Director - Jack Arnold

An archaelogist with a white suit and crude excavating methods dating back to the times he is studying finds a clawed and webbed fossilized hand, conveniently poking out of a rock ten feet from his tent. He splits with the fossil back to the big city to round up an expedition. He gets a couple of smart-talking, macho, marine-biologist types, David and Mark, and David's super-stacked-junk-in-tha-trunk fiance Kay.

They return to the streamside "dig", and find the poorly bewigged native helpers mauled to death, but no fossil monster body. On a whim and a flimsy theory, they travel downstream to a lagoon, where they hope to find more fossil evidence of the fossil claw's former owner. They do a little swimming around in the lagoon, and take some samples. Then Kay sheds her civilian uniform and squeezes into the hottest bathing suit ever built to make a man "study marine biology". While swimming, a living counterpart to the fossil claw, a hideous "gill-man", stalks her every kick and paddle. Yummy. Then when she gets back on the boat, suddenly the net on the little fishing steamer is torn apart by an unknown force which leaves only a claw as its calling card.

The freaky creature climbs on the boat and grabs another of the brown-skinned helpers, apparently in an attempt to keep the expedition racially pure. David and Mark try using some of the boat's sleazy racist stereotype of a latino, redneck capitan's big sacks of sweet delicious bathtub crank to drug the scaly bastard, but it doesn't work completely. The creature tries to grab Kay while the boys are away, but it's a little high, and the boys capture it. BAM - it escapes! and mauls another hapless party member.

That's enough, the group decides to dsplit, the creature is too hot to handle, but no! Having gotten its slimy, flappy flippers on Kay's fantastic, fat fanny, it - or perhaps he - poor lonely creature has gotten it in his mind to keep her, and he blocks the opening of the lagoon.

A brief exchange of testosterone, and Mark and David go back into the water. For his lousy attitude and sexy hairdo, the creature greases Mark. Good riddance - but that doesn't get those honkeys out of the lagoon. The creature climbs back on the boat, and this time is able to make off with kay's too-hot-not-to-handle bod, and swims her off to his cave. Lame-o David goes to rescue her, and ruins the whole icthyological crossbreeding experiment, the bum. I guess the creature was a pioneer of eugenics experimentation.

Good for him, he's got the right idea, the beast and the broad are the bests parts of this early Universal monster pic, which is to be expected. A gem and quite a find for anyone with good sense. If you don't like it, you have the brain of a fish, and are forbidden by law to view the sequels: Revenge of the Creature, and The Creature Walks Among Us.

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