BEFORE: This is another film like the original "Dracula" that's considered a classic, and I'm not sure how it slipped through the cracks over the years. Why have I never gotten around to this one before? I guess I just had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. These 1950's horror films aren't exactly great dramas, the early creature films just have an air of camp about them, unlike today's horror films that are all about serial killers and people being forced to escape from torture devices and holidays where all crime is legal for 24 hours. Hmm, maybe the 1950's films weren't so bad.
Whit Bissell, who played Dr. Hill in the framing sequences in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", carries over to play Dr. Thompson tonight - talk about typecasting, right?
AFTER: This is another instance where you don't really see the full creature for the first half of the film - but at least here there are about a dozen shots of a webbed hand reaching dramatically out of the water, coming close to somebody's ankle (or in some cases nothing at all) before the camera cuts away. I mean, they really tried to wring as much suspense as possible out of that webbed hand.
The mystery here starts with a webbed hand, too, or at least the remains of one. An archaeologist in the Amazon jungle finds a hand buried in some limestone - and it's a hand like nothing he's ever seen before. He immediately realizes he's got to take this hand to the institute for analysis - because why bother looking for the rest of the body? There's just no chance that any further digging will reveal anything else, I think that's the first thing you learn when you study archaeology - if you find something good, you should stop digging in that spot right away, because chances are you'll never find anything else in the same place.
His fellow scientists at the Institute for Stating the Obvious are all impressed by the find, especially since they all have definitely never seen anything like it before, which is the technical definition of a discovery, so they feel that an expedition should be mounted AT ONCE to return to that very spot that the guy was just at. Again, don't even think that it would have made sense for the guy to just stay there and keep digging, if you think like that you'll never become an archaeologist yourself. Then the scientists realize, "Hey, there are 6 of us here in this very room! We could go on an expedition together!" Note that most of the conversations at the Institute for Stating the Obvious are centered around how many people are in the room involved in conversation at the time.
The scientists believe that the Amazon jungle is a magical place, where somehow evolution has not taken place, so many of the jungle creatures are the same as they were millions of years ago, or represent nature's failed attempts to get sea creatures up on land. And thus we have "The Creature", also called "The Gill-Man" who represents some sort of evolutionary dead-end and is definitely not just a man in a rubber suit, despite the fact that he looks exactly like that. The Creature acts much like your average Frankenstein Monster or zombie, in that he approaches humans in a lumbering sort of fashion, with arms outstretched - either menacingly or not, depending on your own personal rate of speed.
But the Creature has one advantage over those other monsters - he SWIMS. Perhaps he is the last one of his race, because he seems to have a propensity for capturing females in his arms, then diving down to the depths of the ocean with them, bringing them to his underwater cavern. Which raises the question about how many women he's brought down there, only to wonder why none of them seem to survive the trip to get there. Why, it's almost like they can't breathe underwater or something.
The creature tries to take down the crew, one by one, presumably to get to the girl, but the crew fights back with a lantern (kill it with fire!) and then bullets and harpoons. The creature blocks the boat in the lagoon by damming up the entrance with logs, but the crew of the boat has a winch. So technology beats monster once again.
When TCM ran this last year, the evening's programming was hosted by Dennis Miller, who noted that two men played the Creature in this film, Ben Chapman in the above-water scenes, and Ricou Browning in the underwater scenes. Miller snarkily noted that he could see why the "walking" actor might not be able to do the "swimming" scenes, but why couldn't the "swimming" actor do the "walking" scenes? It's a funny joke, perhaps, but the real answer has everything to do with the process of filmmaking, and the fact that Chapman's scenes were filmed in California, while the underwater scenes were filmed by the second unit in Florida. See, it's just logistics.
Also starring Richard Carlson (last seen in "Hold that Ghost"), Julie Adams (last seen in "The Man From the Alamo"), Richard Denning (last seen in "An Affair to Remember"), Antonio Moreno (last seen in "Notorious"), Nestor Paiva (also last seen in "Hold that Ghost"), Bernie Gozier (last seen in "Dream Wife"), Henry Escalante, Ricou Browning, Ben Chapman, Perry Lopez (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Sydney Mason, Rodd Redwing.
RATING: 5 out of 10 menacing music stings
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