As a child in the 1980s I was fascinated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He was creepy and dangerous but still had a kind-of-cute face, he was totally different from vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s monster—and he had a glow-in-the-dark action figure (from Remco). I never saw the movie, however, until I was out of college, when I watched the entire trilogy.

So before starting the Blu-Ray Legacy Collection recently, I already knew the first two movies were good and the third one was a shameful disgrace.

The original movie: Yes, you have to overlook the story’s ignorance of proper paleontology, the absurdity of that fossil hand sticking straight out of the cliff, and most obviously the question of why an amphibious fish-man is interested in a flipperless, scaleless, unclawed female mammal. But if you can do that, it’s quite enjoyable and still more sophisticated than most 1950s monster/horror movies. There’s an actual plot here, with the right mix of creature attacks and interpersonal conflicts and suspense, plus characters having understandable reasons for what they do.

But you can view the scene where the Creature watches Kay swimming, and swims along underneath her, in different ways. You could choose to see it as irrational and foolish, because he should have no interest in a human, or you can choose to receive it with the pathos the cinematography suggests, leaving aside the logic of it and taking the emotion instead. We can’t be absolutely certain the Gill-Man is the last of his kind, although the humans suggest this several times; but it does seem plain that he is alone. Could it be that he’s never looked on any female of his own species (if he hatched from an unattended egg, maybe not even his mother), and this is the first time he’s ever seen a human woman—someone roughly his own size, the same basic body plan (bipedal, two-armed, upright posture) and here she is swimming beautifully, much the way he does, performing pirouettes, turns, and twists in his native element. Just suppose for a little while that human hormones are sufficiently like those of his kind that when the water carries traces of her to his animal senses, his biology recognizes her as female, not male, and he is so lonely and isolated that the evidence of his eyes about her external differences does not matter. He might not think of her as outwardly attractive, and that might be irrelevant.

Revenge of the Creature (movie 2): Well . . . not quite as good as I remember.

One, bubbles from the air-hole in the top of the costume are starkly obvious in several scenes, something I didn’t notice in the first film (even though I’ve heard people mock that very thing).

Two, I was bugged by the way they put the Gill-Man in a tank full of saltwater fish (like sharks) and had him swim in the ocean, since the first film was very explicit that a branch of the Amazon River came to a dead end in the Black Lagoon, meaning it was not a saltwater lagoon (the word lagoon can be used of both saltwater and freshwater bodies). Not to mention that the creature was originally seen upstream along the Amazon, and followed the boat into the Black Lagoon.

Three, not only does the Gill-Man become obsessed with a human woman, he only wants this exact woman and inexplicably manages to track her to her hotel after he runs off from the sea-quarium where he’s been in a tank since he arrived unconscious in Florida.

Revenge of the Creature has its problems, but it’s still a legitimate sequel, and again much better than most 1950s monster/horror movies.

Both of the first two movies deserve credit for showing us intelligent, articulate, capable, and (mostly) brave scientist women pursuing more than just romance. (Although Kay’s job plays such a small role in the first movie you might forget it once they’re on the boat.) I’m sure it’s an attempt to appeal to male audiences more than a desire to reject stereotypes, but they effectively shut out any suggestion that being smart and determined and scientific is incompatible with attractiveness—or in any way undesirable.

You can fault the movies for still insisting that women need to be glamorously attractive, and for showing these two in swimsuits at every occasion, and yet the filmmakers could have found some other excuse to wedge them into the storyline, but chose to present them as educated and perfectly qualified for the work at hand.

In the second movie there’s a conversation mid-story where the female lead and her fellow-scientist boyfriend note that men don’t have to choose between family and career, but women do. He says, “I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, it’s just a fact.” And she answers, “It doesn’t seem right to me.” Which is never contradicted.

Also of note in the second movie is that the supporting male character, who is clearly more handsome than the male lead and has a decidedly better physique (you see both of them shirtless in swim trunks, sometimes side-by-side), does not end up with the beautiful woman.

Both movies suffer from overuse of the “Look! A creature!” theme (ba-ba-BAAAA!!!), and if I had complete control of the audio track I would also quietly brush away a certain amount of female screaming.

The Creature Walks Among Us (movie 3): With the first two movies there were things you had to overlook, like certain facts and practices of science. For the third movie you need to overlook even more science, along with . . . whatever you liked about the first two.

All right, yes, there are twenty-five minutes of a Gill-Man movie in there: a dive (including obligatory woman-in-swimsuit), shots of the Creature swimming, a hunt for the Creature, an attack by the Creature, and then . . . we’re into some other kind of movie, with forty minutes left. 

And the Gill-Man is gone, changed into something without scales, without claws, without gills, but suddenly bulked up like an NFL player. His face is reminiscent of a peeled Gill-Man, but it’s not really him. If the filmmakers wanted to make me feel sorry for him, they did succeed in that, because the way he’s mutilated in this story is tragic.

I can’t imagine why they would take an iconic look already proven to please audiences and change him so drastically . . . except a desire to milk the title for more sequels without spending so much on makeup and costuming. Which didn’t work, since there were no more Creature From the Black Lagoon movies.

There are no female scientists in Walks Among Us. Instead you’re offered the unhappy wife of a rich man. At the start she appears to be a spoiled, petulant, rebellious wife looking to cozy up to some other man, a woman who married for money and is now bitter about it. Curiously, though, over the course of the movie she becomes increasingly sympathetic as you see what a grade-A jealous swine her husband is, and you begin to realize she’s not on the prowl at all. Then to complicate things a little more, another character goes out of his way to say the husband is not simply jealous but mentally ill (“disturbed” is the word used) and in need of help. So maybe his behavior, foul as it is, is slipping beyond his control, and we can feel some pity for him too—perhaps with the right help he wouldn’t be acting this way anymore and would see how wrong he’s been?

The subplot about this couple is to me much more interesting than the wreck that was made of the monster movie.

All three films deserve high marks for the underwater photography, which was first-rate. In addition, Ricou Browning, the man in the Creature suit underwater (uncredited on screen; other actors, also uncredited, played the Gill-Man on land) deserves particular praise because his swimming was graceful and elegant, and he did it in costume toe to scalp, which must have been horrendously difficult.

And it should not be forgotten that the Gill-Man looks amazing. The visual design, by Milicent Patrick, is intricate, menacing, and decidedly amphibious, while retaining human-ish personality and a face that can be seen as longing, wounded, and enraged, conveying understandable emotions. It’s hard to design a monster face that can carry all that despite having a limited range of actual motion. And then the physical suit was top quality. This was not done on the cheap. The actual costume has the detail and texture of reality, in and out of the water, and is as convincing as a costume can be for a creature you know does not exist. Some air bubbles here, a glimpse of a fold there, the eyes look a little off in some shots? Maybe, but those things last a second or two, and the effect sustained the rest of the time is one of realism. He’s heavy on land and graceful in the water, and the Creature does not look out of place walking around that lagoon or swimming within it.

I’ll always love the character, and I won’t accept the original movie being lumped in with “B-grade” monster movies. I’ve seen plenty of those, and Creature From the Black Lagoon is a considerable step above them.