Carl Dreadstone - Creature from the Black Lagoon

[kooshmeister]

I recently purchased the much-appreciated reprint of Vargo Statten's 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon novelization. A bit on the dry side, it is nonetheless a fun book and expands nicely on the plot while sticking true to the film.



This got me thinking about the Walter Harris Creature from the Black Lagoon novelization published some years later in the 1970's, as part of the so-called Universal Horror Library, where all the books were written under the pseudonym "Carl Dreadstone" to make it seem as though one man had written all six. More specifically, how much I hated its guts.

Without doubt, it's one of the worst excuses for a movie novelization I've ever read. Not because it's lazy, like Terry Bisson's The Fifth Element or Nathan Elliot's Innerspace, since it for what it is it's well written and quite detailed. But because, alone among the Universal Horror Library paperbacks I've managed to get so far, it has literally almost nothing to do with its source material beyond its title and a bunch of people in the Amazon looking for a monster.

First the good stuff. It's quite violent and has a lot of gross-out bits. Now the bad; everyone in it is an unlikable jerkface and Harris changes literally everything about the story beyond the most basic of basics. This is strange. His Werewolf of London was such a fantastic book, both as a story in its own right and as a novelization of the 1935 film, that I'm having difficulty believing the same guy wrote both it and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I should've known something was up when the novel begins with some poachers getting brutally killed by the creature, rather than Dr. Maia's Amazonian excavation. From there the book just sort of spirals out of control. Except for David Reed (and maybe Kay; my memory escapes me) everyone is renamed: Lucas is now "Jose Goncalves Fonseca de Souza" and Mark Williams has become "Bruno Gebhardt," and is German. Even Carl Maia and Edwin Thompson don't escape unscathed (literally or figuratively; see below) - their first names are ever-so-slightly changed to Carlos and Ed respectively. With such tiny changes, what on Earth was the point?

About everyone being a jerk, everyone except Reed and Kay are cowardly, scheming and self-serving, and even supposed good guy Bruno more or less straight-up murders Jose as he begs for his life at one point, by throwing him overboard so the monster gets him. Smooth, Bruno. Real smooth. The likable passengers and crew of the Rita are jettisoned and replaced with this bunch of rejects from a softcore slasher film. Which is fine I guess, if there were an original novel... which to be honest it may as well be, because Harris' alterations don't end there!

In addition to almost everyone being slimy, unpleasant and mean-spirited turds, almost everyone who survived in the movie dies in the book. Bruno (the Mark analogue) feeds Jose (the Lucas analogue) to the monster, Thompson gets impaled by the beast with a tree (!) and Maia is picked up off the deck of the ship and eaten by it.

Oh yeah, did I mention the creature is big enough to pick a fully grown person up one-handed, hurl trees with enough force to impale someone, knock a helicopter out of the sky, and needs to be bombarded by a navy gunboat to be killed?

And also it's a hermaphroditic pig monster.

.....

But enough about the nonsense. How about the icky stuff? While I tastefully condemn this elsewhere, here, I can wallow in it as much as I like. So. The kills are pretty brutal. Tame, admittedly, compared to a lot of the pulpier novels I've had the immense pleasure to track down and read thanks to this place, but still quite nasty when compared to the movie. Maia's death is quite horrific, with a lot of emphasis placed on him being chewed into bloody chunks by the monster, and, earlier, the monster flings the corpse of one of its past victims at him, and he takes a big load of maggots in the face. Yummy. Bruno dies when the shemale pig monster basically belly-flops onto him and squishes him, causing his eyeballs to shoot out of their sockets. I dunno if that's gruesome or hilarious.

So I'm torn. I don't mind the excessive added violence and gross bits, but I do dislike the other changes Harris made, particularly in regards to the monster's size, gender and appearance, and the characters' personalities and the fact he (a little too sadistically) kills off the entire supporting cast who made it through the film. As its own book it's great... as a novelization of the movie, it's better left to drown at the bottom of the titular lagoon.

[kooshmeister]

Okay, regarding the actual plot in lieu of just bashing the book for being a poor adaptation...

The novel starts off with a group of native guys led by Luiz Padilha and his friend Joaquim Benzoni hunting for diamonds in the Xingu Jungle in Manaus. Luiz is half-black and Joaquim is an evil misanthrope who hates all living things except for piranhas and poisonous spiders because he enjoys seeing people get eaten alive by them. After he fantasizes about Luiz or someone else in the expedition getting eaten, they discuss the fate of the last poor bastard who found diamonds in the area, Rodriguez Sevedra, who was waylaid by competitors who not only stole his hard-earned jewels but also cut his throat and dismembered his corpse. This has nothing to do with anything, nor does Joaquim's weird predatory fish fetish.

