In our Classic Review Series here Read review of Creature From the Black Lagoon below, which was originally headlined, "Black Lagoon Diverting Science-Fiction Meller."

A "good piece of science-fiction of the beauty and the beast school, the beast in this case being a monstrous combination of man and fish"

On Feb. 9, 1954, a month before hitting theaters, The Hollywood Reporter met Universal's latest big screen monster. 

Creature From the Black Lagoon is a good piece of science-fiction of the beauty and the beast school, the beast in this case being a monstrous combination of man and fish. It makes for solid horror-thrill entertainment.

Story starts when scientist Antonio Moreno discovers a huge web-fingered skeleton hand along the Amazon River. When he reports his find an expedition is organized to locate the rest of the skeleton. Among the scientists are Julia Adams, the beauty of the yarn, Richard Carlson, Whit Bissell and Richard Denning, the latter a publicity seeking character who, when he sees the fishman after it has killed several of the helpers, is determined to bring it back. 

They capture it once, but it escapes after almost killing Bissell. Over Denning's objections the others decide to return for help, but the monster has blocked the exit from the lagoon, seeking revenge for the attack upon him and having designs on Miss Adams. It kills Denning and grabs the girl, being tracked down to its eerie hiding place where it is fatally wounded. 

Screenplay by Harry Essex and Arthur Ross, from a story by Maurice Zimm, is soundly developed, leading to an exciting climax. Jack Arnold's megging is briskly competent, although too much time is wasted on underwater shots which are neither novel or dramatic enough to hold interest for the entire footage. Pruning here would help. 

Lovely Julia Adams, finally out of the crinoline costumes, reveals a gorgeous pair of gams in a swimming sequence and turns in her customary fine performance. Richard Carlson, who seems to appear in most of the good science-fiction pictures, is convincing as the male lead, and Richard Denning is strong as the commercial-minded head of the expedition. Nestor Paiva contributes an excellent stint as the skipper of the river boat, and Antonio Moreno and Whit Bissell handle their roles capably. 

The William Alland production was shot in black-and-white 3-D, the process adding some small value to the underwater shots which don't make up for the eyestrain. William E. Snyder's photography is good. Underwater sequences were ably directed by James C. Havens. —Milton Luban

After the travelling through Tamil, Hindi Now ‘Kick’ reached in Kannada, a great full thanks to Sadhu Kokila, in true Uppi style and is a treat for extreme fans.

‘Kick’ has traveled a long way. It’s indeed great to see that in Kannada the film, a crowd-puller formula film, gets re-made with an actor who can do 100% justice to his role.

Yes, it’s a must-see for die hard fans of Uppi Upendra, the singing, fighting, dancing star who has his own style of dialogue delivery, one that endears him to the masses.

Ranga (Upendra) is someone who wishes to derive a ‘kick’ (thrill) out of whatever he does; for this he sometimes causes great risk to himself and to those close to him. He never sticks on to one thing. He happens to come across a young, beautiful girl

Swathi (Kriti Kharbanda), who first dislikes him for this trait of his, but later starts loving him. But later, the ‘kick’ loving nature of Ranga causes a split and they get separated. Later, Swathi happens to come across a daring cop (Raghu Mukherjee), who is out to hunt down none other than Ranga.

Well, ‘Super Ranga’ remains faithful to the original story and at the same time makes sure the real spirit of the original story, the thrills and the frills are not lost in re-making.

Producer K Manju and director Sadhu Kokila makes sure the film gives you real great ‘kick’.

As expected, it’s Uppi Upendra all the way. He just thrills you and performs wonderfully well. Kriti Kharbanda is amazing and looks great too. Raghu Mukherjee shines in his role. Everyone in the cast performs well. Ashok Kashyap delivers the kind of cinematography that’s demanded by the subject and Arjun Janya delivers entertaining music.

‘Super Ranga’ is a treat for the masses and real film-festival for Uppi fans...entertainment guaranteed!!!

After ‘North 24 kaatham’, Anil Radhakrishnan Menon is out to play with ‘Sapthamashree Thaskaraha’, displaying his affinity for stutter-causing Sanskritized words along with fine film-making.

