Movie review for the day

Rico says the ladyfriend had never seen it, and Rico didn't remember it anyway, so we watched the Creature from the Black Lagoon recently. Hokey doesn't begin to describe it; it was 1954, after all. (Rico wouldn't have seen it until much later, probably in the early 1960s.) The low-tech of the monster (though he did a lot of stunts underwater, with no breathing apparatus) was offset by the then-new AquaLung, invented in Paris during the winter of 1942–1943 by the engineer Émile Gagnan and then lieutenant de vaisseau (ship-of-the-line lieutenant) Jacques Cousteau; they used the classic two-bottle, two-hose version:

Starring Richard Carlson and Richard Denning as the warring scientists, the love interest was Julie Adams, who did the then-obligatory screaming whenever she saw the monster, played by two actors, Ricou Browning as The Gill Man in water, and Ben Chapman as The Gill Man on land; they were uncredited, it's said, in the forlorn hope of convincing audiences that the monster (photo, below) was real...