Creature from the Black Lagoon

Every now and then, TCM likes to run a morning and afternoon of "creature feature" movies, silly horror movies mostly from the 1950s. During one of the recent blocks of such movies, they ran one that's often considered to be a better film in the genre, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Carl Maia (Nestor Paiva) is a scientist doing research work in the upper reaches of Brazil's Amazon rainforest, and it's there that he happens upon a really weird fossil. It's something that's got claws making it look humanoid, but is also obviously an amphibian. Unfortunately, finding the rest of the fossil, if it even exists, is something that's going to take more manpower and more money. So he goes back down the river to whichever big city is the headquarters for the institute that handles oceanography and its freshwater equivalent.

There, he meets old student Dr. Reed (Richard Carlson). Reed is down in South America researching lungfish, and when he hears about what Maia has found, he wants to go up the river to do research of his own and help to dig out the fossil. But there's still the matter of the money to do it. Helping in that regard is Dr. Williams (Richard Denning) and assistant Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams, billed as Julia). Williams also has a company with the money to finance any further expedition, from which he hopes to profit.

After getting back to where they found the original fossil, it's determined that the sediments would have come down the river from a legendary place called the Black Lagoon. So the boat is going to have to set off for that lagoon. But at the same time, a mysterious creature comes out of the water and kills two of the grunt workers in their tent!

In spite of that, the research party goes up the river, eventually finding that there is some sort of "missing link" creature. Reed wants to capture it for research, while Williams wants to make money exhibiting it King Kong style. To do the latter is going to put everybody at risk, however, especially when the creature takes a liking to the lovely Kay....

Creature from the Black Lagoon isn't a bad movie, and it certainly is a cut above a lot of the other creature features of the era. But at the same time, I couldn't get past how bad the guy in the rubber suit playing the Creature looked. That, and all the tropes which you can't even argue this movie helped create considering that some of them reminded me of King Kong. Still, for anybody who likes 1950s scifi, Creature of the Black Lagoon is definitely entertaining, and absolutely more than worth a watch.

The movie's popularity spawned two sequels. Creature from the Black Lagoon is available on DVD both as a stand-alone, and in a set with the other two movies in the series.