Revenge of the Creature (1955) Review

Welcome back to Clayton’s Creepy Cinema! This October, it’s sequel-a-thon, a marathon of horror movie sequels, and first up, I’m going to look at the two sequels to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, which I reviewed in the first year of Creepy Cinema. 

Revenge of the Creature (1955) Review

Creature from the Black Lagoon is my personal favourite from the library of classic Universal monster movies, but it had the fewest sequels of all. Revenge of the Creature begins with a trio of men returning to the lagoon to once again attempt to capture the Gill-man, but this time, they actually succeed. Gill-man is brought back to an aquarium in Florida, where he’s imprisoned, studied, and put on display for the public. You almost start to feel bad for him after a point. 

Revenge of the Creature doesn’t take the often-travelled path of a sequel rehashing the same thing as the original. To begin with, it mimics the original, with people trying to capture Gill-man and succeeding, but then it commits to the storyline of the creature being brought back to civilization, and becomes its own movie, entirely different from the original, save for a few similarities. It’s like the third act of King Kong made into a three-act film, in a way. Gill-man is captured and chained up to the bottom of his tank, and there are many shots of him yanking on the chain, failing to break it, but you know one of these times it’s going to break and he’s going to escape. He eventually does, but that isn’t until much later.

The first part of the film is quite exciting, following the risky capture and imprisonment, but the middle of the film gets a bit dull, with the two leads studying Gill-man, and not much else happening. The two leads are animal experts, and begin to fall in love. These romantic scenes are cheesy and dated, and sometimes punctuated with terrible moments of comedy. Gill-man is shown a lot throughout the movie, which sort of takes away his ability to be scary, but it’s still cool to see him swimming and lurking and attacking people. 

The highlights of the film for me are the underwater photography and the creature scenes. There’s a really great shot of the characters observing Gill-man through an underwater window, and a sea turtle swims in front of it, just before Gill-man swims up to look through the window at them. The film was shot at the real Marineland of Florida, with a special credit thanking them in the opening titles. It’s great to see the creature swimming amid real sharks and fish, giving an added layer of believability (even if it’s obviously just a guy in a rubber suit). 

The human characters are definitely not that compelling, but Gill-man himself is, and once he gets free of his enclosure and rampages about, the film picks up again. Fun fact: this is the first screen appearance of Clint Eastwood, who has a small role early in the film. In Back to the Future Part III, when Marty comes out dressed as a cowboy, and says “Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this”, a poster of Revenge of the Creature can be seen in the background. 

Despite a dull middle, Revenge of the Creature is a mostly

worthwhile sequel. It doubles down on Gill-man scenes and presents a different setting that’s still interesting, but overall, it isn’t as scary or as thrilling as the original.