The group heads into the dreaded Black Lagoon, where they make camp for the night. The creature of the title, described, you're well aware by now, as being basically the size of Godzilla, emerges from the water and attacks them. Two of the other guys get eaten (hey, Joaquim, you got your wish!). Luiz also dies while Joaquim escapes in a canoe, frantically paddling back to civilization.

We then get introduced to David Reed, an American ichthyologist "on attachment" to the Brazilian Institute of Marine Biology, being flown to Manaus by Colonel Alves of the Brazilian Air Force. Apparently Joaquim Benzoni told his story, and it's attracted a lot of scientific attention. Wow, scientists sure are gullible! The only eyewitness is a known criminal and also is totally insane, and has no evidence beyond "I pinky-swear it's true!" and scientists are converging from all over to rent a piece of shit boat to travel down the Amazon to see the supposed giant... whatever-it-is.

Said P.O.S. boat is the Rita, captained by José Goncalves Fonseca de Souza, a lecherous slimeball of a man. Harris wastes no time in getting the book's second expedition to the Black Lagoon underway, as from arriving at the airport, Reed is literally aboard the Rita in like the very next chapter. With Joaquim along to lead the way, we're introduced to the rest of the cast in a great big exposition dump:

-Reed's colleague Carlos Maia, a Brazilian scientist from the Institute.
-"Naturalized Brazilian of German descent" Bruno Gebhardt, who has "ex-Nazi" written all over him.
-"Pipe-smoking introvert" Ed Thompson, an American scientist from California.
-Thompson's assistant Kay Lawrence, a woman tragically born without a personality.

There's a love triangle between Reed, Kay and Gebhardt. There just is. These three people have never met before apparently and already Reed and Gebhardt are competing for the affections of Thompson's assistant. Further refusing to waste time beyond a scene wherein José tells gross stories about parasites and diseases native to the jungle, the ship arrives in the lagoon in short order. They aren't there long before Joaquim's story proves true and the beastie attacks the Rita. Our gang of eggheads theorize about the monster's origins and eventually dub it "AA" for "Advanced Amphibian."

The rotonone plot to drug the thing is enacted, which for some ungodly reasons involves José skinny-dipping (the different name aside, he's described as looking more or less exactly like Lucas in the film, so, yes, imagine Nestor Paiva naked). The drug works and they tie the doped-up AA to the Rita. Reed conducts a very thorough examination of the thing, including its reproductive organs, discovering both the ol' meat and two bits as well as a vagna, making AA a hermaphrodite. Lovely imagery, Mr. Harris. The beastie wakes up none too pleased and runs amok. Someone radios for a helicopter to come and assist them, before the transmitter is busted in the attack, leaving the gang without a means to contact civilization.

His role in the plot over, Joaquim leaps into the lagoon and somehow swims ashore and runs off into the jungle, apparently never to be heard from again.

Multiple attacks against the Rita by the giant shemale follow. Luiz and friends have been rotting in the destroyed base camp ever since the beginning, and AA helpfully throws the rotted corpse of Luiz at the ship, resulting in Kay and Maia getting showered in maggots. Then the monster throws a tree branch that impales Thompson, who falls overboard, flounders around for a bit, and then sinks. That night, they sleep aboard while taking turns being on guard. The monster attacks while it's Maia's turn, and tilts the boat so he slides into its mouth like Quint in Jaws. He passes out from its bad breath (!) and gets munched, leaving just his intestines behind. José then suggests they eat breakfast (!!!).

As time goes on, José begins wondering why the hell they're still there with two people dead and a third run off to God knows where, and suggests they leave. Reed isn't hearing any of it. He's in full "OMG science!" mode and unlike Lucas, who friggin' pulled a Crocodile Dundee knife on Mark Williams and said it was his damn boat and they left when he said so, José is a spineless wuss who knuckles under and lets the bossy American run the show.

The helicopter they managed to send for before losing the radio shows up, and does its level best to deal with the monster, but AA grabs it, its claws piercing through the cockpit and killing the pilots, before it violently hurls the aircraft away into the jungle (!). So much for that plot development.

