This is the third and final movie in the Creature series of films that populated the mid 1950s. This one came out in 1956, Revenge Of The Creature came out in 1955, and Creature From The Black Lagoon came out in 1954, so you can see that Universal didn’t exactly let the ideas for sequels gestate any longer than it took to get the rubber Gill Man suit back from the dry cleaners.
In his previous two outings, the monster was last seen at the end of both getting shot, drowned, beat up and left for dead in various watery locales.
The monster doesn’t really do much during his rampages except to grab people, throw them around and growl (in spite of his mask, I mean face, being incapable of any discernable movement), so you can imagine that he’s no match for determined scientists and their ilk what with their drugs, harpoons, and guns
There’s two such scientists here. The good guy doctor and the bad guy doctor. The good guy doctor is Dr. Morgan. We know he’s good because he wants to examine the Creature through observation and friendly questioning and because he doesn’t emotionally abuse his wife.
Dr. Barton is the bad doctor and we know that because he wants to experiment on the Creature and change him physically and because he emotionally abuses his wife.
But why does Dr. Barton want to change the Creature? It has something to do with getting man evolved enough so that he can go into space. Of course, anyone with a lick of sense would know the only way evolving the Creature is going to get man into space is if the Creature suddenly gets evolved into an expert in rocketry that can build a space shuttle or something!
The first part of the movie is spent sailing around the Everglades looking for the Creature. This involves the use of some gizmo that tracks underwater objects as they swim around. So there a few tension filled scenes of the doctors diving around looking for the Creature interspersed with the guys on the boat watching these white blobs moving around on a screen.
I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell one white blob from another, but the dude in charge of the thingamabob said that he’d figured out that the Creature would show up on the screen as a blob that’s about a half a centimeter longer than the doctors. Um, okay, but what if there’s a really long fish or big gator?
I don’t know why the Creature would be hanging around when this boat is making all this noise, but he shows up, gets set on fire, knocks the boat over, gets shot with a drugged harpoon and eventually passes out. Not a bad day’s monster work if you ask me.
They haul his crispy carcass on board the ship and wrap him in bandages. The movie really gets dull at about this time because you know all the swimming chases and rampages are behind us and now we’ll have watch these doctors poke and prod the Creature all the while debating the ethical implications of making a monster wear clothing.
Since they torched the Creature, his gills have been burnt off so he’s having trouble breathing. Luckily, x-rays reveal he’s got a set of lungs just waiting to be used so they do a tracheotomy on him to get him breathing again.
Later that night, everyone is sitting around drinking and celebrating their pointless torture of an endangered species and Barton and Morgan start blathering about what it all means. Morgan tries to be poetic about how man is at a crossroads and it is a choice between “the jungle or the stars.” I didn’t have a clue what any of that had to do with man going into space or with the Creature getting a chemical peel
The Creature makes an escape attempt, but has to be rescued by Dr. Morgan because he can no longer breathe in the water. They dope him up and make arrangements for him to live at a ranch in California. I’m assuming that ranches out in those parts are equipped to handle sea-dwelling monsters or those living arrangements wouldn’t make much sense.
Oh, and they had some clothes made for the Creature out of sail cloth, so he spends the rest of the movie walking around in these ill-fitting, ugly threads that even Frankenstein’s monster wouldn’t be caught dead in!
Once they get the Creature to his plush new digs, the movie is pretty much over. The Creature is penned up in his cage and walks around a lot, looking at the humans whenever they stop to argue with one another. The movie ends following a tacked on mountain lion attack and a rather lame attempt to frame the Creature for murder.
As you’ve probably already guessed, the Creature idea had been played out by the time this uninspired sludge surfaced.
Taking him out of his environment robs the Creature of his uniqueness, reducing him to merely another monster on the loose.
Once he’s in captivity, he’s just a pathetic prisoner, surrounded by so many people with drugs, cages, and weapons that he’s no longer even threatening as a monster.
He also isn’t very interesting in this installment either. Putting ugly clothes on him and changing his appearance strips him of that strange prehistoric fish-man look that was the hallmark of the series. When the Creature finally heads back to the water for the last time, he’s probably doing so out of sheer embarrassment.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
