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Date Posted: 21:39:34 06/19/01 Tue
Author: Griff
Subject: My God! I'm actually posting a review before I said I would! How often do you get chance to do that? Just image such a thing!


CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON


One of the lesser entries in the Universal horror canon - because it’s even more rubbish than the rest of ‘em - Creature from the Black Lagoon may have spawned the inevitable sequels but can’t stretch its thin premise out far enough to fill a seventy minute film, so God knows what the others are like. It has one idea: an amphibious creature swims about in a lagoon. A black lagoon. From then on the writers were clearly stuck for something to happen, because nothing does, and it takes its sweet time about it.

This extremely repetitious and tedious film is replete with the kind of pseudo-scientific babble that had to be crammed into ‘50s SF under penalty of death, in this case absolutely tons of the stuff that threatens to engulf the actors before they set off in search of the hideous gill-man. After an intense and lengthy search for this unseen monster from the dawn of time, which consists of them paddling down a river for about five minutes, the movie hits the repeat button on the editing machine every ten minutes as the creature rises from the depths to attack someone on the boat.

The creature itself doesn’t look too bad, although he’s a bit of an ungainly swimmer for an animal supposedly at home in the water. Hardly the terrifying monstrosity all the characters seem to see, he’s a bit gormless looking facially and it looks like every last second of underwater footage shot was actually used in the film, but design-wise it’s pretty cool. Lots of time is spent/wasted showing us the gill-man flailing about in the lagoon, with plenty of straggly weeds getting in the way and possibly the dirtiest water this side of the toilet in Trainspotting.

The music is the usual overbearing dirge, with an over-enthusiastic composer crapping his pants every time the gill-man makes an appearance and apparently waving his baton around like he’s having an epileptic fit. The shocker music overdoses on ear-splitting “Deeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!” blasts each and every time a webbed hand rises out of the water, which gets pretty boring. Throw in a pert female scientist, the usual argument about whether the creature should be killed or preserved for scientific purposes, the kind of dialogue Whit Bissell is never far away from and a plot that’s kind of a water-logged version of King Kong, and you have a pretty typical genre movie of the period, only without the unintentional laughs.



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