If a bunch of white jerks invading your home and riddling you with bullets isn’t enough to warrant revenge then I don’t know what it is, and that is the basic premise of Universal’s Revenge of the Creature, the second entry of The Creature from the Black Lagoon Trilogy, where once again a group of idiots are going to tangle with a beast that should have just been left alone.
In this sequel, we find Captain Lucas (Nestor Paiva), one of the survivors of the events of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, once again piloting his boat towards the mysterious Black Lagoon, but this time instead of carrying a group of scientists looking for fossils, on this trip we have Joe Hayes (John Bromfield) as a man who has been hired to capture the Gill-man and is to “Bring it Back Alive” to a Sea World type attraction in Florida called Ocean Harbor, and while there are claims made about this being for “scientific purposes” it’s clear that it's more about making a ton of cash by publicly exhibiting the poor creature than is about advancing science, cause you know, commerce always wins out in these situations. It should also be noted that this movie does not bother to address how the creature survived being filled full of holes at the end of the last movie, but I guess a sequel about finding the Gill-man’s riddled corpse wouldn’t have been all that exciting, though the heroes of this film almost finish off the poor creature before the movie even gets going.
Are we supposed to be rooting for the humans in this movie?
The Gill-man (Rico Browning) is almost killed because our “Good ole Boy” thought the best way to capture a missing link of the Devonian age was by tossing dynamite into the lagoon and giving it a concussion, and though this idiotic plan does work as it brings the creature to the surface toot sweet, it also results in putting it in a coma. This is not an ideal situation because a limp and dying creature would not be considered all that thrilling of a park exhibit, so this is definitely a setback. Lucky for the park investors, once safely back in civilization Hayes is able to revive the creature and soon tourists are lining up to see this marvel of evolution, but like any movie of this type we have a pretty face for the monster to fall in love with and while Julie Adams does not return for this entry we get her replacement in the form of lovely ichthyology student Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson), but we also have animal psychologist Professor Clete Ferguson (John Agar), who arrives at Ocean Harbor to study the Gill Man, and he has also set his eyes on winning Helen’s heart.
This is one truly messed up love triangle.
This middle chapter in the Creature from the Black Lagoon Trilogy paints the Gill-man in a more tragic light, with the poor creature being shot, concussed by explosives and repeatedly tortured with underwater cattle prods, but in taking the story in that direction the mystery and magic that made the original film so compelling was lost as it now follows all the standard tropes found in the other Universal Monster films like The Mummy’s Ghost and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. But the most ridiculous aspect of this film is the fact that the Gill-man is somehow able to track Helen to her motel room and then later abduct her from a jazz club, which puts it on par with King Kong finding Fay Wray amongst all the other Blondes in Manhattan, and I’m left wondering “Did the Gill-man manage to place a GPS tracking device on Helen?”
Is he a tragic creature victimized by humanity or just a pervy stalker?
Where the film really drops the ball is in the development of its human characters, with Joe and Clete being nothing more than your average two-dimensional heroes and Helen your stereotypical damsel in distress, and while we do get an odd scene where Helen and Clete discuss whether or not she should give up her career in ichthyology and pop out babies, there is nothing in this script that raises any of these people up to a point where we’d give a damn if the Gill-man murdered them or not. This failure is exacerbated by the film’s pacing because even at a mere 82-minutes in length it does tend to drag at times, not helped by all the “Fun at Sea World” footage that adds nothing to the proceedings and comes across more as a commercial for the Florida attraction than it does something integral to the movie, and while Rico Browning still does great work as the Gill-man he’s not the threatening menace he was in the first film, he's more a pathetic creature with a strong fixation on human women that continues to get him killed, and yes, he dies the same way here as he did in the original, not that this will stop him from coming back for the third installment.
He really needs to join some self-help group to get over his fixation on women.
Stray Observations:
• Five people lost their lives during the expedition to the Black Lagoon in the previous movie, yet in this sequel, we find Captain Lucas once again piloting his boat to this "region of death" and there is no mention of how much money it would take for him to risk his life again.
• For some reason Joe brought along a classic deep-sea diving suit for this mission but such an outfit is ridiculous for the job, not only does its large copper helmet severely limit one's ability to see what’s coming at you it also gives the wearer absolutely no maneuverability, basically, with that thing on you are a large half-blind piece of slow-moving meat for the creature.
• The Gill-man is placed in a saltwater tank but as he comes from a freshwater lagoon in the Amazon this would not be all that healthy for the creature, and this has me doubting the scientific credentials of our heroes.
• The idea of an aquatic terror being brought to an amusement park would later be revisited in such movies as Gorgo and Jaws 3D.
• Professor Ferguson's theory that a well-fed cat won't kill mice is insane, clearly, he’s never owned a cat because killing for fun is a favourite pastime of pretty much all cats.
• The Gill-man is strong enough to overturn a car which means any underwater fight between the creature and a human should last about three seconds.
• Helen clutching a buoy and then being dragged underwater by the Gill-man has definite Jaws vs Chrissy moment vibe to it, I wonder if Spielberg was a fan of this film.
• The lab assistant helping Ferguson on this silly project about cats is none other than a young Clint Eastwood, in his first onscreen appearance, still, he would get another bit part as the lead fighter pilot who napalms the giant arachnid menace in Jack Arnold’s other 1955 monster flick Tarantula.
“If you’d like, I could napalm this Gill Man for you.”
While making the Gill-man a more sympathetic creature could have resulted in a more interesting movie, with the creature being abducted from his natural environment and being exploited for financial gain, which is an obvious direction for this story to go, sadly, what we ended up with was nothing more than another “rampaging monster” flick, but with a monster that barely rampaged – he doesn’t quite of have the size to properly rampage like King Kong and Godzilla – and the stock company of supporting characters did nothing to elevate the material and even the Gill-man's suit is shabbier looking, with bubbles leaking out of it at inopportune times, and thus Revenge of the Creature is never able to raise itself above its B-Movie status and is stuck in the lower tier of Universal Monster offerings.
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