Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) User Reviews

A very misunderstood film.

[rcslone5 · 4/10 · 9 June 2009]

So many people seem to believe that this was supposed to be a straight-up horror film. It is anything but that. Creature From the Haunted Sea is a broad farce first, a political satire second, and finally a horror film/creature feature third. In fact, the said creature in the title has barely a presence in this film at all.

Roger Corman obviously wanted to make a silly comedy with political undertones about the times, but always the businessman, he knew to throw in a monster and cool sounding title to bring in the ticket buying public. Folks need to realize when they watch this to not expect a nail biting thriller or blood curdling horror film. This is comedy all the way.

The film is about an American gangster who agrees to transport a couple of Cuban military officers and some of their men off the island after Castro's revolution. They also bring along a large part of the Cuban treasury. Also aboard the boat is an undercover spy for the American government, who is trying to figure out what all is going on. The gangster also has his girlfriend with him and a couple of hired hands, one of which is his girlfriends brother and the other a strange fellow who makes animal noises all the time. The gangster decides he would like the money the Cubans have brought along for his own and decides to bump them off one by one, blaming things on a local legend about a sea monster. Unfortunately for him, it turns out that the legend is true and there is really a sea monster.

The acting in this film is fine for what it is and the actors play their roles like they should. Its a Corman picture so you know its a cheapie, as the monster is one of the silliest looking creatures I have ever seen. I really didn't laugh at anything in the movie, though it caused me to elicit a small chuckle a couple of times. The picture moved along briskly enough and wasn't a bore, though it didn't thrill me either. My biggest gripe is that so many DVD companies who have released this try to pass it off as a serious horror film. Anyone expecting that will be sadly disappointed.

Not a terrible movie, but not what you would probably expect either.

Offbeat Corman cult movie tries really hard to be funny, but...

[mlraymond · 2/10 · 30 July 2009]

As per the advice given by another poster here, I did see this movie while under the influence of alcohol some years ago, and it may have seemed slightly funnier, but just barely.

I think the main problem is that it tries so hard to be funny, that it just ends up being embarrassing.The goofiness and outlandish action of Corman's other movies Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood somehow do work, but this just doesn't.

As odd as this may sound, there are characters you can get involved with and care about in the other two movies, even if they're somewhat cartoonish figures like Mr. Mushnik and Seymour. Maybe the problem is that there is no real plot or point to any of the characters or action in this film. The characters simply aren't interesting or funny, where you actually feel for would-be beat artist Walter Paisley and put-upon errand boy Seymour Krelboind. The worst offender is the dimwitted gangster who makes animal noises. He makes the Three Stooges look like comic geniuses for the ages.

Corman was certainly capable of making interesting movies and even funny ones. I can't help but laugh every time I see Not Of This Earth, with the three intoxicated hobos singing " For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" to their alien host, just before he zaps them with his deadly stare. That brief moment is funnier than anything in the entire dreary hour or more of Creature From the Haunted Sea.

Monster movie and comedy with lack luster and budget

[ma-cortes · 3/10 · 31 March 2006]

This low-budgeted picture is a monster-movie concerning about a Government Agent ( Robert Towne ) chasing a gangster named Renzo Capeto ( Anthony Carbone ), a mobster likeness to Bogart who along with his fiancée ( Betsy Jones Moreland ) and underlings are aboard ship with a group of exiled Cubans . Renzo schemes a plot to invent a mythical sea monster to eliminate the Cubans and steal the national treasure .

The film is a horror comedy blending parody , humor and suspense . The comedy is absurd and cheesy but gets some fine moments here and there. The movie has storyline gaps and is an embarrassing mess badly developed .However , it gets some amusing gag as the animal imitator hoodlum and the phone cabin on the island . Incredible cheap special effects with ridiculous rubber monster is a man suited attacking the ship crew though also there are good underwater scenes. The main actors ( Towne,Carbone,Moreland ), technicians ( cameraman ,Jack Marquette ) and writer ( Charles B.Griffith ) will repeat with Corman in subsequent films as ¨ A bucket of Blood ¨ and ¨ Last woman on earth ¨. Robert Towne is a prestigious director ( Tequila sunrise and Without limits ) and writer ( Mission impossible, the firm, Two jakes, Days and thunder ) , . The pic belongs to monster movie sub-genre which Corman directed during the 50-60s as ¨ Attack the crab monsters ¨, ¨ It conquered the world ( an Alien from Venus ), ¨ Beast with a million eyes ¨( other Alien ), ¨ Wasp man ¨, ¨ Viking women and great serpent ¨ or even a carnivorous plant as ¨ Little shop horrors ¨ though Corman also produced as ¨ Night of the blood beast ¨ and ¨ Attack of the giant leeches ¨( Bernard Kowalski ) . Rating : Below average , it's a real turkey .