That night José tries to persuade Gebhardt to murder Reed with him so they can fire up the engines and escape. Gebhardt responds to this by breaking José's arm and throwing him overboard to drown. Then he fires up the boat and tries to leave anyway (!). Consistent motivations? What're those? He doesn't get very far before not AA, but a tribe of hostile Indians attacks them (!!!) and takes them all prisoner, including rescuing José from the water (it seems I misremembered him getting killed in this scene). They take the four of them back to their walled in village for God knows what reason, and the whole "José wanted to murder Reed and then Gebhardt broke his arm and tried to drown him, then leave anyway" thing is just glossed over by everyone, except for the occasional complaint from José.

Apparently the tribe worships the monster as a god or something. I'm getting some King Kong vibes here. AA attacks the village and a lot of rompin' and stompin' goes on. It bites off José's head, and then the medicine man of the tribe tries to drive it away by doing a ritualistic dance, but apparently hermaphroditic giant pig-lizards hate interpretive native dance, so it attempts to kill him, but, remarkably, fails, and satisfies itself with swallowing a native woman whole instead. It then absconds with Kay because gosh darn it, white woman purty. Reed and Gebhardt conspire to escape from what remains of the hostile tribe and rescue her...

[kooshmeister]

More Kong-inspired stuff happens as AA sticks Kay in the branches of a tree and leaves her there for safekeeping. After he and Reed leave the native village and separate, Gebhardt finds her and helps her get down, and then they locate the Rita together. Kinda useless without its functioning radio, though. He is morally outraged over the monster's attack on the native village (what? You mean the people who kidnapped you? Why do they deserve your sympathy?). He cements his "I used to be a Nazi until I wised up and fled to South America" creds by angrily calling AA "the Hitler of the animal kingdom." Great, Gebhardt! You just Godwinned the entire book! Abandon review! Abandon review!

Kay replies to this that she's "no Eva Braun," so it isn't gonna work out with her and the giant hermaphroditic beaked pig monster fishman thing. Which now thanks to Gebhardt I'm also picturing with a Hitler mustache. Christ.

They meet up with Reed again and rather than sleep aboard the ship, they choose to bed down in the jungle. In his audio commentary on the DVD, Tom Weaver wonders why in God's name Kay goes swimming in the Black Lagoon, pointing out that even without the existence of a living version of the fossil they're looking for, Lucas just got done telling them about nine foot long killer catfish. Here, I'm asking the same thing; José earlier spent a good deal of time during the journey telling them about all the vile and creepy parasites and tropical diseases the Amazonian jungle has to offer... and yet they're sleeping in the undergrowth instead of aboard the boat.

Granted, the boat is probably the first place AA will look for them, and it's gonna be mighty pissed when it finds Kat not up in the tree where it left her, but still. Needless to say, the whole night long they get feasted on by every bloodsucking insectoid abomination God ever put on the Earth to be a jerk, big ticks in particular. A huge centipede crawls up Reed's leg and another animal, attempting to eat it, accidentally takes a bite out of him instead.

Seriously, fuck the Amazon. Everything wants to kill you there. Even without things like AA you've got ticks, centipedes, piranhas, and that freakin' fish that swims up your dick. And, at least according to Walter Harris, evil diamond hunters who get off on killer fish and spiders (seriously, what was with Joaquim? And where did he go?) and tribes of perpetually pissed off interpretive dancers.

In the morning, they awaken, somehow having managed to sleep, and begin formulating a plan! They need to contact the Navy and get someone out here with something capable of taking down the roid-rage Black Lagoon beastie. I believe what they want to do is find the crashed helicopter and see if they can use its radio.

Elsewhere, AA is indeed in the middle of discovering Kay isn't where it left her. Oh, and apparently at some point, someone (Reed, I think) speared it through the roof of the mouth, badly injuring its palette, and it's loathe to return to the lagoon lest piranhas smell its blood and come a-gnawin' at such a vulnerable spot. It instead decides to content itself with finding and killing the remaining white people. Except Kay, because the power of boners (and lady boners; remember, AA has both) is stronger (thank you, Cinema Sins!).

[kooshmeister]

I was wrong. They don't actually try the radio in the crashed helicopter. That would make sense and justify the copter's inclusion in the story. Dang it. What happens instead is they go back to the Rita and Kay instead justifies her inclusion in the story instead by revealing, quite suddenly, that she had a boyfriend who was a ham radio enthusiast, and so she knows how to repair radios.

