The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) Review

The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) Review

The Creature Walks Among Us is an odd sequel. It marks the last appearance of Gill-man during the black-and-white era of Universal horror films, but it’s probably not the kind of appearance you’d expect. 

Even though it seemed Gill-man was killed at the end of Revenge of the Creature, he’s still out there, and a team is out to capture him once again, this time in the Everglades. They’re led by a disturbed scientist, Barton, who thinks the creature may be the key to humankind achieving space travel…okay? I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion. He’s abusive of his wife, who seems to only be there to wear provocative outfits and entice other men, but anytime she’s with another guy, Barton gets pissed off. 

The first half of the film is pretty much exactly the same as the original. It’s a group of people on a boat in a swampy environment hunting down the creature. When Gill-man finally shows up, it’s a great scene. He attacks their boat and tries to hurl a gas jug at them, dumping gas all over himself, then they throw a lantern at him and set him on fire! He’s incapacitated and captured yet again. This is where things take a strange turn. 

The fire burns off all of the creature’s outer scales, revealing a more human-like (though still monstrous) under skin. They bandage him up head-to-toe, making him look more like Imhotep from The Mummy, but then he stops needing to breathe through his gills and breathes through lungs instead. He begins to recover, so they get clothes for him, and put him in a pen, just close enough to the ocean to drive him crazy. 

For the rest of the movie, Gill-man doesn’t look anything like he used to. He has the appearance of a giant dude with a fish-like head. I don’t understand why they would change his appearance so radically, and not for the better. He isn’t nearly as scary, nor as cool, he just looks like Frankenstein’s monster with his super wide shoulders and clomping stride, not the creature we’ve come to expect. 

This feels like a trashier movie than the previous one. Toward the end, the creature barges in on one of the crew member’s trying to rape Barton’s wife. Barton kills one of the guys who made him jealous, and then he tries to pass it off as the work of the creature, which pisses the creature off, so he kills Barton and escapes back to the sea. It seems fitting that the first glimpse we ever got of Gill-man was on the beach, and the last glimpse is also on the beach, though technically his last live-action film appearance was in The Monster Squad, unless you count last year’s The Shape of Water, which had an extremely similar creature, but I digress. 

In the end, it’s too bad the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy didn’t end on a higher note. It’s not all bad—there’s a bit of decent classic monster action, and I always love the music in all of these classic Universal monster movies, especially this series—but it’s a step down from Revenge of the Creature, and certainly a big step down from the original. I’d say you should probably skip The Creature Walks Among Us, unless you’re a big fan of the original, like myself, in which case you should see it at least once.     

Next up, I’m going to talk about two franchises: Alien, and Predator. There are a few options when it comes to talking about these, option #1: go through all of one series, then all of the other, then the crossover films, option #2: go through them in order of their place on the overall timeline (a timeline which is a little confusing, I must add), or option #3: go through them in order of release date. I’m going with option #3, so tune in tomorrow as I begin with the original Alien!