Harbinger Down

Harbinger Down (2014)

Dir. and written by Alec Gillis

Starring Lance Henriksen, Camille Balsamo, Matt Winston, Winston James Francis, Milla Bjorn, Giovonnie Samuels

OK, first off, full disclosure: HARBINGER DOWN began life as a kickstarter project, and one that I personally funded and followed for pretty much its entire creation. I had the poster on my living room wall up until a few months ago. So much for journalistic detachment. It’s not like I make money off this or anything, and of course I root for every movie I see to surprise me and end up good, but even so, it seems worth mentioning that I may have got too deep in here to be entirely objective. These are still my honest opinions, but please keep in mind that, like all my reviews here, they’re my honest subjective opinions. Now back to your regularly scheduled rant.

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Lance Henriksen made five films in 2015. Five. That’s one new completed movie every ten weeks. The guy’s a national treasure, obviously, but I think it obvious that appearing in watchable movies has not really been a high priority for him for some time. He always brings his A-game, even when it’s just to three or four unnecessary exposition scenes in an otherwise utterly barren SyFy channel movie or something, but when was the last time he made something which could even remotely be called “good?” Closest I can come is APPALOOSA, a little-seen Ed-Harris directed Western from 2008. And before that, he’d made three DTV sasquatch movies in four year, plus two made-for-TV PUMPKINHEAD sequels. Even so, when I saw he’d signed on to an as-yet-unfunded kickstarter campaign for an “all-practical-effects monster movie,” I was excited. What, am I the kind of guy who learns a lesson just from being constantly, consistently disappointed several times a year for more than a decade?

Besides, there’s some poetic justice to this project. See, director/writer Alec Gillis and producer Tom Woodruff Jr. are not your typical indie film school grads trying to scrape together a cheapie horror film with other peoples' money to boost their profile and hopefully end up directing whatever the current re-imagining of the FANTASTIC FOUR is in 2021. Instead, they’re practical effects artists whose company, StudioADI, was responsible for practical effects in, among others, DEATH BECOMES HER (for which they won an Academy Award), STARSHIP TROOPERS, ALIEN 3, THE 6th DAY, PANIC ROOM, CASTAWAY, SPIDER-MAN 1-3,  GODZILLA 2014, ENDER’S GAME and --most pertinently here-- the 2011 THE THING PREMAKQUEL. Or, at least, they made a bunch of monster puppets for THE THING PREMAKEQUEL. Unfortunately, in the finished film, they saw that someone in post had essentially hired CG animators to basically cover over their cool practical work with a bunch of phony baloney shiny CG.  I wrote at the time: “Despite the freedom CG affords, the filmmakers fail to create anything as imaginatively disturbing as Carpenter’s body dysmorphic nightmares from the original, and the CG effects make the monster look clean, weightless and, well, CG.” It’s so relentless in its late-'oughts mid-level CG monster fetishism that I never imagined at the time they’d bothered with anything practical, but it turns out they did: take a look at this video of the amazing work StudioADI did… and compare that to all the corny ass CG they buried it under in the final cut. Increasingly heartbroken over the apparent disregard their craft was getting in the standard studio system, Gillis and Woodruff decided to DIY, or more specifically DIYWOPM (Do It Yourself With Other Peoples’ Money), resulting in the concept of HARBINGER DOWN: basically just a THE THING RIPOFF, but on a boat with Lance Henriksen and all practical, lovingly crafted latex plastic and animatronic monster effects. I gave. We all gave. And now, here we are.

So how is it? Honest to god, not that bad. In some ways, kind of good, really. They did DIE HARD on a boat, so why not THE THING on a boat without really understanding why THE THING is a good movie, except the monster part?

That sounds like a backhanded compliment, and I guess it is, though I mean it with some affection. I sincerely doubt HARBINGER DOWN could fool even the most forgiving filmgoer into thinking it was a movie which could be released in theaters, let alone mistake it for the 1982 John Carpenter masterpiece. The setup is as simple as they come: the hardscrabble crab boat Harbinger, captained by Lance Henriksen and crewed by a bunch of motley roustabouts and his graduate-student daughter (Camille Balsamo, the classic role of “Beach Girl #1” in THE PAPERBOY) pulls a big mysterious frozen object out of the ocean, and we all know that can only result in a shape-changing body-snatching alien rampage. (When Space sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing mysterious Russian space landers. They’re bringing rampages. They’re shape-changers. And some, I assume, are good people.) Yes, it’s just a smaller-scale, single-location ripoff of THE THING, that should be obvious, and that fact is never far off-screen. But considering it was shot for like 400,000 dollars, it looks quite a lot like a real movie, in most ways, sans the powerfully unpleasant found-footage opening credits. The lighting and sets, at least, are solid workaday professional stuff, the miniatures are near-flawless, and the cinematography gets the job done with minimal distinction but little real incompetence.

