The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

Film: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

Stars: Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Gregg Palmer, Maurice Manson, Ricou Browning

Director: John Sherwood

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We are officially on the last of the thirty Universal Monster Movies today with The Creature Walks Among Us.  I will be launching a list of all of the films on my Letterboxd (follow me here) at some point in the next week, so watch out for that, but today we're going to be focusing on The Creature Walks Among Us, not only the last film I've needed to see to complete my set, but generally considered to be the last film, period, of the original run of the Universal Classic Monster movies.  The film, the third of the Creature from the Black Lagoon series, was one I was intrigued by.  I thought the first Creature film was truly wonderful, a spellbinding, excellent horror film.  I thought Revenge of the Creature, though, was a gigantic dud coming off of the first one, totally mindless in its approach.  The Creature Walks Among Us therefore posed a question-was it more Column A or Column B when it came to what I thought of this monster's finale?

(Spoilers Ahead) We start in the Everglades, where the Gill-Man (Browning) has taken up residence.  A team of scientists, including lothario Jud (Palmer), beautiful Marcia (Snowden), and her mad, jealous husband Dr. William Barton (Morrow) are all trying to find the Gill-Man, though for different reasons.  When they find the Gill-Man, it becomes clear that Barton wants to manipulate it, to make it more like man, and use the surgeries he's performing to find a way to make it so that humans can live in space (honestly, the reasoning here is pretty sloppy even for a 1956 B-horror sequel, but let's just give a pass on this one since it's not all-that-crucial to the story).  In doing so, he makes it so that the creature cannot breathe underwater but instead uses his lungs.  This makes him start to become more "human," but the problem is that the men around him are not acting in such a way.  Barton, in particular, after he is driven mad by jealousy against Jud hitting on his wife, murders Jud, and in the process the Gill-Man kills him, escaping but with a different, more human attitude, back to the sea, though we do not yet know if he can reclaim it.

The Creature Walks Among Us is, for me, an improvement over the second film, though it's not in the same vein of the larger Universal Monster movies.  For starters, it feels more like a 1950's film than almost any picture we've seen, with a focus on nuclear war & an altered humanity that wasn't present even in the most political of the previous decade's horror films.  This has diminishing returns not just because it makes the plot mildly nonsensical, but it also shifts a lot of the focus away from the Gill-Man, who is a decidedly smaller role here than in the previous two films.  This isn't bad, exactly, but it's not what I was expecting.

And with that, we're saying adieu to the Universal Monster movies.  There are reviews for all of the previous 29 films listed below (along with a host of other horror films from previous seasons of this series).  We aren't done with the month yet (we have two more horror films before we close out this season), but I feel both a sense of accomplishment and sadness at hitting this milestone.  I started this project in part because I had never seen Dracula somehow, and thought it was time I got that off the list, and so fell in love with the cheesy motif of the picture that I couldn't stop watching.  While there are certainly other horror films from this era, it's bittersweet to hit the end-of-the-line for the original thirty Universal Monster flicks.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death