We’re not even far enough into the Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a good analogy for a franchise debut twenty-three years after the series began (that’d be 2031, from Iron Man in 2008), but the advent of the Gill-Man felt a bit like, say, something as off-beat as Groot. Both Gill-Man and Groot don’t seem like obvious fits for their respective cinematic universes, but that innate weirdness ends up being their great asset, and they manage to blend in seamlessly, thanks to an almost corporate adherence to the vibe of the brand. What kept Groot top of mind, though, was that James Gunn, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the crew at Marvel kept finding new things for Groot to do – despite his limited vocabulary, he could dance, he became a baby, and he saved the day in numerous surprising ways.
The Gill-Man, on the other hand, is explicitly forbidden from doing anything different in Revenge of the Creature. If it’s intentional, it’s brilliant, because the plot of Revenge finds the Gill-Man shackled in a cage for the amusement of his captors and the tourists who flock to Florida to see him. It could be a clever metaphor for sequel-as-sideshow, reducing the Gill-Man to the star attraction in a freak show while forcing him to relive his greatest hits from the previous film. I think there’s ripe metafictional ground to be ploughed with such a storyline, one that acknowledges the cyclical and recursive sequel formula while finding something new for the franchise to address. I have no sense, however, that returning director Jack Arnold is using his own source material for satire. Instead, it often feels like a cost-cutting measure to relocate the aquatic monster series onto dry land, with a built-in excuse for why the water sequences look like they were shot at SeaWorld.
It’s unfair for me to criticize Revenge for not being the low-hanging satirical fruit I might have made it, so I’ll say instead that the premise of the film reminded me a great deal of Jurassic World. Both films are about the ill-advised nature of building a theme park around a murderous creature, and the overall arcs of both films are virtually identical. They even share the stock character of a female scientist (there, Bryce Dallas Howard; here, Lori Nelson) who wonders if she should give up all the science and amusement park scenery to settle down and start a family. The only difference, it seems, was the budget, and maybe that’s why I found Jurassic World mindless yet entertaining, while Revenge nearly put me to sleep.
For the better part of an hour, the Gill-Man doesn’t do anything. He’s imprisoned first in a wading pond, but when he proves able to leap out of his enclosure, the Ocean Harbor staff sedate him and relocate him to a larger aquarium tank, chaining him to the bottom. Then we’re regaled with sequences of him eating fish and menacing his captors, but it’s a far cry from the slasher rampage we saw in his debut film. The minute he’s introduced to Helen, a comely ichthyologist who delivers dialogue like she doesn’t want to disturb paint drying, you know exactly where the film is headed, but there’s something less compelling about seeing it the second time around, no tension in the chase this time. It feels inevitable instead of alarming, in the Universal Monster sequel tradition of retreading familiar ground.
Just about the only bright spot is that the sequel brings back Nestor Paiva as Captain Lucas, here cast in a role roughly analogous to Edward Van Sloan’s turn as Van Helsing. Like Van Helsing, Lucas is on hand to assure us of the Gill-Man’s existence, to brush off the initial skepticism and encourage his passengers to embrace a wider understanding of the supernatural. Of course, Lucas also ends up guiding a new cast of the doomed right to the Gill-Man’s lair – leading me to believe that he might also be the Renfield of the Black Lagoon. Yet Lucas, a bright spot in the first film, is used perfunctorily in Revenge, right down to the reuse of footage from the first film. (Lucas using the boat’s horn to startle an alligator wasn’t all that funny the first time we saw it; recycling it for Revenge is distractingly perplexing.)
With Revenge and all the other Universal Classic Monsters sequels that preceded it, I am fast coming to the conclusion that, if the Universal Monsters popularized the notion of franchises and sequels, they must also be responsible for the truism that sequels are never any good. Film sequels were not exactly common when Bride of Frankenstein (the first monster sequel) debuted in 1935, and for many years they would seldom be as good. Revenge of the Creature is proof that sequels like Bride were the exception, not the rule.
In two weeks, the Gill-Man trilogy concludes when The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), starring Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Don Megowan, and Ricou Browning.
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