Creature from the Black Lagoon is a 1954 monster horror 3-D film in black-and-white, directed by Jack Arnold and starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno and Whit Bissell. The Creature was played by Ben Chapman on land and by Ricou Browning underwater. It premiered in Detroit on February 12 and was released on a regional basis, opening on various dates.
Creature from the Black Lagoon was filmed in 3-D and originally projected by the polarized light method. The audience wore viewers with gray polarizing filters, similar to the viewers most commonly used today. Because the brief 1950s 3-D movie fad had peaked in mid-1953 and was fading fast in early 1954, many audiences actually saw the film "flat", in 2-D. Typically, the film was shown in 3-D in large downtown theaters and flat in smaller neighborhood theaters. In 1975, Creature from the Black Lagoon was re-released to theaters in the inferior red-and-blue-glasses anaglyph 3-D format, which was also used for a 1980 home video release on Beta and VHS videocassettes.
Creature from the Black Lagoon generated two sequels: Revenge of the Creature (1955), which was also filmed and released in 3-D in hopes of reviving the format, and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), filmed in 2-D. The creature, also known as the Gill-man, is usually counted among the classic Universal Monsters.Synopsis
A geology expedition in the Amazon uncovers fossilized evidence from the Devonian period of a link between land and sea animals in the form of a skeletal hand with webbed fingers. Expedition leader Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) visits his friend and former student, Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson), an ichthyologist who works at an aquarium in California and has been a guest at Maia's marine biology institute in Brazil for over a month. Reed persuades his boss, the financially-minded Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning), to fund a return expedition to the Amazon to look for the remainder of the skeleton.
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