Bad Movies For Good People

"Creature From The Black Lagoon" -1954.

Tagline: "Creature from a million years ago!... every man his mortal enemy... and a woman's beauty his prey!"
Or: "Centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart!"

Let's talk poster. Like a few other posters I have seen this one is fairly true to the movie. The girl looks exactly like the girl in the movie, the Gill Man really does scoop her up and there really are divers with spear guns. My only complaint: why is Gill Man wearing Covergirl Lip Perfection (TM)?

Okay look, Universal Studios, your math is faulty. First you get the period wrong. Doctor Reed says the lagoon appears as it was "150 million years ago, during the Devonian Age." He is off by at least 200 million years. The Devonian period began about 400 million years ago and ran to about 350 million years ago. Duh! Everybody knows that. Second, The scientists in this movie keep misusing terms for the geologic time scale. They refer to the Devonian as an "age" and as an "era". Wrong. The Devonian is a period, which is shorter than an age and longer than an era. Geologic time is divided from longest to shortest, Eon > Era > Period > Epoch > Age. So there! Nyah! I feel better.

Plot: Doctor Maia discovers the hand of an unknown amphibian in layers of sediment while on an expedition deep in the Amazon.

He gets more money and scientists to dig up the rest of the fossil in the form of our main cast.

From left to right we have Dr. David Reed, his fiancee Dr. Kay Lawrence, Head Jerk Dr. Mark Williams, and, because crap runs downhill, junior scientist Dr. Edwin Thompson. He's mainly there to bite his tongue while Mark makes an ass of himself. And smoke his pipe, because apparently at least one scientist per B-movie has to smoke a pipe.
They hire a grungy man, Lucas,

and his equally grungy boat, Rita, to take them up the Amazon river (why does no one ever go "down" the Amazon?) to the discovery site. There they find Dr. Maia's helpers all dead.

Lucas explains the wounds look like a jaguar. Well, the wounds don't make a picture that looks like a jaguar. He means the attack looks like it was done by a jaguar. Although that would be pretty cool, in a horrific way. Anyway, we the audience know that it was not a jaguar. (Face palm!)
Eventually, the Gill Man (that's a trademark, people!) reveals himself to any and all.

Luckily he has no genitalia, or this film would have never made it past the censors. Not too sure how the Gill Man would procreate, given he hasn't any junk. He is an amphibian, so maybe there are little Gill-Tadpoles somewhere in the lagoon. Mrs Gill Man in her plaid apron, whipping up some Yankee pot roast for her hard-working monster....Wow! I am way off topic. Where was I? Oh yes.
Once the various doctors see there is a living version of the fossil they were so keen to find, Head Jerk Mark

orders the rest to help him capture or kill the Gill Man. Not surprisingly, Gill Man isn't thrilled with that idea and starts killing people.

To complicate things, Gill Man also gets a hankerin' for Kay.
And despite her prominent eyebrows, I can't say I blame him. Kay has that 50's pin-up style that had a lot of Air Force personnel painting girls on their planes.

Gill Man eventually takes the offensive, blocking off the exit from the lagoon and kidnapping Kay.

With fewer and fewer doctors around, someone has to step up and save everyone's collective butt! And that someone is not going to be Head Jerk Mark!

Things I learned from this movie: 1- there were two people in two different suits playing Gill Man, Ricou Browning wore the lighter coloured suit in the water and Ben Chapman wore the darker green suit on land, 2- Browning, a professional diver and stuntman, held his breath for up to four minutes (!) at a time so air bubbles wouldn't emanate from the mask,

3- Head Jerk Mark is Richard Denning from "Day The World Ended"...apparently he liked to work in films that dropped the first "The" in their titles, 4- rather than running for your life, just stand there and say "No" over and over again while a hideous monster attacks you, 5- you could say things like "I don't like the idea of going into unexplored territory with a woman" in 1954 and not get pimp-slapped, 6- one of the few B-movies that has music that heightens the mood instead of distracting you with how poor it is, 7- I guess they couldn't afford the "big" underwater camera,

8- when David defends the Creature as only protecting itself against attack all I could think of was Sean Connery in "The Untouchables": "He shoots one of yours with a spear gun, you put one of his in the lagoon! That's the Amazon way and that's how you get to Gill Man!", 9- the three most ineffective words in cinematic history: "You wait here"....you might as well say "Screw it, c'mon.", 10- a gigantic amphibian monster can nearly capsize a boat while ripping a net to shreds but can be held in a makeshift bamboo cage,