Gebhardt is impressed with her technical skills. So much so he stares at her ass. He wants to bang her (what? Right now? Priorities, dude!), but holds off because "she's Reed's." Yeah, there's a lot of discussion about Kay, as a woman, as property of the male characters, even the only partially male AA, and even here when she's actually asserting herself and playing an active, rather than passive, role in the story. Ah, ye olden days. Gebhardt muses "There's a time to respect property and a time to share it." Oh, those kinky Germans. Could he thinking of a threesome?

Anyway, they get in touch with, uh, someone, the novel stubbornly refuses to actually say who, but whoever it is, hey have the authority to send a torpedo boat to rescue them and deal with the giant monster. After concluding their conversation with the Brazilian Ministry of Plot Convenience, Gebhardt feels Kay up a bit, wishing to himself that Reed wasn't there so he really can bang her right there on the boat. So much for sharing.

Kay, for her part, has noticed the sole surviving two men are both passive aggressively competing over her, or at least Gebhardt is. David Reed may as well be a plank of wood for all that he seems to notice his colleague is interested in the late Dr. Thompson's assistant. It's a love triangle where one corner of the triangle is unaware there even is a triangle. At any rate, Kay momentarily compares herself to "a bone being fought over by two dogs," but, continuing to stubbornly be a person and not a prop and grow that personality she's lacked all of her life, reminds herself that bones are inanimate objects that don't care which dog it ends up with. She, however, does, and prefers David Reed to Bruno Gebhardt. Why, I have no idea, considering, as I said, Reed is a personality-less plank.

I mean, considering Gebhardt earlier broke a dude's arm and threw him into the lagoon to die, and the fact he may or may not be a former Nazi, I can see why she'd consider Reed the safer alternative. But I thought all good girls wanted bad boys? And besides, Gebhardt only did that because José wanted to murder Reed. And besides, being German, shouldn't this mean he's got that exotic foreign thing women are supposed to like? Why must she go instinctively for the white bread all-American boring guy and not the hot European? Oh, wait, it's because Gebhardt is doomed and we can't have Kay falling for a character who's going to be a pancake in a few pages. Right. Thanks, Mr. Harris.

Reed suddenly shows some personality too, but it's too little too late and a poor imitation of Gebhardt's own inner monologue. The same "God, I wanna bang Kay, but if only Bruno weren't here." I'm telling you people, threesome! Live a little!

Suddenly Gebhardt decides he wants to die. He never says or thinks as much, but there's no other explanation for the fact he suddenly decides they should go for a swim. At night. In the Black Lagoon. With a fifty foot abomination of nature running around. He invites the others, and they decline, and, determined to prove he isn't chicken, he hops in. Apparently he thrives on risk, but this seems like an ass-pull to justify why he's risking his neck for no good damn reason.

The inevitable happens, of course, and we get another monster attack. But noy before Reed and Kay take advantage of the fact Gebhardt is out dogpaddling to go below decks, and the Rita is described as "rocking with love." If this tramp steamer's a-rockin', don't come a-knockin'.

It's while they're f**k**g that our old friend AA attacks Gebhardt in the water, but unlike his counterpart in the film, our German friend survives. For now. He does piss himself in terror, though. The creature surfaces underneath him and he winds up clinging to the top of its head (wait, I thought it didn't wanna go back in the lagoon for fear of piranhas being attracted to its persistently bleeding mouth wound?). It heads ashore with Gebhardt piggybacking, and he manages to climb down off of it. He hides and waits until the critter heads off into the jungle to swim back out to the Rita.

It's decided they ought to abandon ship, and AA hastens this decision by returning suddenly, and Kay somehow knows it's coming for her. Heading into the water, it promptly bashes the Rita up real good. Reed's leg is badly injured in the process. Our trio safely makes it ashore, where Kay, crying, takes off her blouse to bandage Reed's leg.

The next morning, a plane arrives and tries to airdrop some weapons for our heroes. There's some time-wasting back and forth between the pilot and his navigator about how best to do it, and their first attempt fails, with the bundle parachuting into some trees. Oops. Their second attempt succeeds, fat lot of good the weapons actually do the main characters. Gebhardt manages to get one containing a spear gun and unpack it, but AA belly-flops onto him. He's crushed and his eyeballs fly out of their socks. Welp, no threesome now. Unless, of course, AA can figure out a way to work its way in between Reed and Kay. Pun intended.

Reed gets his own bundle containing a rifle, but doesn't get it unwrapped before the monster attacks and badly injuries him. He very nearly bleeds out. He passes out and when he awakens he's aboard the torpedo boat they sent for, being tended to by a doctor and ranting and raving from blood loss. The ship's sublieutenant asks if there's anything to what he's saying, and the doctor just chides him for being superstitious and gullible. What? Now suddenly the issue of just randomly believing some raving loony about a giant monster in the Xingu comes up? Where was this guy back when Joaquim was doing this bit?

