A couple of weeks ago news spread around the internet that Universal might revive The Creature From the Black Lagoon as part of their planned Classic Monsters universe (every studio wants their own connected franchises now post Marvel Studios). It didn't seem like much of a news story at the time, full of "mights" and "possibly" and "they're interested in Scarlett Johannson." Scarlett for the buxom conquest, not the amphibious creature of course!
You know the type of "news" I'm talking about. The type we get when there's no story at all yet. But since we're celebrating 1954 next week with the Smackdown, why not travel back in time to the original to see if it's worth reviving at all?
I may or may not have seen this old horror flick as a child on TV but if so I had no recall whatsover so this would be like a first screening. I imagined from the posters that it would be like a watery King Kong, a tragic beauty & beast story. This was quite wrong.
Thoughts I had while screening...
• Rather unexpectedly the film begins with a brief "Creation of the Earth" myth complete with Biblical narration and visuals of explosions, clouds, and an earth-like sphere, followed eventually by more nature footage of stormy oceans and sand.
It's surprisingly easy to picture Terrence Malick at 10 years of age agog at a drive-in in the Midwest when the movie arrived in early 1954. (10 might be the ideal age for this.)
• The initial discovery of a fossilized webbed & clawed hand, prompts an archeologist to axe it right out of the cliff face. Uh. Bad at his job. Aren't they supposed to dust and chisel around those things so as not to damage whatever else they might find embedded in the rock -- like, I dunno, the rest of the creature.
• Cue scary trumpet music. As THE SAME WEBBED & CLAWED HAND, only not fossilized, rises up from the water nearby and leaves long claw marks in the banks. It's alive!
• I didn't realize this was originally a 3-D movie while watching it but now it makes sense there's a lot of this same type of shot -- claw coming at you -- later on.
• Later at the "Instituto de Biología Martima" (that's what the building's sign says) we meet our trio of main characters.
Left to right: Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson) who is ichtyologist which I think is a fancy word for marine biologist?, Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams who kept reminding of a modern actress but I couldn't quite place who. She is also still alive!), and Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning) who is the boss of sorts or at least the one who gets them their funding for their expeditions and research. It is unclear what Kay's job and qualifications are but she is some sort of colleague. Sometimes she appears to have a brain and says something noteworthy but other times she merely gazes at the men as they impart scientific wisdom as if she's never heard such words before. If they're really going to remake this this Beautywill have to have a real job rather than being The Girl.
Kay basically swims and sunbathes while the men work though she helpfully towels them off when they come up out of the water! Since this is a movie, there's immediately suggestions that Kay used to be with Dr. Mark and now she's with Dr. David though they're not married - why does the movie point this out? Either way she wins because both men have minds of scientists but bodies of athletes and look real damn good in swimsuits. Just saying.
• Meanwhile back at camp. The Creature attacks the natives who work for Dr Carl at his camp.
Some of them are hot but they all wear terrible Prince Valiant style wigs and speak in very Movie-Specific bad English. The Creatures primary mode of attack appears to be the grabbing of people's faces and then pushing them down. Somehow this kills them each time.
• If you have brown skin in this movie, you die.
• More beautiful nature footage including lots of crocodiles plunging into the water.
Kay: And I thought the Mississippi was something!
David: It's a winding brook compared to the Amazon.
• After discovering the natives bodies they come up with the idea of visiting the Lagoon and the men dive in to search for rocks. What follows, because we've just realized we don't want to be here all day just recapping a very slimly plotted movie is many many repetitive scenes of the men swimming under water and having skirmishes with the creature.
• He is surprisingly unable to swim much better than the men despite being an amphibian underwater creature. (But we should say this for the movie: the underwater scenes -- which even get their own credited director -- are well filmed, apart from, you know, the 1950s visual effects limitation of a man in an rubber monster swimming around.)
Temporarily trapped. But his beady eyes are not so unseeing.
FIGHT!
Dr David to the rescue part #7
• The final round of climaxes, from a capture (the monster looks actually spooky, immobile and drugged in the boat) to a weird fight with underwater bursts of poison, are actually good entertainment value. But should this movie be remade, it will need more setpieces because this is awfully slim even at 79 minutes.
Savvy businessman or Noble environmental scientist?
Dr Mark is kind of an asshole and going to get them all killed. Dr. David to the rescue part #11
• As for the Beauty & Beast theme, it wasn't as expected. Yes, the monster clearly wants to mate with the girl and doesn't kill her like he kills the (mostly non-white) men. But she doesn't fall for him and the only sympathy directed at him is from Dr. David, the hero, who argues the whole time that he out to be studied in his natural habitat or left alone, not harpooned and chased and brought back to the world as a trophy. In one particularly good burn he accuses Dr. Mark of being more like a big game hunter than a scientist.
Dr David to the rescue part #18
• But if they really want Scarlett Johansson for a proposed remake, they're going to have to totally revamp the Kay role from frequently screaming victim to active heroine. In fact you could fuse the Dr. David and Kay roles and solve the problem. (But I guess that makes your Creature in the Black Lagoon gay?) As it stands Kay's only character trait a kind of mediating goodness between her bickering men, and her only job is to do no job at all while the men work, and provide eye candy for both the moviegoer and the Creature.
• Her defining moment is bathing in a very pointy bra'ed swimsuit for minutes on end without warning the men that she's gone for swim despite seeing crocodiles on the way into the lagoon. Underwater shots of her from the Creature's POV are quite beautiful and make you wonder if Steven Spielberg saw this as an impressionable 7 year old.
[cue Jaws music]
The End.