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Customer Reviews of The Creature from the Haunted Sea

Zany Corman quickie
This zany little Roger Corman quickie turned up frequently on a local TV station's late, late, late show many years ago. Thinking "Creature from the Haunted Sea" was just another lousy low grade horror flick, I barely noticed it even as it flickered on the TV screen that I used, more often than not, as a night light.

But I did catch a scene in which a couple of skin-divers descended into the sea, and when I saw that one of them carried a toilet plunger, I silently mused a thoughtful "Hmm," and made a mental note to pay attention the next time it aired.

"Creature from the Haunted Sea" is a satire of adventure films as delightfully daffy as Corman's "Little Shop of Horrors," but with a more subtle approach. It's not a knee-slapper, but it is amusing, and well cast. There's Anthony Carbone doing a fiendishly silly homage to Humphrey Bogart, and future screenwriter Robert Towne as the earnest young hero. You even get a title song, a love theme containing the complete title, sung by the leading lady, Betsy Jones Moreland.

This is a movie that is probably best seen unexpectedly in the wee hours of an uneventful night. By morning, you may think it was just a silly dream.

Vintage Roger Corman
Only one man could produce and direct a movie as outrageously stupid as The Creature From the Haunted Sea: Roger Corman. I might as well start with the monster. If you thought low-budget Japanese monster movies featured the most patently fake monsters in the cinematic universe, you haven't seen Corman's creature from the haunted sea. A kindergarten class could make a better monster out of shoelaces and a couple of buttons. You have to see it; I can't even begin to explain how ludicrous this monster is.

The story is also laughable. After Castro's revolution, counter-revolutionary forces have stolen the treasury of Cuba, and their plan is to sneak the gold off the island in an American boat. They choose Lorenzo because, according to their reasoning, the fact that he is an American gambler makes him beyond reproach. Lorenzo's crew is, in a word, unreal. First, there is his best girl Marybelle and her brother Happy Jack, who got his name from the twitch he developed from watching too many Humphrey Bogart movies. Next up is Pete Peterson, Jr., whom, as the narrator actually explains to us, is the son of Pete Peterson, Sr. Pete's only talent is his ability to mimic any and all kinds of animals, but he's never been the same since blowing his brain out of whack imitating a whooping crane years earlier. Then there is the "hero" of our story, an American spy who makes Maxwell Smart look like Albert Einstein. He never really understands what is going on, but he diligently reports his non-findings to headquarters using his home-made, undetectable radio set constructed using simulated hot dogs for knobs and tubes inside of dill pickles. His narration of the story is filled with incredibly philosophical statements such as "It was coming on dusk. I knew because the sun was going down." Getting back to the plot, the crooked Americans want the gold for themselves, so they hatch an elaborate plot to kill the Cuban soldiers on board one by one and make each death appear to be the work of a mythical sea creature. What they don't know is that the creature, as ridiculous as he is, actually does exist.

Featuring such unexplained oddities as a pay phone (with a steady stream of users) existing on a deserted island, this movie goes out of its way to insult the intelligence of every creature who ever harbored a conscious thought. As a result, the film is pretty darn funny at times, although one is hard pressed to see whether or not Corman intended this to be a comedy or a serious monster movie. I for one never know what Roger Corman could possible have been thinking.