Revenge of the Creature (review by Doug Smith)
Revenge of the Creature is a sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon, and a prequel to The Creature Walks Among Us. Released only to capitalize on the success of the first one, this severely lacks … um … everything. If you really want to watch a movie with The Creature in it, just check out 1987’s “The Monster Squad,” where you can hear a 5-year-old girl say “chicken shit.” It’s really quite funny.
John Agar smugs his way through his role as Professor Clete Ferguson. Lori Nelson is his love interest, Helen Dobson. John Bromfield, who is so completely average that I don’t have anything witty to say about him, plays Joseph Hayes. Nestor Paiva portrays Captain Lucas, a very large and smelly looking man. Make sure you watch for Clint “Make My Day” Eastwood in a very brief appearance during a pitiful comic relief scene.
The movie starts off with the typical Universal Pictures 1950s sci-fi music playing, and then we see Captain Sweats-A-Lot (Capt. Lucas) at the helm of his boat on the Amazon. Some white guys make chauvinistic remarks and talk about drinking, while some stock footage of tropical animals appears every once in a while. Soon enough, it’s night and the white men and Captain Stinky continue their ignorant talk and drink some hooch. This scene also includes a little plot exposition; the reason they’re exploring the Amazon is because they’re searching for the Creature.
At this point, I thought there was a scene about some kid named Tommy who got a fever, but his aunt gave him Children’s Motrin and he got better, but then I realized it was a commercial because I taped this off of AMC, which could pretty much stand for “American Movie Crap.” I mean, really, when was the last time you saw a GOOD movie on that channel?
But I digress. Eventually, they capture the Creature by tossing some dynamite into the river. Sure, they probably killed off several thousand other species, but at least they got what they came for!
I’m actually going to make this review very short, because this movie is so inherently awful that most of the scenes either include all talking and no action, or they have absolutely nothing to do with anything in the movie. To summarize, we meet Dr. Clete who holds a monkey that blows a raspberry and Dr. Clete reacts by going, “ha ha ha!”; Clint Eastwood shows up for about thirty seconds and has a rat in his pocket; and the Creature gets transported to Florida. It should be noted that at some point during one of John Agar’s first scenes, I took a moment to type, “man, John Agar sucks,” in an IRC room that I frequent and then I realized that I could’ve made my whole review be just those four words.
Anyway, Dr. Clete and Helen try to train the Creature, which doesn’t work and just makes the Creature get pissed off. The Creature eventually escapes and goes on a rampage through Florida. Well, not really a rampage, I guess. He doesn’t kill very many people and, as for property damage, he only flips a car over, so actually, any hurricane is more potent than the Creature. As for laughable parts of the movie, there’s one scene in which the Creature kills a guy by throwing him into a tree and it looks like the guy kind of floats upwards into it.
Some people will disagree with me (no, I don’t care), but I’m going to give this movie the yak turd. Supposedly, this was the highest grossing Creature movie of the trilogy, but you have to remember this was the martini-induced 1950s, so almost anything with a blonde chick would do well at the box office. I could see this being the kind of movie that G.W. Bush would watch with his buddies and a case of beer and say stuff like, “yeah, white men rule!” and, “that’s right, men are always smarter than women!” So, perhaps if you’re a chauvinistic pig, or a KKK member, or just a plain ignorant moron, you might just want to give this movie a look.