Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

On the front cover of Ed Naha's indispensable book "The Films of Roger Corman" there is a subtitle that reads "Brilliance on a Budget," and a look at Corman's working schedule and method of production will surely bear out that statement. Take, for example, the background for his 1961 film "Creature From the Haunted Sea." As the story goes, Corman and crew were in Puerto Rico in 1959, where Corman was executive producing the film "The Battle of Blood Island" at the same time as he was directing his own film "Last Woman on Earth." Realizing that if he had another week on the island he could just manage to come up with still ANOTHER picture, Corman instructed his oft-time screenwriter Charles Griffith (who had previously worked on no fewer than seven Corman films, including such immortal classics as "It Conquered the World," "Not of This Earth," "Attack of the Crab Monsters" and "Bucket of Blood") to come up with a script...in under a week! The script was somehow delivered and Corman managed to shoot his film in just five days! (He would go on to break that record the following year with "The Little Shop of Horrors" two-day shooting schedule!) And the resultant picture has been flabbergasting and amusing its audiences ever since its release in June '61. In the film, deported American gangster/gambler Renzo Capetto (Anthony Carbone, here channeling the Bogart of "To Have and Have Not" right down to perfectly mouth-dangled cigarette), now based in Cuba, comes up with a brilliant plan. After the revolution, he is given the assignment of using his motorboat to transport a group of counterrevolutionaries, as well as a huge chunk of the Cuban gold reserve, off the island. Capetto's plan is to somehow kill all the Cubans on board and blame their deaths on a legendary sea monster that is reputed to haunt the area. But the only problem is, the monster actually DOES exist, and it goes far in wrecking the plans of both the Cubans and Renzo and his gang. And what a gang of bumbling misfits it is! We have Capetto's pretty blonde moll, the hyphenated Mary-Belle Monahan (similarly hyphenated Betsy Jones-Moreland, a pleasing cross between Carol Ohmart and the young Kate Mulgrew); her stoopid brother, Happy Jack (Robert Bean, a former boom operator here playing a role sadistically written for Corman); Pete Peterson (Beach Dickerson), who largely communicates via animal imitations (!); and our narrator, Sparks Moran, who in actuality is the incredibly dim-witted secret agent XK-150, and played by Edward Wain (a pseudonym for Robert Towne, who had scripted "Last Woman on Earth" and would go on to write the screenplays for "The Last Detail," "Chinatown" and "Shampoo"!). It seems that this Corman quickie is a very loose remake of the director's own "Naked Paradise," which had just been released four years earlier, and is a remarkably cheaply made film, even by Corman standards; I have not been able to come up with a firm figure for the film's budget, but cannot imagine it topping the reported approximate figure of $30,000 for "Little Shop" the following year. Indeed, the monster on display here is guaranteed to engender laughs rather than chills, and almost looks like the type of monster that you might find on a kiddies' Saturday morning puppet show on TV; the Cookie Monster on "The Muppets" might be a good base for comparison, if you are trying to visualize it! It is hard to be critical of a film like this, as it was clearly intended to be nothing more than a light goofy comedy (that combines horror, gangster and spy elements), and the cast surely does seem to be having a ball on screen in their tropical island paradise. So does the comedy work? Well, I must admit that during the first half of the film (meaning the first 30 minutes of this 63-minute picture; it should be added here that 10+ additional minutes were shot, in 1963, for television prints, which explains the "Maltin Film Guide"'s listing of 74 minutes for the picture in question), the comedy is so very lame that it is more groanable than laffable. But guess what? Somehow, the cumulative effect of all the patent stoopidity on screen somehow begins to grow on one, until the viewer is somehow sucked inexorably into the silly shenanigans on screen. Thus, when Sparks tells us in deadpan voiceover "It was dusk...I could tell because the sun was going down...." we are primed for laughter, rather than being pained. And the film surely does become loopier and loopier as it proceeds, especially when the gang members land on a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico and fall in love with some of the native women. Truly, this is not the sort of film in which one comments on brilliant acting (the thesping on display here is of the most amateurish ilk), stunning special effects (the creature looks like a mass of seaweed strewn over a garbage bag, with ping-pong ball eyes...which is not far from the actuality), stylish direction (Corman's work here is, well, workmanlike and efficient, if nothing more) or clever dialogue (I've already given you one of the more choice and quotable bits). The bottom line here is whether or not the film is entertaining, and I suppose that my response to that must be a qualified yes. It will surely not be everyone's cup of tea, and indeed, may only be suitable for that unique breed of individual known as the Roger Corman completist. For this viewer, the film was the 39th Corman-directed film that I have seen, and I do not regret having spent an hour of my life sitting before it and yes, occasionally laffing out loud....

Once this thing came to a conclusion, I sat for a minute and thought about how I wanted to punch Corman and Griffith in their respective chops for inflicting this movie on me. Based on the lines the actors spout at various points in the movie, this is apparently supposed to be a comedy of sorts, the same way "Little Shop Of Horrors" and "Bucket Of Blood" were horror-comedies. Well, for whatever reasons, those movies worked, and boy this one sure doesn't. Comedy is hard. Timing is everything in a comedy, and a spoof only works if the timing and art direction in it are better than whatever the subject of the spoof is. With its washed out, smeary photography and muddy, barely understandable vocals, and barely-there non- performances, it's obvious in the first minute that this movie is too raw and unpolished to get the timing right. A few more takes, a little bit better blocking, a few rewrites of a couple of the dopier scenes in the screenplay...even a more careful edit to weed out some of the dead air and draggy spots..."Creature" might have been at least mildly amusing. Or if they'd given up on the comedy and done a straight monster flick, it would have been a "5" instead of the "3". "Creature" isn't even especially good for a movie shot in less than 10 days. You can give this one a miss if you see it offered on cable or a late night horror host show.

