Classic Horror 

 

Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Another expedition up the Amazon finds a gill man, subdues it, and takes it to an aquarium.  There it is gawked at by the public and experimented on until it escapes, taking a beautiful graduate student with him. 

Quick Review: While it is questionable to place Creature from the Black Lagoon as a classic monster film, it is absurd to include this one—but I have to put it somewhere, so I'll list it with its predecessor.  This is a sequel, with all the bad things that implies.  What is difficult in the first, finding and then capturing the creature, is done in minutes here.  Then it's a matter of the gill man escaping (ludicrously easy) and again going after a girl just to hold her.  The characters are paper thin (and it's not as if they were Hamlet in the original).  We're also given an interesting view of scientific study.  Apparently, all scientists do is torture their animals with electro-shock and keep them cruelly chained.  Unfortunately, this is not uncommon behavior in our world, but when you've only got one animal and it is under public scrutiny, I think our film scientist would have thought up something a bit more clever.  '50 sexism is also evident (yes, much more than in the first).  Here, they discuss how deep down, women exist only to be subservient wives and mothers.  I'm being kind giving it , but fans of Creature from the Black Lagoon will want to catch it once.  For anyone else, skip it.

It was followed by the even weaker The Creature Walks Among Us.

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