#Revenge of the creature movie

Here Arnold demonstrates some sympathy for Lori Nelson’s difficulty in pursuing her desired career and the pressure she is under to conform to the 1950s ideal of marriage and home-making. This emerges particularly strongly in his The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). One notable aspect of Jack Arnold’s films would seem to be an uncommon sympathy toward what at that point in time had not even been defined as feminist issues. It is the relatively crudity of these themes that make Revenge of the Creature a more routine monster movie, lacking in any of the rich subtext that the other films in the trilogy, and indeed the rest of Jack Arnold’s work, does. In fact, it is hard not to see the Creature as a variant on one of the bad teens that inhabited Jack Arnold’s later camp classic High School Confidential (1958). Here Jack Arnold expands the underlying eroticism out to crudely turn the Creature into some sort of horndog reptilian stalker – it follows Lori Nelson as she goes out on a boat, spies on her undressing to take a shower, emerges from the water with symbolic event just as she and John Agar kiss, breaks up a dance to abduct her. The original scene added a suggestion of eroticism to the relation between creature and woman. He creates a similar scene here of the Gill Man lurking inches below Lori Nelson as she swims with John Agar, it mirroring her moves and then reaching up to touch her foot. In The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Jack Arnold created a memorable scene shot from underwater of the Gill Man following Julia Adams from beneath as she swims above. Like the original film, Revenge of the Creature was shot in 3D and we get scenes of Gill Man swimming at the camera, prods emerging out the screen and the like. He effectively generates pathos for the creature as it is chained up, starved and tortured with a cattleprod, or images of it standing by the pool window and looking out at Lori Nelson. Certainly, director Jack Arnold does a customarily good job.

#Revenge of the creature movie

The Creature from the Black Lagoon was a simple but effective monster movie about scientists entering a jungle lagoon where they are stalked by a monster this entry expands the idea by having them bring the creature back to civilisation – where it promptly escapes and goes amok while the third entry The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) went into conceptually audacious areas, featuring scientists trying to surgically alter the creature into an air-breathing mammal.Īlthough highly regarded by many genre fans, Revenge of the Creature is the least interesting of the trilogy thematically. The Creature trilogy is unique among film series, especially monster movie series, in that each successive entry expanded on the basic idea as opposed to repeating the formula of the original. Revenge of the Creature was the second in the trilogy of films begun with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).