- Director: Jack Arnold
- Writers: Martin Berkeley, William Alland
- Stars: John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bromfield
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 22 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/2MIgGuB
Synopsis
We get an overhead view of a tributary of the upper Amazon. We shift to the Rita the same boat from the previous movie. They’ll be returning to the Black Lagoon in the morning. The mission is to capture the Gill Man. We get a quick overview about evolution and the theory over how this creature can still exist.
They arrive and lower a man down in what looks like an armored diving suit. The creature attacks immediately. He goes for the air hose, but the men on the boat start shooting, and he swims away unharmed. They dynamite the water, and the gill-man floats to the surface, unconscious.
The creature is in a coma and is flown to a lab in California, where he’ll be in the care of Professor Clete Ferguson. They unload him at the big Ocean Harbor aquarium, and he finally wakes up. He nearly escapes right away, but they net him and chain him to the pool.
Ferguson quickly meets Helen, and he likes her. The Gill-man also likes her, and he keeps staring at her through the window of the pool. Clete and Helen get into the pool to feed and train the Gill-Man, and he gets pretty excited.
They start performing various scientific tests on the Gill man. It turns out he’s closer to human than fish, just a hair away genetically. He kills Clete’s assistant Joe and escapes. He heads straight for the ocean and is free. Soon, he’s sighted nearly everywhere, and the Navy is hunting him. They assume he’s slowly heading back to the Amazon.
But he hasn’t gone back to the Amazon. He’s hanging out across the street from Helen’s motel. He kills Helen’s dog. The next morning, Helen and Clete take off on a boat bound for Clete’s hometown, and we see the Creature following them.
When they arrive, they dress up and go to the Lobster House, where there’s a huge crowd. The Gill Man walks in right behind them. He grabs Helen and dives off the pier. The police put out an APB on the creature. A huge search gets underway.
They finally find Helen on the beach, and when the Creature comes out of the water to pick her back up, he’s spotted. Clete grabs Helen, and the cops start shooting. Once again, the Creature sinks to the bottom, not to be seen until the next film…
Commentary
Clint Eastwood is easily recognizable in his first performance as a young college student in the lab who has trouble with a lost rat.
Anyone who has issues with Sea World will get pretty riled up with the conditions the Gill man is forced to live in, which were probably based on realistic conditions at the time. A tiny radius of chain in the middle of a not-very-large pool. And they probably didn’t feed him anything in the month or so it would have takem to get from the Amazon to California.
This wasn’t as good as the first one, and it looked a bit cheaper as well. If you liked the first one, you won’t hate this, but it’s a noticeable step down in quality.