Not his best but very good...

[doug-may · 19 February 2004]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this film, judging by the reviews and the low rating. As should be obvious to any halfwit, "Creature from the Haunted Sea" isn't meant to be taken seriously and it isn't trying to be gripping or suspenseful or scary. It is in fact a completely unhinged example of filmic surrealism and is closer to Alfred Jarry than to William Castle or any of Corman's other horror films. Personally I loved every character in this mess. I loved Carbone doing Bogie in The African Queen and the deckhand with his feral yelps and Mama (who looked like a cross between Della Reese and Juanita Hall) in her flowered tutu and the girl named Mango...it goes on and on. I liked especially the way the strange off-kilter and mostly bad acting kept undermining any sense of stability in the formation of the characters' personnae.

Too bad that the Latin stereotypes serve to date the film. But still, the Cuban military men are undeniably funny in the way that all bureaucrats, of whatever color or persuasion, are funny.

The sound quality is unfortunately very poor, and this film is in serious need of restoration. But for those who don't take these things seriously, you will encounter something remarkably original and yes, funny. Also check out "The Last Woman on Earth" which uses the same shooting locale and some of the same actors but overlays a basically simple post-apocalypse plot with ponderous existential musings.

A Quirky Comedy Crime-Horror

[Rainey-Dawn · 4/10 · 6 June 2015]

The movie is a deliberately bad b-rated comedy crime-horror. It was made for giggles and not meant to be a great crime-drama (it simply spoofs crime-dramas).

I had a couple of laughs with the film so the movie is not all that bad but it's not all that good either. For me it was missing something; I think it was missing a bit more comedy-horror because the comedy crime-drama seemed to dominate the film. Maybe it was just me expecting more of a comedy-horror since that is how this film's genre is labeled.

Don't expect to see the creature/monster often either because you will not. That might be part of my disappointment with the film - not enough monster.

There is an overall drabness to the film too - as if there was some other element missing to make the film stand out a bit more. It's not an overly dull film but it is a bit on the drab side.

I felt the movie had the potential to be funnier than it really was. It's not a down right awful film but it is not a b-rated film that stands out in the crowd of "bad but good" b-rated horror flicks.

I would say this is a good morning or afternoon film for those who would like to watch it for the first time. And, for me personally, the movie really is good for a one time watch just to say "I've seen the film".

4.5/10

It's Not Funny; It's Not Even Campy

[Hitchcoc · 1/10 · 19 February 2006]

There are many bad movies that are entertaining enough to still be watchable. Sometimes people don't get parody and are unfair to movies. There is a third category. Movies that aren't campy or funny; they are just plain awful. A junior high kid with a camcorder could make a better film than this. Just because Roger Corman made it, people are willing to give it the benefit of a doubt. I would be willing to bet they had a little leftover film, a couple more days on the island, and decided to play a joke on the public. That anyone would plunk down ten cents on anything like this amazes me. I have a love of bad sci fi. I remember the guy with the gorilla suit and the diving helmet. This isn't that good. Characters with names like Mango and a couple of people who make animal sounds; a plot that is really non existent. Yes, I know it's tongue in cheek, but it has absolutely nothing going for it. Tongue in cheek needs to be clever. This is the antithesis of clever.

Out of Cuba

[sol-kay · 4/10 · 16 December 2009]

**SPOILERS** One of Roger Corman's early work in the field of international and political intrigue. The movie takes place in early 1959 in Cuba that has just been overrun by Castro's revolutionary troops with the remnant's of the ousted Batista Regime running for their lives to avoid a Cuban revolutionary firing squad.

With the Castro forces bearing down on him loyalest Cuban General Tosdada attempts together with a squad of loyalist troops to leave the island with what's left of the Cuban Treasury that amounts to a foot-locker of gold bullion. With only Mafia boss Renzo Capetto being able to get Gen. Tosdada off the island with his yacht it soon becomes evident that Renzo is far more interested in the gold Tosada has with him then in the safety of him and his troops.

