Movie review – Corman #26 - “The Creature from the Haunted Sea” (1961) **1/2

Roger Corman considered this as part of his “comedy” trilogy, the first two being Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. All three were written by Charles Griffith, and the films feel a lot more “Griffith” than they do “Corman”: that is anarchic, parody, free-wheeling, hilarious.

This one is totally way out – its about a bunch of Cubans fleeing Castro who hire a gangster to transport some gold and them out of the country. The gangster plans to kill off the Cubans and steal the gold, blaming the deaths on an old sea monster. Problem is, there turns out to be a real sea monster.

It's not a bad story, even if the sea monster looks a bit too much like the cookie monster. Its main interest are all the way-out touches Griffith puts in: an undercover agent hero (Edward Wain, who later became the writer Robert Towne), whose real name is X11 and who wears a phony glass and moustache, falls in love with the gangster’s moll, incompetently investigates the crime and says things in the voice over like “it was getting dark – I could tell because the sun was going down”; there is also the gangster’s henchman who is obsessed with making animal noises, the moll’s brother who falls in love with a member of a ‘waterside sorority house’ who falls in love with Wain even though Wain is in love with the moll, the constant wacky narration.

Not as tight as Bucket or Little Shop - bit over the place, and technically the copies of the film out there are very poor. But crazy and entertaining, worth catching if you enjoyed the other two films. Corman commissioned this up at the last minute while down in Puerto Rico making Battle of Blood Island and The Last Woman on Earth; the result is more memorable than either, chiefly due to Griffith.

NB Retro Media did a special DVD with commentary by Besty-Jones Moreland, Steve Latshaw and Anthony Carbone. According to this, Roger Corman intended to make a serious movie but only realised he was making a comedy half way. Surely this can’t be true? But the actors confirm this – they say they thought they were making a serious film until they saw the monster.

On the commentary, Moreland seems to become bored and drifts off at times; also she and Carbone occasionally get impatient with Latshaw’s questions (not they they’re dumb questions, I think Latshaw's just interested in stuff which they have no idea about.)