Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Get ready for this—it’s Sequel Month: The Sequel!

Tasked with putting out a follow-up to Creature From the Black Lagoon just over a year later, producer William Alland, director Jack Arnold, and screenwriter Martin Berkeley (who also co-wrote the Arnold-directed Tarantula) took what was probably the most logical path: if the the first Creature film seemed directly inspired by the voyage to a prehistoric world as seen in King Kong, then a second one should take cues from the New York climax. In Revenge of the Creature, the once dominant life form in a secluded natural habitat is forcibly transplanted to our modern world—rather than a film about entering an unreal world of evolutionary alternatives, it’s about the unreal entrapped by more recognizable surroundings. By itself, this storytelling decision de-mystifies the monster by taking him out of his element and making it a lone aberration interrupting normalcy—but, intentionally or not, the rest of the movie degrades and diminishes it to such a degree that it may be an even more pitiable figure than in the first movie.

Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

Most people seem to accept that Creature From the Black Lagoon is part of the classic Universal Monsters line-up, sitting alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy on home video covers, in theme park attractions, and on twelve-packs of soda and bags of potato chips—but in terms of context and content, it is at a removed from the films of the thirties and forties. Those films carried a certain Victorian literary flair (even when they ostensibly took place in “modern” times), set in a Gothic version of Europe (and maybe some other places) frozen in time, full of old foreboding castles and supernatural curses; the 1950s, often favoured science-based horror, and not the theatrical mad science of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man, but the kind that discovered and unleashed the atomic bomb, or that probed deeper into the prehistoric past or into outer space, and finding signs of man’s ultimate insignificance. In that sense, Black Lagoon is closer in spirit to its contemporaries, the less-commented-upon run of Sci-Fi monster movies put out by Universal that spanned everything from It Came From Outer Space and This Island Earth to Tarantula and even something like The Monolith Monsters. These films were about contemporary scientific thought—or, as close as movies like these actually get to it—and grapple with the idea that the more we learn about our universe, the more strange and terrifying it becomes, which is something a bit different from the otherworldly horrors of older stories.

But Black Lagoon still feels like a bridge between the “classic” monsters, which were gaining a new following thanks to television re-airings, and the new breed of mutants and space aliens haunting horror films—while the style of fifties-style monsters and the “classics” differed, that’s not to say that they were completely incompatible. This movies demonstrates that there are, in fact, many places where the two eras both diverge and meet: while steeped in the modern conventions and trends of the day, it maintains a good deal of the spirit of its predecessors, especially in characterizing its lead monster as an individual, tragic figure as well as a terrifying force. There is indeed a reason why this Creature gets to be part of the gang.

Gog (1954)

We’re in the middle of February, so it’s about time we start looking at killer robots here in Creature Land. Why is February the month for killer robots? Well, some month has to be.

The best way to understand the killer robot phenomenon, and the underlying anxiety about technology that fuels it, is to go back to its early days—Gog was released right in the middle of the great Sci-Fi movie boom of the fifties, as the third in a loose trilogy of films about the Office of Scientific Investigation, all produced by Ivan Tors (later known for producing such animal-themed entertainment as Flipper and Gentle Ben) and directed, sometimes uncredited, by Herbert L. Strock (whose continued career in monster movies included I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Blood of Dracula, and the meta How To Make a Monster.) Gog is truly vintage fifties SF, as it is mostly poindexters in lab coats explaining scientific concepts to the protagonists/the audience, and is also in pure Cold War mode, centring on a technology-heavy project being manipulated by “enemy agents”—from where, we are never told, but I’m sure they expected the audience to jump to conclusions. Interestingly, what that leads to is a movie with strangely contrasting views on our technological future: both something to be concerned about for its possibility of being turned against us and for its inhumanity, but also the solution to our problems, with the killer robots being the clanking embodiment of the former.

A*P*E (1976)

There is a very specific reason why I am writing a post about the 1976 movie film A*P*E (I refuse to type it any other way), and that’s because I have been regularly using an image from it on the Internet for years. I probably had no idea where the picture/GIF of the gorilla suit man flipping us off originated from, but I knew in an instant that it was a perfect visual, one that would provide endless amusement and would have an infinite number of applications in my everyday existence online. Do I need to respond to someone I don’t like? The gorilla is there! Do I need something to properly represent my mood? The gorilla is there! Do I just want to make myself laugh? The gorilla is there! I have always kept that image somewhere in my files, and since I learned of where it came from, I considered checking that out, just to see how a bird-flipping-gorilla fit into an actual movie. Now that I have seen it, I’m still not entirely sure it is a movie.

I’ve written about some lower budget or lower quality productions in the series (looking at you, Frogs), but I haven’t quite gotten into the truly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. That ever-dropping barrel bottom, though, is an important part of monster movie history, especially in the fifties and sixties, when barely coherent excuses for film (which were sometimes imported films, but not always) found their way into cinemas, often as part of double bills. Sitting through something like The Creeping Terror or The Beast of Yucca Flats was a rite of passage for many burgeoning monster fans, as they promised terrifying delight, but mostly provided endless tedium because unexciting things are cheaper to film—basic competence was no longer a guarantee. These movies provided good examples of what separates different kinds of schlock: while some movies may not have coherent plots, consistent special effects, or top tier acting, they at least have ideas, style, or atmosphere—others seem like they could have been home movies (and some of them pretty much were), and contain so little of what they advertised that they are basically a scam. A movie like Inframan is super silly, but it feels like the people making it knew what they were doing in the end. A movie like A*P*E on the other hand…