His Creatures Walk Among Us : UCLA pays tribute to director Jack Arnold, ‘The Incredible Thinking Man.’

In presenting “Jack Arnold: The Incredible Thinking Man,” the UCLA Film Archive is calling attention to one of the finest, most resourceful B-picture directors ever. In the program, the archive quotes Andre Gide’s famous dictum: “Art is born of constraint and dies of freedom.” Arnold was a man for all genres for whom constraint in the form of modest budgets was a challenge most often overcome. He made the kind of films, on the other hand, ripe for the remakes that lose whatever sophistication they gain in overbloated production values.

The Arnold retrospective commences Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954), a drive-in classic that is one of the most cherished horror pictures of the ‘50s. So what if the creature, who looks to be a mutation between a human and an alligator, might be a tad primitive-looking alongside contemporary monsters. He is nonetheless a figure of considerable poignancy. Essentially, “Creature” is an underwater “King Kong,” with the monster developing a passion for lovely Julia Adams.

Adams is part of a team of scientists who are on a fossil expedition in the Upper Amazon in Brazil when they learn of a hidden lagoon and tales of the creature who inhabits it. Leading the expedition is ichthyologist Richard Carlson, who clashes with his boss, Richard Denning, head of the institution financing the expedition. Denning becomes obsessed with the economic windfall the capture of such a creature could represent, and the skirmishing between the two men represents the ever-timely struggle waged over the priorities of profit and pure research.

Written by Harry Essex and Arthur Ross, “Creature” is fast-paced, intelligent, well-acted and a triumph of efficient, graceful filmmaking. It even acquires a poetic dimension through its substantial undersea sequences, so beautifully directed by James C. Haven and photographed by Charles S. Welbourne.

“Creature” will be followed by “The Space Children” (1958). Sunday brings that camp classic “High School Confidential” (1958), which features no less than Mamie Van Doren and Jerry Lee Lewis and which will be followed by “Girls in the Night” (1953), which marked Arnold’s move from documentaries to features in a story of lost innocence as a family struggles to escape the Lower East Side for Queens. Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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Arnold is long overdue for an archival tribute, but it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm for the American Cinematheque’s Halloween offering, “Euro Sexo Horror: The Films of Lucio Fulci and Jesus (Jess) Franco,” commencing Friday at Raleigh Studios. The Cinematheque’s ace programmer, Dennis Bartok, wisely offers a periodic break from seriousness and high quality, but with the late Fulci and Franco we aren’t talking the stylish horror of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, we’re talking trash.

Despite the strongest possible endorsements for the 1981 “The Beyond” (Friday at 7:15 p.m.) from the makers of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” it’s more likely to put you to sleep than scare the daylights out of you. A young, down-on-her-luck Englishwoman, Katherine MacColl, inherits from an uncle a derelict hotel outside New Orleans, and for her it’s a matter of things going from bad to infinitely worse. The hotel, alas, is built over one of the mythical seven gates to hell.

Visually, the film is quite elegant, thanks to Glenn Kimbell’s camerawork and Janice Klepner’s inspired production design. But as a thriller of the occult it’s overly familiar, just another rotting-flesh ghoul parade. Not helping matters is Fulci’s frequently languid pacing--just think, the Cinematheque is presenting it in an uncut version longer than its 1984 American release as “7 Doors of Death.” It’s clearly the work of people trying to create a sophisticated horror piece only to be undone by trite, underdeveloped material.

“Succubus” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.) takes its title from a perfectly respectable word of Middle English and medieval Latin derivation defined in Webster’s as “a female demon thought to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men.”

So much for etymology. As for Franco’s 1967 “Succubus,” there is absolutely nothing respectable about it whatsoever. It’s just another sleazy piece of European-made sexploitation, arty to the point of incoherence and fitted out with the ludicrous dubbed dialogue and the bilious color characteristic of this type of product. Worst of all, it’s a cheat--at once so awkward and so coy it’s virtually devoid of prurient appeal.

Like everything else in it, it’s never clear whether the heroine (Janine Reynaud) is merely some sort of nut or truly an agent of the devil. In either case, the lady looks like hell weighed down by a ton of makeup and a mop of rusty hair. Reynaud plays a performer who enjoys her work inordinately in a sadomasochistic act in a Lisbon night club whose proprietor (Jack Taylor) she seduces. She can’t settle down to this affair, however, because she has these bad dreams that leave her with the feeling she’s lived in other times and places and has engaged in all manner of debaucheries and murderous deeds. It develops--with more clarity in the distributor’s synopsis than on the screen--that this spooky guy who shows up from time to time is none other than Lucifer, bent on reminding her of her duties as a succubus. “Succubus” is worthless as either entertainment or pornography.

It takes 93 minutes to peel Fulci’s “A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m.) only to find there’s nothing there and never was. This Italo-Franco-Spanish co-production--set in London!--is a deliriously silly, extravagantly arty but actually thoroughly routine murder mystery. There’s this rich, gorgeous woman (Florinda Bolkan) who has these murderous lesbian sex fantasies involving her hard-drugging, heavy-orgying next door neighbor (Anita Strindberg). One day Strindberg winds up murdered for real, but Bolkan insists she didn’t do it because she’s been responding to psychiatric treatment undertaken on account of those fantasies.

Who, then, did? Her prominent father (Leo Genn)? Her two-timing husband (Jean Sorel)? Her hippie stepdaughter (Edy de Galleani)? The English dubbing is technically far better than usual, but it’s funny to hear upper-class English accents coming out of so many patent non-Britons. Worse still, the dialogue is insufferably arch.”

Genn and police inspector Stanley Baker, who’ve got their own voices at least, fare best. The others look good but sound awful. Any way you look at it “A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” is a waste.

“Lizard” will be followed at 9:30 p.m. with a double feature composed of Fulci’s “The Awful Dr. Orloff” (1961), a shameless rip-off of Georges Franju’s horror classic “Eyes Without a Face,” and Franco’s “Sadisterotica” (1968), with “Succubus” star Janine Reynaud. Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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As part of its Alternative Screen series, the Cinematheque is screening Larry Fessenden’s 1991 “No Telling, or the Frankenstein Complex” tonight at 9:30 p.m. It’s nothing if not ambitious. A medical researcher, Geoffrey Gaines (Stephen Ramsey), and his painter-wife Lillian (Miriam Healy-Louie) head for a summer in the country, where an old barn has been converted into a secret lab where Geoff is to conduct experiments on animals. Meanwhile, the bored, restless Lillian, eager to conceive, strikes up an acquaintance with a hunky ecologist (David Van Tieghem), who’s trying to convince the locals to convert to organic farming.

In his feature debut, Fessenden has tackled one message too many--the serious environmental concerns raised by the ecologist deserve their own movie. Fessenden’s willingness to grapple with crucial issues is of course admirable, but “No Telling” is too preachy and not nearly as tense or involving as it means to be. “No Telling” will be preceded at 7:30 p.m. by “Spooky Shorts,” a program of Halloween-themed films.

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Saturday and Sunday at noon, Filmforum presents “Jonas in the Desert,” Peter Stempel’s tribute to experimental filmmaker and theorist Jonas Mekas, who along with Stempel will be present at both screenings. Mekas is such a seminal figure, crucial in launching the career of the profoundly influential critic Andrew Sarris, you wish you could be enthusiastic about the film. It’s a tedious insider’s visual scrapbook. Information: (310) 478-6379.