The Creature Walks Among Us begins shortly after the events of Revenge of the Creature, as a brand-new team of scientists (with yet another requisite love triangle) heads out into the Everglades to search for the Gill-Man, recently escaped from the aquarium where he had been put on display. Few if any of the other Monsters got three movies that told one continuous story with a clear, defined arc across their films. It doesn’t really work as a horror movie, or even really as a science-fiction movie, but it’s a very interesting entry in the canon of classic Universal Horror films nonetheless.
Even if it’s not scary, though, the film’s project of humanizing the Creature and making even more explicit the rotten core at the center of the human relationships makes the film an intriguing, thought-provoking watch. The third film of the classic trilogy is not as good as the first, of course, but it’s a fair bit better than the second, even as it almost completely trades out the horror aspects of the first two films in favor of sci-fi philosophizing about the nature of Man and the Universe. I didn’t really like the first sequel - which, mind you, does not undercut his iconic status one bit.
After re-watching the first film, I argued that the Creature deserves to be a gay icon because of how layered and delightfully homoerotic the film is. For the last two days, I’ve been exploring the legacy of the Gill-Man, my favorite of the Universal Horror Monsters.
0 kommentar(er)
