"The Creature Walks Among Us" (1956) d/ John Sherwood

We'll wrap up the Black Lagoon trilogy reviews tonight with my least favorite of the series, the third and final chapter to date, and the only one with a 3D release not bestowed upon it. Ricou Browning handles the underwater Gill-man duties once again, which only last about thirty-five minutes or so, before Don Megowan takes over on land, not terrorizing an entirely new cast of characters that includes Jeff Morrow of This Island Earth (1955) fame, and his co-star from that movie, Rex Reason, as well as Cheesecake from Kiss Me Deadly (1955) herself, Leigh Snowden, as the hot blonde bod in a one-piece that likes to smoke cigarettes, play guitar, and shoot sharks from the side of a boat.


"As we're ascending to the surface, you may feel a bit of a prick."
This time around, the amibitious Dr. Barton (Jeff Morrow) has assembled a team of scientists and adventurers to travel to the Florida Everglades, where the fabled Gill-Man is reported to have clawed up a fisherman, only Barton won't be satisfied simply conditioning the creature with cattle prod electricity up the ass, he wants to speed up evolution itself, and bring the homicidal amphibian up onto dry land. Dr. Morgan (Rex Reason) and the red-blooded Jed Grant (Gregg Palmer) want to help the chain smoking scientist realize his goals, except that he's brought along his frustrated young dish of a platinum blonde wife, Marcia (Leigh Snowden), for the expedition. When she's not laughingly introducing nearby sharks to hot lead death from the deck with a smoke dangling from her lip, she's diving with the boys in a sheer white bathing suit, just to get away from her hothead husband who doesn't trust her around anybody. Oh yeah, there's a Gill-Man out there scoping from the murky depths, too. And this troubled dame looks like she's right up his alley.


"You wretched air breathers had no idea I was Hindu..."
When the Gill-Man finally attacks their night boat, he's hit with a flurry of harpoons and unwittingly sets himself on fire with a gasoline can. The men bring him back to the ship, where they cover his third degree burns with gauze bandages, only to find that underneath his badly singed gills is a layer of human flesh. He's also got a pair of air-breathing lungs that Barton kick starts with an emergency tracheotomy. Fitted up with an impromptu burlap suit, the no-longer-quite-as-gilly-man soon finds that his usual escape into the rolling surf, just won't do anymore, and nearly drowns in trying. With wife and shoddily-dressed specimen under lock and key, Barton returns to his California ranch, where the ex-gill man slam dunks a prowling cougar and breaks the fuck out like meningococcal  meningitis when the covetous doctor brains the wisecracking flesh hound Grant with a pistol butt, and tries to hide his crime in ex-gilly's caged enclosure. In the end, he chucks the scientist off a balcony to his death, and shuffles off to a nearby beach where he can forlornly gaze upon a sea he can never return to.


"The good news, Mr. Tyson, is that the laser removed all of your facial tattoo...but there's also some bad news."
Director Sherwood would follow up his effort here with the even sillier Monolith Monsters a year later.A lot of folks dig the psychological angle this one took, away from the usual car-flipping, wake-splashing chaos that drew audiences in the previous two outings, myself included, but I just can't get around the clunky-looking terrestrial Gill-Man when all is said and done, with FX supervisor Bud Westmore only bothering to provide a head, hands, and feet this time around. It's not like Universal couldn't spring for a whole suit. Though the story is undoubtedly stronger than even the 1954 original in several instances, I find myself losing much interest the second his bandages are removed, revealing a hulking, padded oaf in rags lumbering around, like so much pedestrian horror fare of the fifties. Worth seeing, for sure, just not nearly as fun as either of the first two movies were for me, and because of that, The Creature Walks Among Us earns itself an unremarkable deuce on the scale.


"Congrats, significantly-less-covered-with-gills-man, you've been selected by the Green Bay Packers in the first round of the 1957 NFL Draft."

"Revenge of the Creature" (1955) d/ Jack Arnold

Tonight, we'll cover the 1955 3D sequel to the 1954 3D original (Revenge was also the only 3D feature released that year, coincidentally), the only time in cinema history that's ever occurred, and the first of two sequels spawned by the frenetic enthusiasm that audiences displayed for the Gill-Man at the box office. Jack Arnold returned to the director's chair here, and B-movie hero, Mr. Shirley Temple, John Agar himself, takes the lead, with cerebral blonde, Lori Nelson, appearing as his romantic interest/ Gill-Man bait. Ricou Browning also returns as the Creature, who's undergone a few noticeable cosmetic alterations, but remains ever ready to face palm the nearest unlucky devil with webbed authority.


"You feel lucky enough to light that Bunsen burner...well, do ya...punk?"
Despite the previous year's expedition to the Amazon ending in tragic failure, Lucas (Nestor Paiva) is back in the Green Inferno with a new boat, and a new crew of scientists determined to capture the fabled amphibious monster that dwells in the Black Lagoon, for obvious research purposes, but more so, for lucrative ticket sales at Ocean Harbor, an early Sea World-esque water park, where tourists will pay long green to gawk at the fishy fella from behind protective aquarium glass. The capture in question, takes all of fifteen minutes, thanks to an environmentally sound technique called "dynamite fishing", that leaves the titular Creature in a comatose dead man's float amid hundreds of belly up fish, ready to be exploited, errr, studied in far off,  sunny Florida. Once the experts have walked him back to consciousness, shark-style, with only one meathead casualty (John Bromfield), it's chains and shackle, feeder fish out of metal cages, and Pavlovian conditioning with a nifty cattle prod to the midsection for the new specimen. Ah, those early days of science...


"I hope you've brought your snorkel tonight, darling...", quips Clete (John Agar).
Tired of being labonza-prodded with 'behave yourself' voltage, and being chained to the bottom of the fish tank like an amphibious Kunta Kinte, Gill-Man finally busts the fuck loose like Richard Pryor, amid screaming, terrified tourists, tipping over cars, and generally exacting rampaging Devonian era revenge, before diving into the ocean and swimming home...well, not exactly. Instead, the scaly fiend swims towards St. Augustine, where he does some peep-tomming on Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson) in the shower, but respectfully waits until she's decently clothed again (laying the whack on her improbably-named dog, Chris(!), in the meantime) at a nearby Lobster House bandstand party, before carrying her off, screaming, into the night. Helen's colleague/beau, Professor Clete Ferguson (John Agar), is totes jelly(fish) at the notion of an inter-species interloper, filling him full of lead, and forcing him to repeat his half-dead float from the original picture, in the end.


The Gill-Man(Ricou Browning) can totally see you in your new underthings. And he doesn't much hate it.
Look for the first screen appearance of Clint Eastwood in a cameo as a scatterbrained lab assistant with mice in his pockets. I vividly recall New York station WPIX broadcasting this one in 3D in the early eighties, and being front row and center of the big floor model tv in our parlor, in red and blue glasses, with one hand on the pause button of my Panasonic top loader, to remove the commercials in between. Like many sequels before and since, Revenge doesn't nearly hold up in comparison with it's groundbreaking predecessor, but remains packed with enough nostalgic 50's B-movie monster mayhem to stay entertainingly buoyant on a cinematic ocean of also-ran's. A recommended cult classic that amasses an impressive three Wops, in review, and demands a spot on the shelves of every self-respecting horror dvd/BR enthusiast.


"Only youuuuuu...can make this world seem riiiiight..."