DIRECTED BY: Roger Corman
FEATURING: Robert Towne (as Edward Wain), Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland
PLOT: Opposed by incompetent spy Sparks Moran, a shady American expatriate and his
gang of crooks try to cheat General Tostada and his crew out of gold they are smuggling out of post-revolutionary Cuba by pretending a sea monster is on the loose.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Creature from the Haunted Sea is a strange little comedy indeed, one that feels improvised, even experimental at times. Unfortunately, although there’s nothing else quite like it, after watching it for a few minutes you will understand why there’s nothing else like it. It’s not funny, or meaningfully entertaining on any level; the only draw is to be awestruck by how utterly a movie can fail. The movie has a few lukewarm fans, but basically, this is among the worst of the worst, something you should only watch on a dare.
COMMENTS: Anyone renting Creature from the Haunted Sea thinking that it’s going to be a terrible monster flick may be surprised to find themselves watching what appears to be a terrible spy movie, until it dawns on them that they’re actually watching a terrible comedy. Creature features a senseless, slow moving, confusing plot; confusing, because every time the action lags, the script introduces us to another “wacky” character to take up the slack. We get General Tostada (groan); the henchman who speaks in dubbed-in animal noises (monkey cackles or elephant trumpets, as the mood strikes him); his dream girl, a hefty matron with a similar mode of communication; Roger Corman in sunglasses grinning like an idiot for no reason; an unexplained man in a suit on a desert island who feels the need to step in every tide pool along the beach; Carmelita, the senorita love-interest who arrives from out of nowhere; and Mango, the island girl who takes up with “weird strangers” as a “come-on for tourists” so her mom can sell them “coconut hats.” Gags include Sparks being forced to eat a transmitter disguised as a sandwich and the slightly amusing theme song (a torch song that throws in the improbable non sequitur “…and the creature from the haunted sea.”) Humor is subjective, so you very well might find the silly absurdity of it reasonably entertaining; you’ll just be in a very small minority if you do. The highlight, and the main thing most viewers remember, is the utterly ridiculous sea monster with the ping-pong ball eyes, who only appears on screen for a few seconds at a time. Some feature movies would have worked better as shorts; this one would have worked better as a still.
The abject failure of Creature to amuse is all the more shocking since it came from the pen of Charles B. Griffith, the Corman collaborator responsible for several smartly scripted minor classics: A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and Death Race 2000 (1975). In true Corman cheapie fashion, this script is a recycled comic treatment of an earlier Corman production, Beast from the Haunted Cave, and was written in three days and filmed in five. It was shot together with two other forgettable movies made in Puerto Rico for tax reasons.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: