Creature From the Black Lagoon [DVD]

I am a fan of the early SciFi/Horror films, probably because I grew up watching them in the sixties. Since they aren't on TV much anymore, I have my own collection of these classic films.

I love this movie, it came out in the fifties and some of the best horror is old school. If you want to see a great creature feature this is it.

Fifty three years ago I watched the Creature From The Black Lagoon for the first time on my 5th birthday. As a birthday present my dad would drag out his Bell and Howell projector and put in the reel of The Creature From The Black Lagoon film. Every birthday as my first present the family watched the picture. I watched it each birthday from age 5 to 17. Age 18 I went to college.The movie was great I enjoyed every minute of it. Sad to say I never watched it in 3D. Other reviewers have said the 3D version was great.Two years ago I found the old projector in my parent's house after my parents had passed away but could not find the reel of The Creature From The Black Lagoon. I'm so glad that the old original TCFTBL was put on this Legacy collection DVD. It brings back so many happy memories of my family and I celebrating my birthdays with the Creature.The Legacy DVD collection was great. This B/W DVD had great both visual and audio. I can't complain about anything! The acting, plot and directing were superb but the best INMO was the Creature. The full body rubber suit of the Creature was fantastic and super state of the art for early 1950s. Look at those horrible eyes, gills and clawed webbed hands and big feet! The Creature is seen effortlessly back swimming underwater looking up intently at the beautiful woman swimmer on the surface. You can see it is just iching to reach up and grab her. I pity the man inside the hot rubber suit on land in a hot/humid Florida day. The set was in Fl in the springs about 40 miles from where my family and I live today.As a youngster I was always for the Creature and cheered when it got away out of the net and escaped in the Black Lagoon in the Amazon. Years later I realised this film was similar to King Kong as "beauty killed the beast". Both creatures were attracted to a beautiful woman and this led to their downfall. Like I said I have never seen TCFTBL in 3D. I can imagine the spear gun shots underwater at the Creature must have been great as well as the creature walking with his arms out right into the camera. Must have terrorized the little kids in the 50s (in a nice way).Just shows everyone a great monster/horror movie can be made with NO 4 letter words, sex and nudity, disgusting graphic scenes like peoples heads getting sawed off like in some of today's horror movies. These graphic kinds of PG13 or worse ...horror/monster maybe OK for the older crowed ( I have no interest watching some cruelty like someones head getting cut off by a chainsaw or worse) but INMO NOT for a 5 year old. TCFTBL was the kind of movie you could let your 5 year old enjoy and the rest of the family would enjoy it too. The violence is directed to an inhuman horrible monster and visa versa...not human to human. I LOVED this movie on my birthdays age 5 -17. I weeped every time the creature got spear gunned and shot. I bawled my eyes out when the Creatures lifeless form drifts over the edge of the underwater cliff into deeper water.Maybe someone can please verify this for me. The scene where the creature is holding the unconscious woman in its arms in the cavern passageway... was she truely unconscious? I heard from numerous people the actor playing the Creature bopped the woman's head accidentally on the side of the rocks and the director liked the authentic unconsciousness so much he kept the cameras rolling. True or false?...or is this just a myth.I have never seen the Creature's Revenge or The Creature Walks Among Us. This DVD was great with these 2 bonus DVDs. Each was in B/W . The visual and audio were great. Great plots, acting and again the Creature stole the show. 3 cheers for the Creature. Again the Creature is attracted to good looking women and tries to capture them. I was so mad at the scientists trying to make the creature more human by making him use his lungs instead of his gills so they can have something to study for humankind going into outer space..Now it can't breath underwater and escapes and kills the mental wacko doctor that imprisons him. Again the Creature is attracted to a good looking woman. They even cloth the creature. I felt bad when the Creature kills the graduate student woman's German Shepard dog. The dog was only trying to protect the woman. Bad,bad Creature. All 3 movies as a collection INMO are in the top 5 monster/horror movies of all time and each movie is a 5 star movie!There are bonus trailers of the movies as well as commentary and an original documentary Back to the Black Lagoon. This is a superb Legacy collection to pass down to your kids and their kids. Rated 5 stars plus.

Classic

Update:Universal did the right thing and issued replacement copies of the 2nd disc, which now include a proper MVC 3D encode of Revenge of the Creature. Maybe the SBS encode on the previous version was an honest mistake. Who knows? The movie does look a bit soft in some places, but apparently that's due to the original film, and not a result of disc authoring/compression. I can definitely recommend this set now that it contains the corrected disc and I hope that Universal will continue to release more 3D Blu-rays (both new and from their back catalog) in the future.Original Review:I don't think I've ever been so disappointed with a movie set before or so disgusted with the publisher. I'm going to have to think twice before I pre-order anything from Universal again.Many people, like myself, already own the standalone release of Creature from the Black Lagoon on Blu-Ray, with a proper MVC encoded 3D version of the movie. The Legacy Collection contains a re-issue of that same disc along with a second disc that was touted as containing Revenge of the Creature + a 3D version of that film, and the third and final the Creature Walks Among Us film. If that seems like a lot of movie for one disc to you, you're not wrong. So much in fact that Universal couldn't fit a proper 3D version of Revenge of the Creature on it. Instead they put some low resolution split-screen garbage on the disc in lieu of a proper MVC 3D encode. If you're lucky then maybe your TV or Blu-Ray player can convert it into some blurry low-fi version of an actual 3D Blu-Ray movie. Worse still, it seems they used over-aggressive compression on the 2D version of Revenge of the Creature, in order make it fit, so neither version of the film is of acceptable quality. I might expect this sort of thing if I had ordered a movie set from Sri Lanka, but certainly not in a US release from Universal.The 3D Film Archive (the best in the business) did a 4K 3D restoration of this movie for Universal. Many of us have been awaiting a proper 3D release of Revenge of the Creature for years, and were super excited for this release after finding out they had done the restoration. Sadly, this release is so botched it hasn't given us any chance to see the fruits of their labor. We still don't have a proper 3D release of release of Revenge of the Creature, and the only adequate disc in this collection is the one I already owned. What a disappointment!Would it have killed Universal to make this a proper 3 disc collection in order to do it right instead of cutting so many corners? Actually, there are move collections with 3 times as many Blu-Ray discs for less than half of what I paid to pre-order this thing, so no, it wouldn't have.It's sad to see Universal give such poor treatment to a "Legacy Collection" and sadder still to see such a breach of trust with customers and fans who already owned the first disc in the collection and were expecting something at least on par with that release for the other movies.I'll gladly revise this review if Universal decide to do the right thing and give a proper MVC 3D encoded Blu-ray to people who purchased this, but I'm guessing this was not a mistake, just an ill-conceived cost-cutting measure. The ball is in their court now. We'll see what they do.