The Creature Walks Among Us

I’ll be completely honest: when I said that this series was effectively a trilogy I really remembered nothing about this movie except that the creature is injured, loses it’s gills, and walks on land. I remembered little with good reason. Everything else in this movie feels like bits of the other two movies, redone poorly and in an illogical manner.

The movie feigns some degree of continuity by establishing that the Gill Man is no longer in the Amazon, but now hiding in the Florida Everglades. This effects the plot not one bit. The trip to Florida is still treated as an epic adventure by our intrepid scientists. They even get there by boat. These people actually took a boat to get from one part of the United States to another on a trip that was purely for business!

This time our scientists are led by Dr. William Barton (Jeff Morrow), a man who believes that the Gill Man is somehow the secret to humans surviving in Outer Space. I guess I can’t start faulting the science now,. He brings along his wife Marcia (Leigh Snowden), and a guide named Jed (Gregg Palmer) who makes passes at Marcia.

The actual hunt for the creature has nothing new to offer. We get spear guns, poison, and a lot of diving scenes. Everything is more well-lit now, losing any remaining traces of the exotic this series might have offered. We also get to see their fancy new fish-finder. Of course, the movie includes lots of pseudo-scientific babble that anyone who passed High School biology would laugh out loud at.

Their battle with the Gill Man ends with it being badly burned, and rushed to...I’m honestly not sure. Obviously there’d be plenty of labs and research facilities in Florida, but this movie five minutes earlier treated the area as no different from the Amazon. In this lab they find that the fire has somehow activated the Gill Man’s lungs, while also burning away his gills, and revealing “human skin” underneath (tenure to the biologist who can explain any of this with a straight face).

The effect of the Gill-less Man is rather unimpressive. I’m fairly certain he bulked up, and I have no idea how having stuff burned off of you makes you larger. He has the Creature’s face, but is otherwise basically human. There’s no real sign of burns or scarring, or even asymmetry in his face.

The movie really doesn’t seem to go anywhere narratively. We get a love triangle with Jed, Marcia, Barton, and Barton’s colleague Dr. Tom Morgan (Rex Reason). The Gill-less man keeps attempting to get back into the water, not realizing he will now drown. The scientists discuss whether the creature is becoming less violent because of it’s physical changes, or because they showed it kindness (...by locking it in a cage after severely burning it...). Then it kills a Mountain Lion that gets into it’s cage and attacks it, and somehow this gives the edge to Dr. Morgan and his biological determinism.

The final few minutes attempt to tie all of this together by having Dr. Morgan kill Jed, and attempt to frame the Gill-less man by throwing his body in it’s cage. Instead, it breaks out, and rampages through the house (why they had a zoo-like enclosure in the yard of what appears to be an otherwise normal residential home I don’t know). The creature kills Dr. Barton and then escapes.

The movie ends with an attempt at being profound. We get a speech about how the creature, which in three films has never shown more than animal-level intelligence, somehow proved something about humanity by killing Morgan. Blah blah, beast, stars, we’re halfway between the jungle and space travel.

Then, the movie ends with the implication that the creature drowned itself. I suspect we were supposed to take it as suicide, but honestly there’s no reason to think that, given that the creature had been trying to do the exact same thing earlier in the film, and there was never any indication that he realize he could no longer breath water.

I had trouble even paying attention to this movie. Yes, it’s technically the completion of a thematic journey from savagery to civilization, with the Gill Man being unable to return home at the end. However, I’d much rather have a good movie than thematic match. Actually, would it be too much to ask for both?