The chastened sublieutenant goes to report to his commanding officer, who is currently on the bridge talking to Kay, who they also rescued. Incidentally, I have no idea what military this ship is from. Earlier, Harris was emphatic that the DC-3 plane that flies Reed in to Manaus was from the Brazilian Air Force, piloted by a Colonel Alves. Here, though, the all-important torpedo boat that's about to save the day (spoiler) never has the military it hails from identified, nor are any of its crew named. Maybe if we'd known who the heck they radioed for help we'd have some clue. I mean, I'm guessing they're South Americans, too, Brazilians most likely, but does Brazil have a navy? I Googled and yes apparently they do. But Harris is being so coy with these guys and who they are and where they're from that it's rather infuriating, especially considering he went out of his way to identify Alves and what military he belonged to.

Up on the bridge, Kay is having an argument with the politely condescending captain. There was no sign of AA when they arrived (what? Didn't the pilots of the plane see it at all and radio in? Did their colleagues think they were cranks? Why is there sudden skepticism about AA's existence when it seemed like literally everyone believed in the thing before? I guess Reed and Kay had the misfortune to get rescued by the one boat in Brazil's military crewed by a bunch of skeptics.

Anyway, AA has made itself scarce since the navy men arrived, and the captain doesn't think it exists. Why it's being shy now I do not know. When asked if there's no monster, why does the area surrounding the Black Lagoon look so thoroughly trashed, the captain attributes the the destruction to someone having "gone mad with a bulldozer." Kay's efforts to convince him don't seem to be working. Reed for his part remains below decks in sick bay and apparently isn't mentioned again. Does he die? Does he survive? Harris apparently doesn't think we care (and he's right!). Apparently realizing it makes no sense for the heretofore brazen beastie to be hiding, Harris rushes to the end here. Kay's argument with the captain doesn't even get two pages before boom!, AA breaks the surface and decides it wants to eat itself some military men to wash those yummy natives and scientists down. Kay does the usual "Now do you believe me?!" spiel, and the stunned captain replies by ordering the ship to go on the attack.

The book basically runs out of pages here, and the battle between the creature and the ship lasts for all of two or three of them at most before a Polaris missile (!) succeeds in fatally wounding AA. 'Twas Lockheed killed the beast! Wait, did the Brazilian Navy have Polaris missiles? Wikipedia doesn't list them as one of the countries whose navy employed them. Oh, nevermind...

So the giant horny shemale expires. Kay is... kind of upset? Why? She and the torpedo boat crew go over to its corpse to examine it, and in particular she focuses on its dead eyes staring accusing at her. The eyes of a "betrayed friend."

The End.

Blech.

Sorry, Harris, you can't try and pull that Kong bullshit after the novel that preceded it painted the monster as such a violently evil, sadistic beast.

[ramseycampbell]

Just for the record, I hadn't read the three Dreadstone books by other authors when I wrote the introductions - those were based purely on the films and shooting scripts.

[kooshmeister]

Ah, thank you, Mr. Campbell. That makes sense. Were you surprised when you saw the finished product and how little it matched up to the film?

As long as I've got you... can I ask you a question? In your Bride of Frankenstein novelization, you referred to Pretorius' assistant, who is named Karl in the film, as "Fritz." That was the name of Frankenstein's assistant in the first film! And when discussing events pertaining to the previous film, you refer to Frankenstein's assistant Fritz as "Igor."

Was there a reason for this name-shuffling?

I enjoyed the book immensely (especially compared to Harris' poor effort here), but the assistants' name changes have always stuck out in my mind as being particularly unusual. So I've always wanted to ask why this was done.

[ramseycampbell]

I'm not sure about the business with Karl and Fritz. I suspect that since I was working from the original shooting script as well as the film, I used the name from the script, but I don't know if I was aware of having made a change. Sorry!

[kooshmeister]

That would seem to be the case. Listening to Scott MacQueen's Bride of Frankenstein commentary, he mentions that one version of the script used Fritz despite his having died in the first film, and it was only sometime later that the filmmakers realized their mistake, and thus Dwight Frye became the new character Karl instead of reprising his role as Fritz. Perhaps it was this script you worked from?

[ramseycampbell]

It may well be! I believe the copy I worked from is here: www.liv.ac.uk/library/sca/science-fiction/