Together with his two henchmen Happy Jack Monahan and the somewhat mentally retarded Pete Peterson Renzo attempts to fool Tosdada into thinking that the waters off Cuba is the home of this horrible sea creature who's out to get him and his boys on board Renzo's yacht. There's also a side story in the film involving CIA undercover agent Agent XK150 code name Sparks Moran who infiltrated Renzo's gang in order to get enough evidence on him to have him put away for among other things tax evasion. Agent XK150 soon falls heads over heels in love with Renzo's girlfriend, and Happy Jack's sister, Mary-Belle Monahan who despite Agent XK150 swearing his eternal love for her can't stand the very sight of him!

The film really picks up when the sea creature makes his grand appearance with him offing the Cuban troops without Renzo & Co really knowing that he's doing it. The creature looking like he's outfitted with a bunch of garbage bags tied together with strings of seaweed and two eyes looking like fried eggs is about the best thing in the film. It, the sea creature, even rivals the beautiful Mango Happy Jack's island girlfriend who in fact ends up getting eaten by it in the films closing minutes.

**SPOILERS** The films ends with all the bad guys as well as Cubans getting offed by the sea creature with Agent XK150 making it to the safety on a deserted Caribbean island with his new love, with Mary-Belle ending up as the creatures lunch, Senorita Rodriguez to live happily ever after. This is a big jump for Agent XK150 in now living with the senorita rent free and with an unlimited supply of coconuts and banana, that's both healthy and nonfattening,for the rest of their lives. That's far better for Agent XK150 then the meager, even by 1960 standards, $41.00 a week that the US Government is paying him. As for the sea creature he's back home under the waves of the Caribbean Sea with the remains of the Cuban Treasury that he, only consisting on fish & seaweed, has no idea what to do with!

Lots of Humor

[michaelnj · 4/10 · 5 January 2014]

This is pre-Airplane humor. Anyone who thinks this is a "monster movie" will be sadly disappointed. My first clue? The very first scene has a guy getting his shoes shined. And what is he wearing? White canvas sneakers. There are lots of quirky dialog that doesn't even need MST3000K to make jokes about. "Did you get that?" "Right. Where do I turn for the decoder pin?" "Left." "Left?" "Right." "Right". And the classic, "It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down."

Nothing in this movie was intended to be "horror". But if you listen closely and watch, you'll find plenty to laugh about. Kind of clever, actually.

For Corman Devotees Alone

[Space_Mafune · 5/10 · 16 January 2003]

Only if you can appreciate the offbeat sense of wacky humor Roger Corman brings to life in this film will you truly appreciate it..this is in many ways a spoof of the monster on the loose and the spy film genres but at the same time it also seems to be laughing at itself. Notably Corman makes a cameo in which that's all he does--smiles and laughs at this movie's ridiculous lead character - a numbskull secret spy government agent.

Clearly this film was never meant to be taken as seriously as some seem to take it. The biggest flaw with it however is it's too slow-moving...it takes forever before we get any kind of resolution. The highly entertaining rampage of the Monster at the end does make up for somewhat for the slow opening half. But once again I recommend this only for Corman staunchest fans.

"A government agent lives in constant peril."

[classicsoncall · 2/10 · 5 June 2005]

It would be hard to imagine this film being anything more than a parody of the sci-fi, horror and mystery genres. It's got a government secret agent more inept than Maxwell Smart keeping tabs on mobster Renzo Capetto (Antony Carbone) who's a Humphrey Bogart wanna-be, and a crew member who can mimic any animal he's ever heard perfectly. This he does rather often, though no purpose is served other than to provide comic relief in a film that relies heavily on it. Throw in attractive Betsy Jones-Moreland as a love interest for both Agent XK 150 (Robert Towne) and Renzo, and you've got the makings for about as much nonsense as can be packed into a seventy minute film, if you can stand it for that long.

As Renzo places his services at the hands of Cuban refugees and a strongbox filled with gold, he intends to kill off members of the exiled group while filling their heads with tales of a mythic sea monster. This story of robbery, double cross and murder is interrupted by the appearance of a real creature, looking very much like Cookie Monster on steroids. Meanwhile agent XK occasionally reports in to Washington with his observations, usually stating that the case is about to break wide open.