Seven thieves, one goal. While you can extend this tagline to make up the whole story, what’s to be seen is how it all unfolds.

The seven thieves get to know each other in jail. All of them have lost something—reputation, family, trust. But it isn’t a dismal story; it puts together events from all the seven lives that affected them in myriad ways and also landed them in jail.

Among the bunch of jailbirds, the quiet one is Krishnanunni (Prithviraj), whose case coincides with that of Noble (Nedumudi Venu) leaving them with a common bad man-to-be-vanquished. And this becomes everybody’s motive for making a master-plan to hit back at the bad man—Pious (Joy Mathews).

What ensues is how they devise plans to get to their goal once they’re released from jail. But why should everybody get involved in two peoples’ personal vengeance? Money is the factor.

The movie isn’t strictly a thriller; it has excellent comedy, some light flirtation with social issues, and elements of a thriller, in ways that one would wonder where the story is leading to.

What’s on display is fine direction, one that doesn’t stray from the main plot; the only problem being, it gets slightly drab when one plan takes so long to be executed, and there aren’t as many hurdles or setbacks as a thriller is expected to have.

As for the story, if it was more layered, since there were a bunch of very interesting ‘thaskaras’, and if the adventures and misadventures were more sporadic, the fun would have multiplied.

An amusing aspect is how the movie has taken a rather serious past, involving murder and death, and placed it in the ‘present’ of the thieves, who aren’t out to avenge themselves by unleashing violence. There’s enough humour to pull the darkness out of the frames.

Although it will make one wonder how a sullen Krishnanunni with a rather painful trail of events that preceded his jail tenure comes to terms with it soon as he’s out. So quickly, that he specifies that he’d only drink milk when a host serves him black tea.

It’s Annamma (Sanusha) who reminds the viewers with her temperament that all’s not hunky-dory and personal woes remain. This might give way to some mixed feelings, but all’s to be forgotten as we wait for more surprises!

Where humour counts, the most effortless performances came from Chemban Vinod and Neeraj Madhav. The Thrissur slang was slapped on aplenty, and Chemban Vinod masterfully handled the role of a small-time thief in Thrissur with his fleeting expressions and fine-tuned intonations.

Neeraj Madhav stirs up quite a ruckus too, as the gullible Brahmin boy, whose livelihood depends on the highly misuse-able video cameras that he makes! The strength of the movie is that it finds good humour even in unlikely places.

Director Lijo Jose Pellissery makes an effective priest, with a role that seems Innocent’s domain of expertise with his quirky brand of comedy, and is impressive. Asif Ali rides an Enfiled and bashes up people intermittently.

Rex Vijayan’s BGM is good for the movie, but it’s been tried and tested way too many times.

The movie has a subdued Prithviraj, and it’s meant to move slowly and cautiously. While the end result brings in much appreciation, the detailing that could have gone into the story-telling is missed.

You sit through this one since you can get a whiff of something big about to happen towards the end, since nothing great happens throughout! As for the thieves, a couple of them do steal your heart for good.

It is, of course, a biblical blockbuster, a 21st-century answer to Cecil B DeMille. It's also a disaster movie — the original disaster, you might say. It's an intense family drama. Part sci-fi film. An action flick? Definitely, along the lines of The Lord of the Rings. At times you might also think ofTransformers, and at one point, even The Shining.

But there's one thing Noah is not, for a moment: Dull. So, what to make of Noah? It's a movie that, with all its occasional excess, is utterly worth your time — 138 minutes of it.

Although the real star of the film is its visual ingenuity, particularly in a few stunning sequences, one must give ample credit to Russell Crowe, who lends Noah the moral heft and groundedness we need to believe everything that ends up happening to him. Noah's near-descent into madness would not be nearly as effective had Crowe not already convinced us of his essential decency. At the same time, the actor is believable when pondering the most heinous crime imaginable. It's one of Crowe's more effective performances.

It wouldn't have been possible, though, without considerable liberties taken by Aronofsky and his co-screenwriter, Ari Handel, in framing Noah's story. There's been controversy here, but if you glance at the Bible, you'll see why liberties are necessary: the story takes up only a few passages, hardly enough for a feature-length script.

