The Creature From the Black Lagoon

I had an appointment today with the Welfare Officer at work this morning. The main reason for the visit was last week's robbery, but we also discussed my depression, low self-esteem and general unhappiness at work. He lent me a personal alarm, to make me feel safer going out on the streets after dark. basically it's a small device that can be clipped on to the belt and if the string is pulled it makes a horrendous loud noise, something between a siren and a screech. I was up there for about an hour and ten minutes.

The rest of the day was very quiet. There wasn't much work in at all and that which was there was pretty much all complex stuff that had to be referred for checking, and so not much actually got done. in the end I just got fed up and left about half an hour earlier that I probably should have.

I had an incident free journey home and I'm now sitting here watching The Creature From the Black Lagoon, directed by Jack Arnold. It's a horror film from 1954 about a scientific expedition which discover a strange fossilised hand in the South American jungle. A further expedition is despatched to the remote area, known locally as the "Black Lagoon", near where the fossil was found. They soon find that the Lagoon is inhabited by an intelligent humanoid fish monster, which soon develops a huge crush on the party's sole female member (Julia Adams). The film was really popular in it's day. Today it seems very dated, with terrible acting and the "Gill-Man" monster never quite recovers from the fact that it looks very obviously like a man in a rubber monster suit. It also suffers from avery predictable story. However, despite that, it is very effective. The underwater sequences are extremely impressive, the Gill-Man is depicted quite sympathetically and it is quite unusually sexual as well for the time. The famous scene in the film is where the woman is swimming in the lagoon in a white swimsuit and in the water beneath her the Gill-Man is imitating her moves.