FILM : Eeeeeeeek! ‘Creature’ Will Emerge Again

Being a monster was never tougher than in the 1950s.

First off, there was so much competition. Look to your right and a nuclear-zapped mutant was elbowing in. Look to your left and something cranked out in the lab was getting pushy. Look behind you and there was a real illegal alien sneaking into the spotlight.

Hollywood didn’t care if the field was crowded. Monsters were in, especially at the drive-in theaters, and coming up with new ones was easy. But becoming a star, a beast of distinction, was another matter. Creepy and hot one day, creepy and cold the next.

There were a few, though, that managed to rise above the throng of anonymous growls, grunts and gnashing teeth. None was bigger than the fishy Gill-Man from “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

He didn’t have the girth of, say, the giant ants in “Them,” nor the feverish charisma of the brute from “I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf,” but he did have--what? He had the gimmick of hanging out underwater.

Probably one-third of the 1954 movie (screening Friday night as the start of the Muckenthaler Cultural Center’s “Monsters by Moonlight” series) was shot in the depths of the lagoon, something of a novelty for the sci-fi flicks of its day.

Director Jack Arnold may have let the plot become waterlogged, but he took advantage of his time below the surface. Filmed with natural lighting, the Gill-Man’s neighborhood isn’t so much foreboding as luminously fantastic.

The flick had another gimmick. “3-D” was just about to invade the genre, and “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” was one of the first to play with this technological toy. Arnold works the usual 3-D mischief by shooting scenes with obvious foreground and background to give the sense of depth, and then thrusting things at the audience. The Muckenthaler, by the way, plans to hand out 3-D glasses.

Of course, the plot isn’t much to yell about, not much worse or better than most of its contemporaries. This time around, the monster is a solitary sort content with splashing about his isolated Amazonian lagoon until a team of busybody scientists shows up.

The leader (Richard Carlson) and his super-vixen biologist girlfriend (Julia Adams) think they’ve discovered a prehistoric oddity, a missing link with webbed feet. What they’ve found, though, is trouble, and the Gill-Man, cranky over being disturbed, goes bonkers.

Everyone gets worked up when he kidnaps the biologist (she’s the only one who never sweats), dragging her to his underwater bachelor pad. It’s not clear what he plans to do, but miscegenation anxiety runs high. Adams, for her part, is a first-rate screamer, and does it loudly and often.

Although the end is tragic, keep in mind that the Gill-Man appeared in a couple of sequels, “The Creature Walks Among Us” and the wacky “Revenge of the Creature.” In the latter, he may be happy with the way he looks, but others aren’t; meddling plastic surgeons try to give him a make-over so he’ll fit in proper society. It’s true.

What: “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

When: Friday, July 10, at 9 p.m.

Where: The Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton.

Whereabouts: Take the Riverside (91) Freeway to Euclid Street and head north to Malvern.

Wherewithal: $2 to $4.

Where to Call: (714) 738-6595.