Creature from the Black Lagoon
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Creature from the Black Lagoon is a genre-making 1954 horror film. A fossil expedition along the Amazon River discovers the fabled Black Lagoon and its prehistoric menace, a "Gill-Man" - a fish-human hybrid. The explorers capture the creature after it kills their native guides, but it escapes. It then returns to kidnap the token female research assistant and carries her away to its lair for the others to rescue her.
Made for Universal Pictures in a lightweight 79 minutes, directed by Jack Arnold and starring Richard Carlson, Julie Adams and Richard Denning. The Gill-Man was played by Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning, the underwater action specialist (later to be responsible for the TV-series Flipper).
It is considered a classic of the 1950s monster B-movies and has wonderfully crisp photography to back up the featherweight plot and acting.
Followed by two sequels Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Both the 1954 and 1955 films were originally made in 3-D for polarized 3D-glasses (but mainly distributed for the red/green anaglyph spectacles, showing an inferior 3D-effect), the last one was only produced "flat". In the 1980s the director John Carpenter attempted to produce a remake, and a script was written by John Landis and Nigel Kneale, but the film ultimately went unproduced.
The film has also had an effect on paleontology. When Jenny Clack of the University of Cambridge discovered a fossil amphibian in what was once a fetid swamp, she named it Eucritta melanolimnetes, which is Latin for, literally, "the creature from the black lagoon."