But so what, all these shitty no-budget wannabe creature features these days tend to offer at least some base level of basic competence; it’s just so damn cheap and easy to shoot a movie on your iphone these days that there’s really no excuse anymore for the adorably incompetent nonsense of yesteryear, when this shit was actually hard. Just being functionally professional ain’t much of a compliment. HARBINGER DOWN distinguishes itself, though, by being a little more thoroughly 80’s than its competition, in a good way. I'm not saying it's some kind of Stranger Things kitche pastiche or anything, it's just spiritually more in tune with that era of horror movies. The acting is a little broader than you’re used to with these self-serious modern movies, and it suits it: a movie like this is not reasonably expected to generate deep feelings, so instead, the actors try to win you over by inserting some welcomed personality. It’s somewhat cartoonish personality (the big strong guy, the whiny fast-talking guy, the hardass Russian, the prissy academic) but for these purposes that works just fine. After suffering through years of dull-eyed indie horror mumblecore for Mature Grown Ups who don’t really like horror movies anyway because who likes horror movies, that’s kids stuff not for real Serious Postmodern Hipster Types Like Us, it’s honestly a welcome change to see a cast of actors more or less on the same page about giving broad, bawdy performances which inch just up to the point of parody without quite crossing that line. These are not instances of great acting, but they’re definitely fun, colorful performances, which ends up having a lot more impact than great acting ever could on something this straightforward and silly.

Of course, Henricksen is on another level entirely. For once he's actually got a real role in one of these movies --he's not just in four scenes shot separately for the rest of the cast, he's a prominent character and in almost the whole thing-- and he obviously elevates every scene he's in by an order of magnitude. He’s predictably great doing the standard gruff captain stuff, but, as usual, he goes above and beyond the call of duty here, delivering an otherwise unnecessary scene about his wife’s recent death from cancer with such genuine texture and pathos that I swear to god I briefly forgot I was watching a DTV THE THING ripoff and started to think about this stock monster fodder as an actual character. I remember Henriksen being interviewed somewhere, praising John Woo for HARD TARGET (the only person to have ever done so), because he says that for all the roles he does, he spends time working up a backstory and putting in what he considers interesting character beats, which are almost always excised from the final edit. Woo, though, kept them in, obviously to the infinite improvement of HARD TARGET and also the world more generally. This seems like that kinda thing -- You could easily cut it out and it wouldn’t change the story, but with an actor of his quality, it really does add a little something if you leave it in. That’s the unexpected pleasure here; HARBINGER DOWN is a stupid movie, but the characters do distinguish themselves enough that even when there’s no monsters around it’s not a total deadzone, and at times you even kind of root for these morons to actually survive.

The unexpected annoyance, unfortunately, is not the script, it’s the monsters. They look pretty cool where you can see them, but for a movie designed solely to showcase practical monster effects director Gillis really doesn’t seem to have much faith in the results they came up with; way too many are hidden with poor lighting, visual obstacles, and confusing edits. This is strange, because I’ve seen the behind-the-scene footage, and these monsters look great, even in a brightly lit workhouse-- so why hide them? Atmosphere is one thing, but come on man, we wanna see these fucking monstrosities you’ve built, that’s the whole fucking point. The 80’s movies they’re emulating here --and I don’t mean THE THING, I’m talking waaay worse shit than that, PROTEUS and the like-- boasted vastly crappier creature puppets which were probably not a labor of love the way these were, but they tended to be better at showing them off. Too many shots here are just flashing lights and masses of tentacles. If I wanted to see that, I’d watch a crappy CG horror film. By the final credits, there’s enough solid monster action here to satisfy, but not as much as there should be, given how derivative everything else is here.

