3-D Thursday: Revenge of the Creature (1955)

There's several notable things about 1955's Revenge of the Creature: it was the last 3-D movie of the 1950s, the first 3-D sequel to a 3-D movie, the first 3-D movie shown in 3-D on non-cable broadcast, and personally speaking, the first 3-D movie I ever saw.  It was in May of 1982 and it was an anaglyphic broadcast, the first in the Philadelphia region. Though it really didn't work at all, my 11 year old brain was convinced it did. Mercifully, Universal and the 3D Film Archive restored the film and have released it on 3D Blu Ray which works beautifully.

Revenge picks up a year after the original Creature From the Black Lagoon. The Gill Man is still hanging out in the Amazon. Ocean Harbor Oceanarium sends George Johnson (Robert B Williams) and Joe Hayes (John Bromfield) to capture the Gill Man for scientific study. They enlist Lucas (Nestor Paiva), the boat captain from the first film, to take them to the Lagoon. After a near fatal encounter with the Creature, they manage to capture him and take him back to Florida. Once there, he's studied by Animal Psychologist Clete Ferguson (John Agar) and Ichthyology student Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson). He falls for Helen but gets sick of being hit with bull prods so he eventually escapes, wrecking havoc and killing Joe.  His downfall comes when he kidnaps Helen from a seafood house.

Revenge is not quite as good as it's original. The first half has too many comedy bits in it. First there's Lucas, but he's not too much and anyway, I always liked his character. Then we get some humor with a chimp followed by Clint Eastwood in his first role as a dumb lab tech with a rat in his pocket. It's neat to see Eastwood when he was so young, but the scene is disposable. Then we get Flippy the educated Porpoise who serves no purpose to the film outside of filler. Revenge was shot at Marineland in Florida and much like Jaws 3-D acts as a bit of an infomercial for Sea World, so does Revenge for Marineland. Mercifully the second half does away with Flippy and gives us some good Creature chaos with the Gill Man flipping over cars and tossing around college students like they're frisbees. There's also a few callbacks to the original in the second half. If the first half had been as strong as the second, this would have been fully as great as the original Creature. Unfortunately, the filler makes it a lesser entry.

The cast is good, though not quite up to the casting for the first film. John Agar did a bunch of these things back in the 1950s. This might be his best film. Lori Nelson is attractive enough and you can argue if her or Julia Adams is sexier. The scene in the motel room where she gets ready for a shower is surprisingly sexy for the 50s and predates Janet Leigh's ill-fated shower in Psycho by five years. But the triangle between Agar and Bromfield for her affections doesn't quite have the tension that existed between Richard Carlson and Richard Denning in the original. Paiva and Creature actor Rico Browning are the only two major actors to return from the original. Paiva is great as usual and gets the one genuinely funny line in the film when he says "I hope you're not going to blow up my boat, Mr. Johnson. Like my wife, she's not much but she's all I got". Browning, by the way, is the only actor to appear in all three films. He later assistant directed the underwater sequences in Thunderball. This was also the fourth and final 3-D film directed by Jack Arnold. Arnold held the record for directing the most theatrical 3-D films until Robert Rodriguez did five in the current era.

For decades, most people who got to see this in 3D only got to see it in anaglyphic format, whether it was anaglyphic on TV or 16mm. The 16mm print looked better than the TV print, of course, but seeing it as it was originally intended is an eye opener. The 3D Film Archive did a gorgeous job on this. The 3D is absolutely perfect here. Shots that were in reverse 3D for decades have been corrected and the alignment has been corrected shot by shot. It actually looks better on 3D Blu than the original film. The 3D version is included in the Creature Legacy Collection Blu Ray Set. There was some controversy as Universal accidentally released the 3D version in a Side By Side format as opposed to 3D Blu Ray format, but that's been corrected and the new version looks great. The depth is outstanding and the pop-outs memorable, especially when Agar hits the audience with the bull prod, the one effect that worked in the anaglyphic TV version.

One of the complaints about the film is that taking the Creature out of the Amazon removes much of the terror and mystery of the first film. This isn't totally incorrect though I still think the filler in the first half is what really drags the film down. When it's trying to be suspenseful and scary, it works wonderfully. The opening in the Amazon and the Creature's rampage when he escapes from his captivity are marvelous. The motel room scene is pretty creepy, too. All in all, it's at least half a worthy sequel that just slightly misses the mark. But thankfully we can see it the way it was meant to be seen, since this works much better in it's 3-D format than 2-D.