And herein lies the beauty of the double feature. Two movies in a row. The thing is, I really, really enjoy the cinematic experience. It’s like a double-header to baseball fanatics. (Although I’m not one, I certainly like those too.) Unless baseball people think that double-headers are somehow impure? Well, if they do: whatev. It’s just, there I’ll be, watching the credits go by, when suddenly I don’t have to leave and go home, because, another movie! It’s possible I’ve explained this sufficiently, though.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is about this, well, this creature, right? It lives along the Amazon, at a place that the natives call the Black Lagoon, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. Black and white film makes some things non-obvious, water color among them. But I don’t remember any of the characters discussing anything being all that black. Anyhow, this so-called creature is kind of an amphibious fishman, who is among other things a perfect segue for the whole evolution discussion. It is amusing to me that the film so casually asserts that God created everything via evolution, yet it is so hard fifty years later to find people willing to take a look at that compromise position.

Besides evolution, though, this movie was about a lot of things. Underwater photography, for one. If you removed the underwater shots that served no other purpose than as a tech demo? Movie over in under an hour. It’s like Star Trek: the Motion Picture without the 45 minutes of “look at the cool new Enterprise model”. For another… well, it wasn’t about this, but it was certainly a permeating undercurrent to the whole thing. Natives? Completely irrelevant. The important thing is to work that paleontology and retrieve the creature-skeleton (and later, of course, the live specimen instead) in order to prove that it existed and make us all rich and/or famous. I mean, until the white people are in danger. Then it’s time to stop this tomfoolery and save ourselves. I know it was a different time, but I really am amazed/amused that nobody on the writing staff seemed to notice how blatantly dismissive of the natives they were being. Oh, and the paleontology? Maybe they were this careless back then, but I doubt it. The techniques were completely laughable, and I am very much an amateur on this topic.

But what it was really about was the relationship between the creature and the girl. The completely hot, thank you for going swimming and I wish you weren’t in your 80s right now girl, I’d like to add. She was thoroughly yum, and even moreso in her explorer shorts than in the bathing suit, if you can believe it. Which would be beside the point, really, except for the part where the creature is a stand-in for every teenage boy in America. Two goals: 1) get the girl, and then take her back to your aquatic underground lair where you’ll, well, okay, you don’t exactly know what it is you want to do, but boy do you ever want to do it, and 2) kill anyone that gets in the way of goal one, because that testosterone is on the upsurge just now, if you know what I mean.

I guess my point is, once the underwater scenes got old, it was the inferior of the two films due to being not quite as deep of theme. But then again, a good slice of cheesecake goes a long way. Also: multiple gratuitous spear gun shots, off the screen and right into your face! Yay, 3-D.