Oh, and incidentally: If you’re going to rip off THE THING, how ‘bout remembering that the real monster --going all the way back to the original John Campbell Jr. short story Who Goes There, which was essentially a Cold War parable-- was always paranoia, the uncertainty about who you can trust in a world where the enemy can look like your friends? Here, the monster can take over bodies and stuff... but… nothing ever comes of it. There’s never really any significant scenes of doubt about who can and can’t be trusted. Monster effects are always welcome --and some cheerfully broad 80’s characters are maybe even more welcome-- but even THE THING REMAKEQUEL seemed to grasp the mechanics of this premise better than these guys do. I’d be less grumpy about that if HARBINGER DOWN was wall-to-wall puppet action, but this is a crucial --and completely missing-- piece of the puzzle if you’re going to get shy about the claws and tentacles and try to play it as a suspense piece.

On the other hand, Henriksen has a beard, that’s pretty special. And despite my grousing, at almost no point in the movie are you more than ten minutes away from another slimy creature puppet, which is something very few Fellini movies can claim, for example. Combined with a tone which takes the stakes seriously but isn’t afraid to have a little fun, and you could obviously do a lot worse. But I also wish it was a little more of a slam dunk, because it definitely has the ingredients to be more than it quite adds up to. As Dan P pointed out at the time, It's not worse than THE THING REMAKE, but it's not really any better, either. Which in one sense is pretty impressive, given it had a budget about 1/38th the size of its direct competition. But it also puts it squarely into that most unfortunate category of films which are good enough that you can’t help wishing they were just a little better. Still, “good enough” is still a lot better than this might have turned out, and it’s still more than enough to make it Lance Henriksen’s most legitimately watchable screen appearance in ages. At the final buzzer, HARBINGER DOWN is manifestly more entertaining than most modern creature features and at its core it's got the goods, but it doesn’t always have sense enough to put its own best foot (or tentacle) forward.  

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

TAGLINE	Terror is Just Beneath The Surface
LITERARY ADAPTATION	None
SEQUEL	None
REMAKE	Pretty much unacknowledged remake of THE THING, but whatever. The line between ripoff and remake has always been a little blurry.
DEADLY IMPORT FROM:	USA. (wikipedia calls it a Russian-American production, but I see no evidence of that).
FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK	There’s some truly heinous found footage right at the start over the credits, but thankfully it ditches that shit quickly.
SLUMMING A-LISTER	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON	Lance Henriksen, practical creature effects
NUDITY?	Nah.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
GORE?	Lots of body horror which probably counts
HAUNTED HOUSE?	No
MONSTER?	Oh yeah, some goodies
UNDEAD?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
SLASHER/GIALLO?	No.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Oh hell yeah
VOYEURISM?	Nah

OBSCURITY LEVEL	Fairly obscure, but it’s on Netflix now!
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you find a big mysterious thing in a giant block of ice somewhere, you should definitely bring it to your isolated location and let it sit unattended for long periods of time.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s a weirdly poetic title for an actual literal thing which happens: the boat (the Harbinger) goes down. And I’m pretty sure Henriksen barks that over the radio at some point.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE?	N/A

Pretty strong 3, a C+. I'd definitely watch the fuck out of a sequel, hint hint.

A couple female characters talk to each other about monsters and science and stuff.

Salvage

Salvage (2009)
Dir. Lawrence Gough
Written by: Colin O’Donnel
Starring Neve McIntosh, Dean Andrews, Shaun Dooley

SALVAGE is a respectably assembled indie British hodge-podge of siege movie, monster movie, and THE CRAZIES. It takes place entirely inside a small cul-du-sac which is thrown into chaos when heavily armed government troops storm the place in search of a mysterious missing... something. Trapped in this madness are divorced housewife Beth, her recent hook up, and her daughter who’s a little pissed at her because she walked in on said hook-up. Daughter has stormed out, and Beth is desperate to find her and make sure she’s OK amidst the shooting and monstering.

Good acting is gonna be crucial to this kind of affair, where the key to the horror is our limited perspective as to what the fuck is going on. The leads generally deliver, particularly Neve McIntosh as Beth, the mom, who puts on a pretty good intense face and heroically embraces a few precious moments of mega-acting. But the problem is the characters are all pretty thinly written. Not poorly written, it’s just that there’s not enough to them to really quite carry the majority of the movie the way it sort of needs to. For example, the drunken hook-up (she says she picked him up at a bar, but it seems to be like 3 in the afternoon and no one’s drunk, so I don’t know) is a racist who thinks terrorists are responsible, but he turns out to be an OK guy in the end. It just feels like it wouldn’t have been character growth if he didn’t come off as a jerk at the start, which makes the whole thing feel a little forced and insubstantial. Mom gets a sort of better redemption angle but really just spends most of her time freaking out, so the drama of the situation ends up getting a little repetitive, even though it’s quite well-directed (there’s at least one long show-offy take as she explores through most of a mysteriously bloodied-up house).

