Creature from the Black Lagoon

It makes for solid horror-thrill entertainment.

Jack Arnold has a flair for this sort of thing, and if there really is anything frightening about a man dressed up in a rubber suit with zippers where the gills ought to be, Arnold comes close to finding it.

This adventure has no depth.

The routine story is mightily improved by Arnold's sure sense of atmospheric locations and by the often sympathetic portrait of the monster.

The whole thing is ultimately just a '50s B-movie, but it's hard to imagine what they could have done to make it a better one.

When I was a kid, this was the movie monster I wanted to be.

What distinguished Jack Arnold's pictures from mutant spinoffs/knockoffs is even more imperative to sci-fi today than it was in 1954: wonderment.

Imbued with great atmosphere by director Jack Arnold, the film is genuinely frightening, but also elicits a certain amount of pathos for the creature.

The underwater sequences were excellently shot by Havens, and the make-up for the half man, half fish was a masterful creation by Bud Westmore and Jack Keven.

Very neat