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

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).

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.
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