One year after his first butt kicking, the Creature returned to the big screen in 1955 in Universal’s first sequel to Creature From The Black Lagoon. The Creature tries hard in this one, but he’s given such weak material to work with that even he can’t save this lackluster effort.
It all starts in the Amazon again. The grubby river boat captain is back piloting the Rita and is, along with the Creature, the only returning character from the first adventure in that eerie lagoon. He’s got two scientists with him who are determined to bring the Creature back to civilization to study. The captain is sort of a Greek chorus here, saying stuff like, “the Creature killed five people in the last movie and you want to try to capture him?”
They have come down to the Creature’s Amazon home with a foolproof plan though! They’re going to dump a net in the water. As you can well imagine, that plan is foolproof in the sense that it proved what fools these guys were. The Creature hasn’t survived 100 million years of evolution only to be dumb enough to get caught in a net. He’s not some stupid tuna!
So the scientists go to Plan B. They dynamite the lagoon! It’s not too long before we see the Creature’s scaly butt bobbing up and down in the water, unconscious.
They box him up and Fed Ex him to Florida to some kind of Sea World type park. The Creature is chained up in the bottom of the tank by one of his little webbed feet and throughout the rest of the movie we periodically see the Creature trying to break his chain. I kept thinking, “gosh, I hope he doesn’t break that chain when all those people are at the Sea World type park gawking at him because that would surely cause a panic and stampede and the Creature would probably start throwing people around like rag dolls if he got the chance.”
But then I thought that these scientists were professionals and probably knew what they were doing. I mean, sure they dynamited his home and it only knocked him out for awhile, but that single chain should do the trick. What could possibly go wrong?
In addition to the Creature, there are two human male leads. One captured the Creature in the Amazon. He’s one of those brawny 1950s type who always looks like he’s sucking his gut in. He’s an idiot who thinks he can just jump into the water and battle it out with the Creature whenever the Creature gets ornery. Well, as you may know there is another sequel after this one and do you think it starred this guy or the Creature?
The other guy is a dopey scientist who spends the movie trying to put the make on a woman scientist. He also is there to study the Creature. What’s stupid about all this is that the only studying he really does is he tries the old food and buzzer routine where the Creature gets a cattle prod in the chops whenever he goes for his food dish. What is he trying to prove – that he can piss off a monster?
And they do this experiment constantly in these boring underwater scenes where you’re just hoping the Creature turns that prod sideways on that scientist. To the scientist’s credit, I think he just did all those experiments so that the little lady could help him. “Hey, I’m shocking the Creature this afternoon. Why don’t you put on that sexy 1950s bathing suit and lend me a hand.”
Two weeks go by and the novelty of torturing our green friend wears off so the guy and girl go up the coast and go dancing. Meanwhile the novelty of being chained to the bottom of a fish tank wears off and the snap of the chain you hear signals that a rampage is imminent!
There’s a stampede and the Creature looks a little silly running around the park throwing everyone into the water and making ooga-booga faces at the paying customers. The best part is that the brawny guy who thinks he’s a bad ass goes toe to toe with the Creature once too often and the Sea World type park is suddenly taking applications for the position of Brawny Guy!
The Creature escapes into the ocean and somehow using his Creature superpowers, he locates the hotel where our lovers are staying. He kills the girl’s dog and then watches her as she undresses for a shower. Those two weeks in captivity apparently turned him into the Peeper from the Black Lagoon!
Then he kidnaps her and her boyfriend finds out and there’s the big final chase and the Creature kills some people and the girl gets rescued and the Creature gets shot a bunch of times and goes back into the water and floats lifeless, waiting for filming on The Creature Walks Among Us to start next year.
The movie was not terribly interesting. Most of the movie the Creature was just locked up in his lobster tank and fuming. The humans didn’t ever do anything but shock him and the whole thing played pretty much like a lame version of the first movie.
The Creature is a good monster because he’s humanoid in appearance and is a victim of forces beyond his control so you get some sympathy generated for him, like Frankenstein’s Monster, but then they just slag him through this cheesy monster on the loose script. Has there ever been a monster that’s been on the receiving end of so much abuse? The Creature doesn’t seem to act out of malice, just out of self preservation. Interesting to see because the Creature always gives an affecting performance, but he’s the only standout in an otherwise pedestrian film.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