And yet, it's one of the best-known tales in the Bible, if most of us only remember the children's version, with visions of brightly painted animals standing two-by-two on the ark. But there's a much more serious backdrop: Man's wickedness, and God's desire to purge the earth of that wickedness. Aronofsky dives headlong into this story of good vs. evil, not only between men, but within one man's soul.

We meet Noah and his family as they're attempting to live peacefully off the land, and ward off the greedy, violent descendants of Cain. Noah has three sons and a wife, Naameh (Jennifer Connelly, genuine and appealing). Along the way they pick up Ila, an injured young girl who will grow to love Noah's son Shem (an invented character, played with sensitivity by Emma Watson.)

Noah visits his grandfather, Methuselah, embodied with scene-stealing vigor by Anthony Hopkins. The old man — and by the way, this is relative, because Noah himself is already over 500 years old, according to the Bible — helps him induce a hallucination, which brings a vision. The Creator will destroy the Earth in a great flood. Noah's job, of course, is to build that great ark, and get out of Dixie.

It's a monumental task, but Noah has help: the Watchers, huge, lumbering creatures made of rock, who, for Aronofsky, represent the biblical Nephilim. Are they angels, giants or men? Interpretation varies.

But it is here that the movie courts ridicule. These creatures look a little too much like Transformers, and detract from the mystical feel of the film. A giggle is surely not what the director was going for here, but he may get a few.

But that ark? It's a wondrous thing — constructed on a Long Island field, according to measurements specified in Genesis, and finished up digitally.

Also stunning: the flood itself, more chilling than any you've seen in a disaster flick. It's also rather magical to watch the animals arrive, two by two (and by virtue of CGI) at the ark.

But for sheer cinematic beauty, it's hard to beat the dreamlike sequence in which Aronofsky illustrates the story of creation, as recounted by Noah. At this moment, you may well forgive any excesses in the film. Like his flawed hero, Aronofsky has a vision — a cinematic one — and the results, if not perfect, are pretty darned compelling.

The script has been tailored to accommodate the lewd; sorry, lead's porn backdrop.So when the film crew visits the same haunted house where the first Ragini film unfolded (why make the same mistake twice?!), Sunny, all voluptuous and popping all over the place, fakes an orgasm and tells an obnoxious fellow actor that porn actresses too can act.

They sure can. Sunny, in her third Bollywood film, puts in quite an effort to look possessed by an evilchudail. To be fair to this fornicating fraulein on an image-mending binge, the last half-hour finds her going into convulsions of terror. It's a climactic performance that pines to tell us that porn stars can act.

Point made. Sunny is always good with climaxes. We can now move to the rest of the film which slithers through the hall of absurdity with a terrifying nonchalance. We have characters deliberately moving deeper and deeper into the darkest shadows of the haunting house inviting sure death.If you are so dumb as to go into empty rooms with creaky doors, then you might as well be dead.

Why are the characters in our horror films so intellectually challenged? Ragini MMS 2 is specially suffused with morons. There is a hammy television actor who takes a naked shower with Sunny (once a porn star) and then later jerks off in bed. He is so gross because guys in the Ragini series are destined to be just that. 

In Ragini MMS 1, Rajkummar Rao dragged his girlfriend to a haunted house to shoot a dirty MMS with her. In this instalment, there is an over-the-top film director (the talented Parvin Dabas) who wants to make a 'horrex' (a blend of horror and sex, much the same as the director of Ragini MMS 2).

Ragini MMS 2 is so enamoured by its luscious leading lady's lusty past that it doesn't know what it wants to be. Neither horrifying nor sexy, the film is like a conflicted schizophrenic seeking a closure to his identity crisis blocking out the sunlight from all the windows in his home and running around in circles all over his darkened home.

Watching Ragini MMS 2 is like playing Russian Roulette with the lights off. You know someone is pulling the trigger and trying to fire random shots at unidentified victims. Every trick from the horror genre is brought into use. By the time Divya Dutta is brought in as the latest avatar of Max von Sydow from The Exorcist, the devil is too far gone to be tamed.

