Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Film: Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Stars: John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bromfield, Ricou Browning

Director: Jack Arnold

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

You can see the review below, but my first outing with the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a home-run.  I genuinely liked the movie, not just as a horror fan, but also as cinephile.  The claustrophobia of the lagoon combined with the brilliant underwater cinematography-the movie is a hit, and there's a reason that this movie gets to be housed alongside such monsters as classic as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf-Man.  As a result, I also had high expectations for the film's sequel-after all, Frankenstein had an even better movie the second time around, so what would be true of the Gill-Man, who had two sequels before ending the original run of the Universal Monsters?  Today we'll get to that film (two more movies left in our Month of Horror, though both will be outside of our Universal Monsters canon focus), called Revenge of the Creature.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with the Gill-Man (Browning) being captured from the Lagoon, having lived through the original film despite being shot up by the survivors from the last film.  He is brought to an aquarium where he is studied by psychologist Clete (Agar), and a young scientist named Helen Nelson).  The two fall in love, to the chagrin of both the Gill-Man's keeper Joe (Bromfield) and the Gill-Man himself, both of whom are also in love with Helen.  As part of his escape, the Gill-Man kills Joe, and runs amuck in the city, killing people after being horribly mistreated in the aquarium, and in the process starting to stalk Helen & Clete.  The film hits its climax when the Gill-Man kidnaps Helen, but before he can take her back to the Lagoon, he is found, and shot up by humans as Clete & Helen look on...until, presumably the eventual sequel.

The movie could've been interesting.  Helen's character is sympathetic to the creature, seeing that it is really trapped here, away from its natural habitat, and that sympathy might have been something that would've expanded the film in the way we saw some humanity brought to the Frankenstein creature in Bride of Frankenstein.  It also features the first screen appearance of Clint Eastwood, in an uncredited role as a lab technician (how weird is it that Clint Eastwood's first role was in a random monster movie sequel?).

But Revenge of the Creature is a total failure.  Helen quickly just becomes a beautiful damsel, forsaking anything interesting about her character, and the rest of the men are so boring as to be interchangeable.  The film took the best parts of Creature (the claustrophobia the lagoon, the fear of the water), and totally destroyed it by having humans swim with the Gill-Man unafraid, and by going to the mainland with the creature rather than staying in the forbidding lagoon.  The movie doesn't dwarf my original love (I'm still such a fan of the first movie), but it is a sign that the filmmakers had no idea how gemlike that first film was, and just decided to cash in on the menacing fish face.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death