss the next step, Kay goes for a swim. The scene wherein she is taking a dip and the gill-man notices her and swims along with her is incredible to behold and one of the few moments in a Universal horror film that actually inspires some real fear. Imagine going for a dip to cool off (this IS the Amazonian rainforest after all) while, unbeknownst to you, a prehistoric creature lusts after you just a few feet below you, leering at you. You feel a little tickle on your foot, thinking perhaps a fish just brushed by you, but it’s this horrible monster toying with you, touching you to make sure you’re real. He wants you in the same way that King Kong wanted Fay Wray, despite the physical impossibility of such a pair. It’s grotesque and nerve-wracking and I loved every second of it. It also inspires the gill-man to actively try to capture Kay.

The gill-man attacks David and Mark when they go to look for the fossil a second time and while most of us would turn tail and run (at least so we could properly equip ourselves) Mark has a different idea. Evidently, he and David had never seen King Kong, and the two men decide it is in their best interest to bring home the gill-man. Mark’s thinking is dead or alive, but David is fairly adamant that alive is the only way to go. Mark is convinced that a live capture would be a good idea when the gill-man’s skin proves to be a bit too hard and scaly for one of his spear guns to do any considerable damage and Captain Lucas gives them some fish food laced with some kind of drug. The idea is that when the creature eats it, he goes belly-up and they catch him. It only sort-of works. The creature’s physiology is rather different than that of a normal fish and after eating some of the dope, it manages to get onto the boat, and partially make off with Kay before collapsing due to the drug. Of course, his unconsciousness is only temporary and that night, as Mark and David are cataloguing its lair (they found it during the scuffle wherein the creature passed out, and David refuses to leave before taking notes on everything in it because he’s an idiot and doesn’t realize that (A) they already HAVE the find and (B) they can come back and catalogue the lair any time they damn-well please) the gill-man wakes up and escapes, horribly maiming Edwin in the process.

The team has had enough. With one of their friends in a near-death state, they decide it is time to leave. Mark is not convinced however, and as the boss he insists they stay. Too bad for Mark he forgot that Lucas is the CAPTAIN and as such, he says when they stay and when they go and he reminds Mark (with his bowie knife) that such is the situation, and they are leaving. Too bad for Lucas then, that while he may be the captain the gill-man is the one making the decisions on when they stay and when they go, and while everyone was in-fighting, the beast has managed to fell a very large tree across the only exit from the lagoon.

As the gill-man begins picking off the team one by one, David tries rather unsuccessfully to move the tree. He’ll need to work harder and faster though, because the gill-man is growing closer to taking Kay hostage. It’s a fight to the finish between man and beast and only Kay is relatively safe from the threat of death. Unfortunately, should David and the team fail to loosen the tree and get them the hell out of the Black Lagoon, a much worse fate than death awaits her in the arms of the gill-man…

WOW. If you’re even remotely a fan of monster movies and  you have yet to see Creature from the Black Lagoon, stop what you’re doing right now (yes, even if you’re at work, take a sick day or just tell the boss jellydonut said it was ok), get your hands on this and watch it. The pacing, usually fairly terrible in 50s films (there’s typically some sort of massive lull in the middle) is smooth and steady, building throughout the film to its climax, which is actually climactic. Jack Arnold showed the world that underwater scenes could be interesting despite having no dialogue and slow-moving action with the incredible use of his camera here. The acting might not be anything special to write home about (that’s what you get when you need to rely heavily on people trained to work underwater), but the characters all have reasonable motives and only occasionally commit “Oh COME ON!” offenses. Mark is JUST a touch too ready to sacrifice everything in order to kill the gill-man and bring him home, but as the film goes on, we can almost forgive him for that (when one is really committed to something, every hurdle along the way just makes one want it that much more, despite what may happen if that goal is lost). At least the movie doesn’t fly in the face of its own theories like She-Wolf of London, and everyone is appropriately skeptical then faithful from the appropriate impetus unlike the overly skeptical police force of The Mummy’s Ghost.

This brings me to the biggest point in this film’s favor and the one that it most assuredly hangs its hat on, even for people that don’t like any other portion of the film: the creature from the black lagoon itself. In my extremely humble opinion, in the pantheon of Universal’s classic monsters, only Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster and Lon Chaney Sr.’s interpretation of the phantom even come close to holding a candle to the wonder that is the gill-man. It is decidedly inhuman without being unbelievable. The way it gasps for air just like a fish when out of water is just one of the many details that make it so believable despite how fantastic it is. If you consider that the film is 55 years old and yet the creature moves as fluidly and believably as any of today’s CGI creations, it is even more impressive. Suit-actor Ben Chapman (portraying the creature when on-land) was unable to sit for the 14 hours a day he wore the suit and would often stand in the studio’s back-lot pools due to overheating. Ben is typically considered to be THE actor that portrayed the creature and as such was the last Universal suit-actor to be alive when he passed in 2008. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention Ricou Browning (the man who played the creature when in-water in this film, Revenge of the Creature AND The Creature Walks among Us). Browning went on to create Flipper, but he is most remembered for his appearances as the creature, which he does an AMAZING job of in this film, and is still alive

If we can learn anything from any of Universal’s movies that can’t be learned from a book, this is probably the movie where it would be learned. Specifically, we’ve learned that it IS possible to come up with something original. Even if the story borrows somewhat from the mummy films in terms of a beast attempting to kidnap a beautiful girl (sounds a bit like Beauty and the Beast too…), we’ve got a wholly original setting, a monster that transcends time and has no origins as a human being, and a monster design that would set the tone for all gill-men and mermen and fish-men for years to come. We’ve also learned that we can’t help who we love. By all accounts, the gill-man should only be interested in gill-women, but his attraction to Kay is undeniable. It wouldn’t be possible to get away with stating it explicitly in 1954, and it would take a sleaze like Roger Corman to actually come out and say it specifically (don’t get me wrong, I love Roger Corman, but the man is the sleaziest, most exploitative non-porn filmmaker ever), but the gill-man LUSTS for Kay. The worst part to think about is that it might not actually be physically IMPOSSIBLE for the mechanics to work…From that perspective, I think Creature from the Black Lagoon is Universal’s most horrifying monster movie.

It might not be PERFECT, but in the nearly 30 years that passed between Phantom of the Opera and this film, it’s by far the closest a Universal monster movie comes. We’ve got one or two issues of motive and perhaps just one too many outfit changes for Kay (why she’s even wearing a swimsuit in the movie’s final reel when she isn’t planning on taking a dip I have no idea beyond the obvious need to get her into a swimsuit again) but while those few faults keep the movie from being perfect, they don’t at all hamper the ability to enjoy the movie. Final Rating is below and as usual, you can get a full explanation of my ratings system and a full index of reviews RIGHT HERE.

This hub is number twenty-eight in my “30 Hubs in 30 Days (PLUS THREE!) Challenge” where I will be reviewing essentially all the old Universal monster movies (the 30) as well as the very first, the very best and the very worst films to feature ensemble casts of ALL the monsters (PLUS THREE) over the period of just thirty (plus three) days. Who “challenged” me? Nobody…well, unless one can challenge themselves. In that case, I challenged me.