And I don't mean the chudail in this film.

Sid(dharth) Roy (Akhtar) and Trisha Mallik (Balan) are a happily-married couple whose life is struck by the baby boomerang. Once Trisha becomes a mother, she puts her marriage on the back burner. This leaves Sid feeling frustrated, neglected and insecure. Sid's brother in-law (Ram Kapoor) advises him to tell white lies and carve some time and space for himself. So the poor baby, sorry... husband, starts living a double life — half the time, he's a family man and the rest of the time, he pretends to be single dude. 

Then, after some unnecessary melodrama involving accidents, confessions and a strategically timed sunrise, Sid and Trisha must decide whether they can actually do this thing called marriage or if they'll be victims of its "side effects". Chaudhary's script is juvenile and heavily biased in favour of Sid. Not only is the entire film literally narrated by Sid, thus providing only his perspective, the events in the film allow Trisha few instances in which she can redeem herself. Sid is entirely insensitive to the challenges Trisha faces — from being a "hormonal nutcase" because of her pregnancy, to putting on weight and feeling unattractive, and raising a child almost single-handedly. But the way Chaudhary has written Trisha's character, she's insufferable for most of the film so no matter how much you may want to, you just can't side with her. As far as Chaudhary is concerned, Sid is the victim. Even when Sid admits he's in the wrong, it's an exercise in reverse psychology. How can you not love a man who will admit he's in the wrong? So what if he's not actually taking responsibility for his actions because hey, his wife drove him to make the mistakes he did? The fact is, if Sid wasn't being played by Akhtar, we probably wouldn't care for him. Not only is Akhtar cute as a button, he's got excellent comic timing and even when the script teeters into melodrama, his performance doesn't. He only looks uncomfortable in a few of the sequences where he's made to do filmi choreography. Otherwise, Akhtar makes Shaadi... watchable and it's his acting rather than the writing that draws the laughs. Aside from Akhtar, there's little to praise in Shaadi... . Balan is strapped in a role and wardrobe that do her no favours. The supporting cast includes Ram Kapoor, Rati Agnihotri, Ila Arun, Vir Das and Purab Kohli and they're competent but unremarkable. It's difficult to tell whether Ila Arun as "Aunty" was supposed to be the ideal nanny or the nanny from hell. The only person saddled with a more uni-dimensional character than Trisha's is Das, who plays a tattooed wannabe actor who can't say a sentence without the word "bro" in it. (That's presumably to clue us into the fact that he is a hipster.) The comedy evaporates from Shaadi... post-interval. In fact, the blooper reel that accompanies the end credits is more enjoyable than most of the attempted comedy in the second half. Chaudhary tries to hold the audience's attention by introducing ridiculous twists. However, this doesn't change the fact that the film barely has a story. This isn't surprising. Marriages are rarely eventful. To make them interesting and engaging, a story must reveal the nuances and emotional layer cake that is a 'normal' marriage. Presumably, Chaudhary thought he was being cheeky when he included not-so-subtle nods to his lead pair's real life in Shaadi... . So Balan's character is married to one Siddharth Roy while Balan is actually married to UTV's Siddharth Roy Kapoor. The film begins with Sid and Trisha meeting in a night club, which is perhaps a nod to how Akhtar met his wife, hairstylist and entrepreneur Adhuna. Trisha struggles with being voluptuous, which, as we've learnt thanks to Koffee With Karan, is a battle that Balan has fought with herself. In Shaadi..., Sid is initially an aspiring singer who is largely dependent upon Trisha who has a well-paying job that she loves. That's reminiscent of how at the start of the Akhtars' relationship, Adhuna was the successful one while Farhan was unemployed and non-descript. However, these are just flickering references that don't actually add much to the film. Chaudhary's script doesn't have any of the maturity that real life demands of a married couple. Despite having two good actors who are happily married in real life, what Shaadi... gives us is a portrait of a resoundingly unhappy marriage between two people who have just one flash of passionate chemistry right at the start of the film. After that, it's just unhappily ever after.