:42:01
"A little bit more human in appearance."
:42:03
That early rejected head
was sculpted by Chris Mueller,
:42:06
almost certainly from
a design by Milicent Patrick.
:42:08
And when Universal started thinking
about making a second Creature movie,
:42:13
there was talk of
adding a Gill-Woman.
:42:15
The rejected gill-man head,
or something like it,
:42:17
would have been used
as the head of the female creature.
:42:20
When the rejected head was made,
it was supposed to be a gill-man,
:42:23
but the eventual gill-man head used
in the picture looked so ferocious
:42:27
that this more human head looked
almost feminine by comparison.
:42:36
Q Magazine: "This horrendous
pseudo-science-fiction melodrama
:42:39
revolves, wildly, in three dimensions
and with considerable excitement,
:42:43
around a poor ancestral fish that
never quite made the grade to man."
:42:47
"However, it ain't funny, McGee.
On the contrary, it's pretty scary."
:42:50
"And Creature from the Black Lagoon
is a first-rate thriller-chiller of its type."
:42:55
But when the movie played on TV,
the New York Times always called it
:42:58
"about as charming as a dead cat".
:43:02
There is such a thing as rotenone,
they didn't make it up.
:43:05
It's a crystalline substance
used in insecticides.
:43:08
Universal decided not
to use real rotenone,
:43:11
so they had to do some
experimenting during preproduction,
:43:14
combining pure cream with aluminum
for shots of rotenone on the surface,
:43:18
and they used pure cream alone
for the underwater shots.
:43:27
Here in one rowboat are the two
leading sci-fi stars of the '50s.
:43:30
Richard Carlson was in
It Came from Outer Space,
:43:32
The Magnetic Monster,
The Maze and Riders to the Stars.
:43:35
Denning was in Target Earth,
Creature with the Atom Brain,
:43:38
The Day the World Ended
and Black Scorpion.
:43:40
They were both in Black Lagoon, of
course. So they're even, sci-fi-wise.
:43:44
When I asked Denning about Carlson,
he wasn't crazy about the guy.
:43:48
Denning said Carlson could be uppity,
:43:50
and that goes along with what
other people have told me.
:43:53
The one who said it best was
Michael Fox, who worked with Carlson
:43:56
in Magnetic Monster and Riders to the
Stars, and half a dozen other movies.