All 3 Creature from the Black Lagoon Movies, Ranked

If The Shape of Water counted, it would be quite comfortably the best of the movies featuring the Gill-man, AKA the titular creature from Creature from the Black Lagoon. But that Guillermo del Toro-directed Best Picture winner instead featured a similar creature, and was certainly influenced by the official Creature from the Black Lagoon movies, but wasn’t related to the series specifically. It’s actually a bit of an odd horror series to talk about, owing to the relatively few official films. They were all made in the 1950s, though the Gill-man endures as a pop-cultural icon, and any movies that feature amphibious half-man/half-fish creatures will probably be indebted to the original film in one way or another. But it’s not like The Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, or even The Invisible Man, where those series have continued to exist – and be rebooted – long after the decade during which their first respective movies came out.

All those characters are part of the overall Universal Monsters franchise, and so is the Gill-man, but he’s just not had the same kind of longevity in an official capacity, compared to most of the other Universal Monsters. Still, three movies is something, and technically just enough to rank, so that’s what the following ranking is going to focus on: those three official Creature from the Black Lagoon films. These were technically the last movies of the Universal Monsters classic era (well, among the final four, since you probably also have to count Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy), and maybe some of the more overlooked ones, too. At least one of these is a semi-classic, and you can honestly probably do without the other two, unless you’re a particularly big fan of old-school sci-fi/horror movies. There’s also a very obvious way to rank all of these, so excuse the kind of boring order here, but that’s just the way things sometimes are.

3

‘The Creature Walks Among Us’ (1956)

Image via Universal Pictures

There isn’t anything here. This is a big old nothing of a movie, and a pretty sad note for that whole classic era of Universal Monsters to end on. The Creature Walks Among Us is a step-down in quality from the second Creature from the Black Lagoon movie, which itself was a step-down in quality from the first Creature from the Black Lagoon movie. Diminishing returns all the way through, and a case of the series just not working anymore, so they stopped making them. It’s not a cohesive or meaningful trilogy, and instead was just a trio of movies because they were seen as worth making, one after another, for three years/installments. Maybe that’s the way it works most of the time, but it just feels extra disappointing here, since there’s a clear downturn in quality at each step along the way. Further, the absolute shrug that The Creature Walks Among Us was seemed to spell the end for all these Universal Monster movies, and not just the ones with the Gill-man, so that’s an extra shame, really.

As for the movie itself, if you need a little more by way of commentary than just “it’s not good,” and if you need a synopsis or something, you’ll begrudgingly get both right about now. Funk soul brother, check it out now, this movie is about scientists trying to make the Gill-man have the ability to breathe the air and walk on land. So, that takes away his amphibious quality, which is kind of the thing that makes this particular monster interesting, and the movie never really takes off because that whole premise is just a bit broken. The Gill-man sort of fights and tries to return to the water, and he does walk among the people on land for a bit, but not as much as you might expect. There is a little schlock, and at least the film clocks in at under 80 minutes, just as the other two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies do, but it’s not enough. You can feel a sense of fatigue here, behind the camera and behind the scenes. The tiredness of the film itself rubs off on you, and watching it becomes tiring. If you get through the first two movies in this trilogy of sorts, do not feel obligated to finish it, since there isn’t much fun (nor anything very thrilling) here, in The Creature Walks Among Us.

2

‘Revenge of the Creature’ (1955)

Revenge has fueled a great many movies before, of various genres, but what about a monster movie? Eh, if so, then not really with Revenge of the Creature. He came back to life in The Creature Walks Among Us, and he also seemed to die at the end of the first movie, but this is just how it goes, with horror movies that become franchises. No one’s ever really gone. The Gill-man is not really gone. He didn’t entirely die in the first movie, but he doesn’t really get to enact revenge on anyone in particular from that same original movie. It’s more of a broad “revenge” against humanity generally speaking, if anything the Gill-man does even counts as revenge. More accurately, the movie just has him come up against another group of human beings, and they capture him and take him to an oceanarium, which he later manages to escape from.

There’s also a young woman the Gill-man gets infatuated with, a little like in the first movie, and then things end up where you’d expect them to… only really one way a movie like this can end, and then that ending is pretty much ignored if there’s the chance of making a sequel. Beyond saying, “Well, it’s not as bad as the third movie,” and mentioning that some of the rampaging by the Gill-man in the film’s back half is a little fun (and more enjoyable than when he “walked among us” in 1956), the only other thing of note here is that Revenge of the Creature features Clint Eastwood’s earliest acting role, which is kind of funny to see. He’s barely in the movie, so don’t just watch it for him or anything, but he shows up for about a minute and has a couple of lines as a lab technician. It was an uncredited appearance, but it’s definitely Eastwood, pre-Rawhide, pre-Man with No Name, and pre-anything he directed, of course.

1

‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954)

Image via Universal-International

The original and the best, even if it’s not quite a perfect movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon is comfortably the most essential of the official films featuring the Gill-man. It’s been weird to go through these backwards, but that’s necessary when going from worst to best through a trilogy that gradually got worse with each entry. Oh well. Anyway, with Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), it’s about an expedition through the Amazon River undertaken by some scientists, with one of the scientists also bringing along his fiancée, who’s the inevitable young woman for the creature to fall for, King Kong-style. Or The Mummy-style. This happens quite a bit, in monster movies. The scientists there want to capture the Gill-man for their own purposes, but they’re not fully prepared for what he can do, nor what he wants (that fiancée for himself, basically).

This was released in a pretty big year for monster movies, just because the original Godzilla also came out in 1954. Godzilla didn’t bring about an end to the Universal Monster series or anything, but if you want to look at things broadly, maybe it represented a necessary evolution for monster movies, or suggested a shift in interest regarding what people wanted out of movies featuring monsters. It was a different kind of monster movie, and a very different kind of monster, too, and that original film understandably overshadows the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, and not necessarily because Godzilla could probably step on Gill-man without even flinching. As far as B-movies (or movies with a B-grade feel) go, Creature from the Black Lagoon is pretty solid stuff, overall. It might not stick with you the way some of the truly great Universal Monster movies from previous decades had (see Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the first The Invisible Man in particular), but this is still a worthy film within that whole era of Universal Monster movies. It’s a shame this is as good as Gill-man-related movies have gotten, but never say never… the creature may walk among us – or our cinemas – once more, in time…