Put on your scuba gear because we are going back to 1954 and you will soon know "what kind of fish do this?" This is the story of a group of scientist that discover a large unusal hand fossil and soon discovers that there is a living creature from the Devonian era that still survives. This movie is great and very suspenseful. It is also unusual because it is a movie of three stages. First it is a "prehistoric monster on the loose" movie , then it becomes a "beauty and the beast movie", and lastly becomes a "hunter becomes the hunted" movie. Believe me, this combination works. The creature was played by four different actors total but only one did all three movies. Ricou Browning did all the creature parts in the water scenes but he never played the creature in any land scenes. This was because he was on the shorter side (once reported 5'5") and Universal wanted the creature to be big and imposing. In the first film Ben Chapman did the land scenes, the second film was Tom Hennesy and in the third and final film it was Don Megowan that played the creature. This movie was an instant classic and earned the right to join the other Universal classic monsters from the thirties and forties. The film as shot in 3-D but due to customer complaints about the picture giving them headaches and the cost to theatre owners, it was shown normal in most screenings.
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