Julie Adams, star of the original The Creature from the Black Lagoon, meets the new musical Creature and the 21st century version of her character, Kay.

This morning I headed over the Hollywood Hills to Universal Studios, where the latest musical attraction, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, debuted. Running about 25 minutes long, this musical is presented as a sort of sequel to the original, with a whole new boatload of people heading to the Amazon jungle to find the Gill-Man. And to sing about.

One of the big attractions for me was the chance to meet Julie Adams, the star of the original 1954 The Creature from the Black Lagoon. She was a very sweet lady who was obviously pretty psyched to be at the debut of this strange new take on the classic Universal Monster.

Before the show began, the Creature himself was brought to the theater under armed guard. Something predictably went wrong.

Then we went inside the nicely air conditioned theater for the show. Before that started, Julie Adams was escorted to her seat.

You can hear Latino Review’s El Guapo narrating into his own camera there.

After that the show began. We get introduced to the characters – a fat voodoo priestess boat captain (beats the shit out of me. Pirates hangover, obviously), a millionaire explorer who is horny, a nerdy scientist and the nerdy scientist’s fiancee, who the explorer wants to bang. She’s apparently not getting it enough from the nerd. This show is sort of unexpectedly racy, by the way. Lots and lots of cheap sex jokes.

The fiancee, Kay, goes for a swim, and while she does sings a terrible song. This causes the Creature to take note of her.

Kay escapes the Creature and goes back to the boat. But the Creature himself soon shows up and does a number of his own, one where he drops names like hot coals. I like to imagine they scrambled to remove Michael Jackson’s name from this at the last minute.

Yes, he did sing ‘I’m a Darth Vader Freddy Krueger OJ Moby Dick.’ No, I have no idea what that possibly means either. And yes, that’s me saying I got wet. They sprayed water into the crowd.

The Creature takes Kay away to his bachelor pad (he has a bar down there, and it has Nine Inch Nails and Rolling Stones stickers on it), where they have this double entendre-laden duet.

The boys break up the party, though, and the explorer shoots the Creature with a speargun. But it turns out that the spear had been dipped in a ‘male enhancement’ formula (I swear I am not making this up), and the Creature becomes gigantic for the finale.

Let’s be honest: this was awful. Just terrible. But if you’re at Universal Studios and you want to get out of the heat, you have at least 25 guaranteed minutes here. And if you have a 12 year old boy he’ll think the musical is just the cutting edge of humor. And there’s just enough manic bizarre energy on display to make the thing watchable. Barely.

Here’s the video El Guapo shot of Ryan Rotten and myself after the show. Our on the spot review and thoughts!