Although there’s nothing technically the matter with the movie, there’s also nothing much there to really recommend it. It’s competently put together, but the scale is small, the stakes are just over whether or not Beth will find her daughter (who’s sort of a bitch anyway), the conflict with the soldiers is fairly routine, and the monster is pretty unmemorable. Actually, he looks like he was originally designed to be some kind of freaky human spider, which is a pretty cool idea, but the end result is just kind of skinny and furry and you never get a clear enough sense of it’s look, motives, or abilities for it to have much impact. So even though the film is pretty competent at most things it tries, it never really adds up to much. Sort of a shame to see so much competence put to waste on only an average movie, but I guess it’s a good reminder that technical proficiency will only take you so far. After that, you’ve gotta have imagination.

Beth has a conversation with another mother about her daughter. Not exactly storming the White House, but it counts.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: Yeah, we get a quick glimpse of the hook-up in question and Beth getting dressed afterwords.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Good bit of blood, though not as much dismembering as you'd like to see.
SEQUEL: No.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid-High. No substantial theatrical release.
MONSTERS: Yeah.
SATANISTS: None.
ZOMBIES: Nope.
VAMPIRES: None.
SLASHERS: Some slashing, but no slasher.
CURSES: No.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)

Dir. Jack Arnold

Starring Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno.

Would you believe I'd never seen this one?  I never really made an effort to watch all the classic Universal Monster films, but they tend to be the sort of things you just encounter. Watch DRACULA in a double feature with FREAKS, see WOLF MAN in a film class, check out FRANKENSTEIN on TV while sick from school as a kid, you know. Films with this level of clout just find you. You need to go out of your way a little to see HORROR EXPRESS. THE MUMMY (1932) just comes to you. In my case, I watched it standing in a long line to enter a haunted house one Halloween with my mom. That's what happened to you, too. You never decided it was time to watch it, but at some point you just did. It found you. These films find you, somehow.

Except for some reason, this one didn't. And as of 11:43 PM on Tuesday, May 10 2011, I was done politely waiting for the Gill-Man to make its way to me. I took the fight to it. Just like Gill-Man would do.

Well, I'm glad to have seen it, but this one is definitely in the lower tiers of the loose Universal Monsters series. Filmed in 1954 in 3-D, (apparently only the second Universal film to be released in 3-D) it is also among the last of the series (most of the biggies, such as MUMMY, DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, and THE INVISIBLE MAN were released nearly two decades earlier). It has plenty of the cornball qualities you probably expect from this era, but unfortunately lacks a lot of the artistry which pushed most of those films to classic status.

For one thing, it lacks a strong central performance which helped anchor most of the great monsters. Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr. and their ilk were not just beneficiaries of great monster makeup; they were magnetic personalities with classic takes on these characters which redefined them for subsequent generations. They were the charismatic lynchpins upon which the whole film rested. By this time, the formula is well-established and director Arnold clearly understands that the creature is the star. But Gill-Man, despite his cool design, is a bit of a cold fish. Ahem. He's a cipher without much to relate to, character-wise. He's cool and menacing, but he unfortunately doesn't provide much pathos or drama, and without that you're forced to rely on the human characters for some sort of story arc, and you can imagine about how well that works. The characters and their stories are so perfunctory that it honestly isn't even worth explaining the plot and who's involved. They're a couple scientists who end up in the Black Lagoon, and that's the only relevant thing. But since they can't really hang any drama on the creature, we have to endure quite a bit of time with placeholder characters that barely even make an effort.

He's coming right at us!

