In 1954, the Universal Monster age briefly gasped back to
life through its scaly gills with the successful release of Creature from the Black Lagoon. The following year, director Jack
Arnold was back to strike again while the iron continued glowing bright red with
Revenge of the Creature. In 1956, the
Gill Man would take his final stroll in the melancholic Creature Walks Among Us, but as it turns out, this was not exactly
the third creature feature. In the interim between parts 1 and 2, members of
Arnold’s crew and some of the folks from Marineland Studios, the aquatic animal
park that was the setting of Revenge
(now known as Marineland), created a comedic Gill Man short to screen at the Revenge of the Creature wrap party.
The Return of the
Creature was a 21 minute, 8mm film starring Patsy Beery (aka Patricia Powers), who
played the unforgettable, uncredited role of “Girl in Convertible” in Revenge of the Creature. On his website, Patsy’s brother Jere, who played the uncredited part of a photographer in Revenge, had this to say about his sister's picture: “(Patsy’s husband) Clayton (Powers) worked at Marineland and made many
friends with the movie crew who were there to film the Black Lagoon sequel.
After the production crew left town, Clayton and Patsy produced a (sic) amateur home
movie satire of the Revenge of the
Creature… One particular memorable
scene in this no-budget production was when the ‘Creature’ is revived and kept
alive in a apartment bath tub while being fed martinis to keep him sedated.”
A still of Patsy Beery with a makeshift Gill Man from The Return of the Creature.
Although Jere Beery
goes on to say that members of the Revenge
crew received copies of The Return of the
Creature, it has generally been considered a lost film for the past 58 years. Film historian Tom
Weaver performed his own search to find out if this was true. Weaver’s creature
quest brought him to an associate of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of
Marine Studios, which led him to the filmmaker behind Return, who then sent Weaver a DVD duplicate of the film.
This is not the end
of the story, because on Friday, July 19, The
Return of the Creature will finally go public at the Monster Bash convention in Pittsburgh.
Tom Weaver, who attested that the movie is laugh-out-loud funny, will be on
hand to introduce the film.
In other Creature
news, Bloody Disgusting.com reported yesterday that
Gammi Illustrations has released some spectacular, unpublished, color-corrected
photos from the set of Black Lagoon
originally shot for Life magazine in
1953. Check them out in all their full-color glory here.
