Theme: Dragon's Child - Iced Earth
The Universal classic monster movies have been more endearing than unnerving since about 1950 at the latest. I can't tell you late entry Creature from the Black Lagoon is any exception, but it's my favourite and the best regardless. The design of the titular Creature, more often referred to as the Gillman, is so GOATed it makes me unreasonably mad that Universal didn't make more horrors based on original treatments over the well-worn sources of Victorian novels and folklore.
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| The Gillman rocks 16-pack abs. Personal trainers HATE him. What's his secret? Click to find out! |
Creature dropped in 3D back when that was cool (1954, and not a year later). While 3D would become synonymous with B-joint schlock and, worse, Avatar (2009), in 1954 it inspired a more kino grandiosity. You don't open a picture much bigger than this:
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| Based. |
We then flash forward a bunch to the 50s, when the good ship Rita explores the waters of the Amazon, where dwells the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)! Tormented!'s Richard Carlson leads the cast beside Julia Adams, who becomes the locus of the Gillman's foreveralone affections. In a curiously poignant sequence, he observes her from below in the act of not-quite-synchronised swimming:
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| Fortunately Julia at no point looks down, prompting you to wonder who's just out of your own field of vision right now and for the next few weeks. |
The most hilariously dated aspect of this movie is the Creature's bombastic leitmotif, which goes (and this is highly technical musical notation) "Dahn-dahn-DAAHN, dahn-dahn-DAAHN", etc. whenever the Creature or, more often (likely to spare the stuntman who played him donning the entire elaborate kit all the time), his hand appears.
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| I'm tempted to make an Airplane!esque parody in which he reaches through people's windows to grab popcorn and stuff, yelling "dahn-dahn-DAAHN" the entire time. |
I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to make a proper R-rated horror remake of Creature that was actually scary. Images like his webbed footprints in the sand seem like they would lend themselves well to found footage, if anyone still makes those, though with the coolness of the costume maybe you'd want proper camerawork and lighting to show it off to its best effect.
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| Working title: The Black Lagoon Project OC DO NAHT STEAL |
Like Bride of Frankenstein, the Creature's story was redundantly extended through two sequels, neither of which are particularly essential viewing and, given that they extend his streak of striking out with human women, seem a bit like piling on. My version would give the Gillman the happy ending he deserves: after being arrested for mauling the explorers who rudely interrupt his daily swim, Ol' Gil is sentenced to life in Seaworld (this is more or less the plot of the second one, if memory serves), but his trainer (Sidney Sweeney) is won over by his amphibious charm and they escape together on the back of that orca from Free Willy, then kill and eat it because fuck orcas, they murder seals for fun.
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| Gamers rise up. |
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