But the way they prattle on about this and that, you sort of get the idea that the film might just be about something. That the creature has endured this long, and in the lofty company he is associated with, can only be testament to the fact that something about this concept connects with people on a slightly deeper level. The reason these classic movie monsters persist is that they don't merely represent bodily harm. The monsters themselves represent something more psychological deep-rooted fears about our world, and often fears about ourselves. Vampires, of course, represent human sexuality and desire - so much so that they've gradually lost most of what made them monstrous as our society finds itself a little less terrified of human desire (for the record: I'm pro-desire, but if we have to trade Bela Lugosi for TWILIGHT to get a less judgmental society I say it may be time to bring back those stylish scarlet letters). Werewolves represent the frightening and painful bodily and emotional changes undergone in puberty. Zombies (a la their Romero reinvention) represent our insatiable consumer culture. Frankenstein represents our fear of loss of identity and meaning. And so on. Most of the classic monsters could (and do) have whole books written about their symbolic meaning and the way that meaning has become part of our representational culture.

What, then, is our pal Gill-Man telling us about ourselves? I feel that it doesn't read as clearly as the other monsters I mentioned, which is probably a big part of the reason this film feels less effective than some of its predecessors. It doesn't quite go for our subconscious fears with timeless, classic symbolism in the same way. There are no creaking castles or foggy moors in here; it’s a thoroughly modern (1954) movie populated by bold, effective white scientists and simple, colorful locals, and shot mostly in the daytime. I wonder, though, if that isn't sort of the point. These scientists (an ichthyologist, a geologist, a business-scientist and a girlfriend-scientist) are way into talking about the Devonian era, the geologic period during which legs first began to develop and ocean creatures began to venture onto land. Well, you can hardly say "Devonian era!" with a blank face suggesting an unsettling fear that there might be other eras to remember the names of before you start talking about evolution, which is exactly what these scientists do.

Remember, this is 1954, where evolution is not the dry, noncontroversial academic issue which every schoolchild clearly understands that it is today. They don’t talk much about the philosophical implications, but shit, the Scopes trial was in living memory of every one of these characters. And here they are in a black lagoon in the middle of the most unconquered land left in the world, with this weirdly human fish thing which has a suspicious interest in their women. We diverged from this thing as far back as the Devonian era, and yet we have more in common with it than anyone in the film wants to admit (or even monologue about). I suspect that the Creature, if anything, is there to represent the discomfort audiences of the time still felt with the concept that human animals were not quite as different and special as we might like to believe, and that the scary, alien things we see in nature are a far greater part of us and our history than we’re comfortable examining.

Well, like I said, since then we’ve all become completely accustomed to this concept and there’s no debate or discomfort about it at all by anyone anywhere, so the movie doesn’t really work on this level any more. It does, though, perhaps work on a slightly deeper level that the evolution thing only plays at. By being like us without being us, the Gill-Man does indeed represent the things we share with our animal ancestors and our own animal instincts. But unlike the Wolf Man, who also represents our animal urges and desires, Gill-Man represents a different part of our animal brain – the reptilian part, the cold, incomprehensible, instinctual part of us. Gill-Man isn’t warm and furry; he’s alien and unknowable, yet has too much in common with us to dismiss as unrelated to our lives. He’s the nonrational self which we don’t understand and can’t control, too alien to understand but too familiar to ignore. He’s the fear of the unknown self, the part of us deep in the primal psyche (our unconscious black lagoon of primal muck) which is alien to our mammalian emotional and social instincts.

We understand our antisocial impulses; anger, lust, jealousy, hate. We may fear them about ourselves, but at least we can understand them and control them. That’s Wolf-Man Territory. Ahem. Gill-Man is the part of ourselves that’s so ancient and primal we don’t have words for it. He couldn’t tell you what the fuck his deal is, why he keeps killing minor characters and trying to kidnap white women. I mean, what’s he gonna do with her, fuck her? Not unless she lays her eggs first so he can swim over and fertilize them. If he’s angry he doesn’t show it; if he’s horny he doesn’t act like it. And yet, there he is, moving beneath the surface of the water creating powerful drives to action. It appeals to our disgust and repulsion at parts of ourselves, and even our own bodies. There’s nothing sexy about slime and scales (except to an extremely specific demographic of which we won’t speak for fear of attracting spam-bots), or anything that happens behind those weird, unblinking eyes. Nature itself is gross and ugly here; the Amazon is all murky mud and rotting vines, its inhabitants violent and random and covered in spines and slime. And yet, every new connection these scientists draw seems to bring us more and more uncomfortably close to the natural world which so repulses us. It’s in our brains, it’s in our genes, it’s in our souls. That’s the film’s trick, to show ourselves looking back at us from behind the eyes of something we don’t want to recognize.  