A man gets his tennis shoes polished and the shoeshine boy sticks a note in his customer's sock . A shot rings out and the shoeshine boy drops dead . The customer runs down the street hotly pursued by a couple of Rabbis . Well that's what the scene looked like to me and questioned where this film might be heading " But Theo why would someone be getting tennis shoes polished and why do Rabbis go around shooting people ? " Look sit down and shut up . We're not holding a question and answer session here . No doubt Roger Corman thought he could get away with making a low to no budget comedy horror movie but even the great Robert Towne can't do anything with the script probably because the contribution he made to it is to play the hero character Sparks Moran and read out the lines and read them out very badly . Towne appearing in his Corman production pseudonym Ed Wain is even worse here than in LAST WOMAN ON EARTH but he's not helped by Charles B Griffith screenplay which even involves a scene in the pre-credits for Towne/Wain to don a cunning disguise by putting on sunglasses and a false moustache ! Perhaps Corman should have got Towne to write the screenplay and cast Griffith as the hero ? As it transpires Moran is a secret agent and he's in league with Cuban patriots kicked out by Castro who still wear their army uniforms and carry their weapons around . Moran crosses them and has to dodge all sorts of mean nasty men who are out to get him and a consignment of Cuban gold . Neither the sound mix and the Cuban accents are tolerable so it is almost something of a relief when subtitles appear because at least then you know what the characters are saying . I say " almost " because this film is incredibly intolerable . Despite my one line summary of it feeling like a parody of a thriller by Benny Hill there's nothing genuinely enjoyable about it even for people who enjoy bad movies and is quite possibly the worst film Corman made

Much as one admires Roger Corman's shrewd entrepreneurial qualities and the prescient nurturing of various up-and-coming talents, admittedly, his own non-Poe horror output is alarmingly erratic – so that, on the one hand, you had undeniable classics such as NOT OF THIS EARTH (1957), A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959) and THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and, on the other, the likes of the goofy IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956), the dull ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (1957) and this one, which is at once heavy-handed and silly! The film is a remake of the director's own NAKED PARADISE (1957) but made in the vein of Monte Hellman's BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE (1959), which had added a monster to PARADISE's central heist plot. Besides, it followed on from the afore-mentioned BUCKET and SHOP with respect to the comic tone adopted throughout (all three, as well as BEAST, were scripted by Charles B. Griffith); as with the latter, too, its borderline feature-length was expanded for TV showings (adding some 12 minutes in all) and this chore was assigned to none other than fledgling director Hellman! Another notable name here is that of hero Edward Wain, actually Robert Towne(!), who would soon carve a reputation for himself as an ace scriptwriter (penning Corman's masterpiece THE TOMB OF LIGEIA {1964} and eventually winning an Oscar for Roman Polanski's own best work CHINATOWN {1974}) and occasional director.Corman was quick to incorporate topical issues (if only in a superficial manner) into the narrative – in this case, the Cuban Missile Crisis: in fact, the film features several authoritative or vaguely sinister Latin American types. One more definite influence, however, is Howard Hawks' adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway adventure TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) – whether consciously or not, the protagonist here (Anthony Carbone) looks quite a bit like the iconic star of that one i.e. Humphrey Bogart! Wain is ostensibly a secret agent investigating the transport by boat of stolen Cuban gold: he has apparently gained Carbone's confidence and yet, unless he is confessing his love for the criminal's moll(!), he mostly keeps to the sidelines. The greedy skipper wants to get rid of his foreign associates and, to this end, commissions his underling to kill one of the crew members and place the blame at the foot of a legendary sea monster (what he does not know is that the latter is very much real and that Carbone and his men have been targeted for 'breaching' its territorial waters)!Unfortunately, the creature is among the loopiest ever conceived: CONQUERED and CRAB's were similarly outré, but this one actually belongs alongside the notorious ROBOT MONSTER (1953) in the annals of non-scary film fiends! The other low-point here, then, is the truly execrable comedy relief: it is not that some of the lines and situations prove unamusing but, along the way, we are improbably treated to a henchman with a penchant for communicating via animal sounds (who is later involved in a bit of jungle romance with a similarly-inclined{!?} South Sea woman) and the moll's klutzy younger brother (who, of course, becomes enamored of the native's daughter)…not to mention, coming up with lame quirky touches such as having Corman himself appear unbilled as a perennially-grinning man wearing shades waiting to use the phone on the South American island and a man in a suit walking along the rocks by the sea and purposefully stepping into every puddle he comes across! Yet another female character is introduced during these latter scenes, just so she can be with Wain for the finale – after the monster has killed virtually the entire cast (unlike BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE, the leading lady in this case was apparently deemed too much of a harlot to be allowed to survive!) and is thus left in sole possession of the conveniently-sunken treasure.Of Corman's remaining genre efforts, I have the following still unwatched in my collection: DAY TIME ENDED (1955), WAR OF THE SATELLITES (1958), TEENAGE CAVE MAN (1958; though I had checked out Larry Clark's 'controversial' 2002 TV remake) and LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960; which was shot back-to-back with the film under review and even retains the same three leads!).