On the other hand, the monster is --of course-- the star here, and the film barely tries to conceal its empathy for the poor misunderstood guy. Our nominal hero (the forgettable handsome, modernist-manly Richard Carlson) spends most of the film convincing his colleagues not to kill it, and berating them when they try (he shouldn’t have worried; the thing takes quite a beating and will be back for sequels long after the names of the main characters here have been forgotten). This sense of a frustrated creature driven by unarticulated feeling and desires but rebuffed by society also, whether intentionally or not, speaks to the kind of people who were watching this stuff then and now: nerds.

Like nerds, the creature lives in an isolated, lonely area where he is uniquely suited. Interestingly, the creature is portrayed by two people: Ricou Browning in the water and Ben Chapman on land. This otherwise inexplicable use of different actors (which continues to each sequel as well, although different actors would take over on land) means there’s a stark difference between the graceful, natural swimming and his awkward, alien attempts at moving on land. Like many awkward loners before him, he has felt moved by feelings he cannot quite put into words to venture out of his comfort zone and try to interact with the handsome, athletic scientists of the world and their girlfriends who he doesn’t quite know what to do with but obviously wants something from. And just like every time this happens, a few people end up getting murdered, everyone misunderstands, spear guns enter the picture, escape is prevented, and everyone flees back to their underwater caves.

It's not easy being green. Or gray.

I find it hard to believe this was completely unintentional. With almost two decades to learn from the success of the previous monster franchises, I suspect the producers of the film understood that there was a certain demographic which would appreciate and empathize with the monster’s isolation, his inability to make sense of his world and his place in it. Hell, the makers of KING KONG (which features a virtually identical story, without the third act back in ‘civilization’ or anything else which makes Kong’s narrative mildly unique and interesting) understood that as far back as 1933. Here, Arnold and writer William Alland even try to milk that same Beauty and the Beast angle, which works considerably less well here because Gill-Man is much less expressive and charismatic than the id-centric Kong.

That it works at all is a testament to the one thing the film really gets right: the creature itself. First and most importantly, it’s a fantastic design which somehow got made into a truly extraordinary costume. The thing looks great, moves extremely naturally (with the slight exception of the clawed hands which look a little like gloves) and holds up immensely well. They wisely reveal the creature early and nearly all the pleasurable moments in the film come from marveling at how cool he looks.

The second thing that works is the way they shoot him. The movie is generally artlessly made (maybe it looked better in 3-D?) and generally devoid of any effective atmosphere, let alone visual poetry. It does have one single trick up its sleeve, however, which elegantly ties up everything creepy and cool about the concept and execution of the film in one shot. Girlfriend-scientist swims along the surface of the water, bathed in sunlight. Underneath, the creature parallels her swimming in his own wriggly style, watching her from below. It’s probably the one legitimately classic thing about the film, and still packs a punch, both poetically and as great horror staging.

The underwater photography is, in general, cooler than anything that happens on the surface, with the camera taking advantage of the greater underwater mobility to get some effective stalking and even action angles. The suit looks even better under water and actor/swimmer Ricou Browning gives our man Gill a unique, twisting swimming style which looks both unique and very natural – sort of the way a human swims, but not quite (probably most like the way a human swims in a bulky rubber suit, but the effect is good).

All things considered, I’m glad to have seen this one as part of my general cultural edification, but it’s not a film I’m likely to revisit all that often. It doesn’t connect on a gut level the way those older, more evocative monster films do, and despite the striking design of the creature the whole thing, even with its lightly implied subtext, feels sleight and padded. Still, I’m curious about the sequels – the first sounds like a rehash but since its Clint Eastwood’s first film (he plays an uncredited lab technician who has a conversation with a cat, apparently) I may have to check it out. The third one sounds a little more interesting, however – THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US finds the creature captured and taken to civilization, where an accident causes him to lose his gills and submit to human clothing and study by more scientists and their girlfriends. That one sounds just crazy enough to be interesting, and also sounds like a logical extension of the subtext from the original, which could open some interesting doors. And with a long-promised remake on the horizon (the writers say they’re re-imagining Gill-Man as a product of Man’s poor treatment of the rainforest, an amusingly ill-conceived take considering that it undermines literally everything about the subtext of the original) it looks like this Gill-Man’s got some life in him yet, even if it looks a little awkward and unfocused to us Lung-Men.

Soon.