Roger Corman whipped this gem out on the shoestring that followed "The Last Woman on Earth", filmed in the same location and with the key players appearing in both films (Towne, Carbone and Moreland). One can only imagine the state of mind of the actors coming out of these two rather inane offerings. Roger Corman has certainly done better, and these two could have been phoned in more effectively. As another reviewer pointed out, these pictures would best be viewed in the company of some wacky friends with just enough attention span to pan the living daylights out of them.

Awful!

[BaronBl00d · 1/10 · 19 August 2000]

I disagree with several of the other reviewers who state that this film is typical Roger Corman. It isn't. Films like Little Shop of Horrors and A Bucket of Blood are Corman quickies AND masterpieces, but this film was only a quickie and a stinker! It is awful in every fiber of its being. The production values are SO low that the film quality is grainy, the sound just audible, the sets and design pieces barely functional, and the acting...yes let's talk about the acting...the acting is incredibly bad by all concerned. In point of fact, there is not one good performance in the whole film. Anthony Carbone is wasted in the role of a gangster...the part too big for his supporting abilities I imagine. Betsy Jones-Moreland croons a song and throws dice through her scenes and utters lines with a complete lack of conviction. Robert Towne is unfunny and thoroughly unlikable in his role as a spy/secret agent aboard a ship carrying Cubans and their gold from Cuba. The worst performance, however, and I say this without any...ANY..hesitation is the guy that makes ridiculous animal sounds throughout the picture and is a jack-ass of epic proportions in every scene he is in. I mean this guy is so bad he couldn't be an extra in a Herschell Gordon Lewis picture! This film, plainly put, sucks!

Wonderful, deliberately bad monster movie

[Skragg · 10/10 · 24 July 2005]

As the back cover of a DVD of it points out, this movie parodies a dozen different movie things - social comment (the Cuban Revolution), monsters, gangsters, spies, beatniks (to some degree), impromptu singing, cameos by the film-makers, Bogart movies, even South Pacific (I think). And Betsy Jones-Moreland makes one of the great movie molls (in comedies OR dramas). This story is the first and last place I've heard the phrase "crazy-looking" - "crazy" in the "beat" sense of the word, making it a compliment - but I've always wanted to use it. And of course, there's Antony Carbone as a villain you start to feel sorry for, because he's surrounded by incompetents, and Robert Towne as the incompetent hero, who tries to make himself sound better in the narration, but fails even THEN. There are many little moments that really work - the impromptu song with the really clumsy lyrics (even though it's a romantic song, it has the title of the movie worked into it), the cameo by Roger Corman himself where he seems to be trying to make Robert Towne laugh, and of course the aliases. There's one little thing it took me a long while to notice. In one scene, "Sparks" is trying to rescue "Marybelle" (who hates him) from drowning (which she isn't). She gets fed up and hits him, and (though I'm not at all sure), instead of sounding "dubbed in", it sounds like Moreland got carried away and hit him for real. Deliberately clumsy-looking films (not just horror ones, of course) have gotten much TOO common lately (taking a lot of the novelty away from it), but Creature From The Haunted Sea really works.

Loads of quirky ideas

[BruceCorneil · 7/10 · 22 August 2003]

Another Z- budget gem from Roger Corman . A playful and witty send up of horror thrillers mixing gangsters , fleeing revolutionaries and a sea monster .Some great hip dialogue together with loads of quirky ideas . Clearly , it's just meant to be a bit of fun and on that score it works well.

The Return of Edward Wain

[richardchatten · 3/10 · 20 November 2021]

Hardly a good film - but an enormously likeable one - this is the third of a trio of zany comedy-thrillers dashed off by Roger Corman's Filmgroup, made on a whim because he already had a cast and crew with him in Cuba (in the days when all those vintage cars in Havana were still new).

Featuring probably the daftest looking monster since 'The Giant Claw' (intentionally this time), future Oscar-winner Robert Towne in his second and final appearance as Edward Wain (who this time also narrates the film), foxy Betsy Jones-Moreland as a shady lady "perfectly adjusted to my life of crime" and a very noisy jazz score by Fred Katz; according to Corman financially the film "had a mild success...It should have been a big success or a big failure".

Misfiring would be comic creature feature

[lorenellroy · 22 May 2004]

Roger Corman is a major figure in the world of low budget pictures and he brought pace ,energy and wit to a wide variety of cinematic genres .I will maintain to my dying day the The St Valentine's Day Massacre is the best post World War 2 gangster picture bar none and his Poe adaptations are stylish ,elegant and finely wrought . However it is idle to pretend that his career does not have its share of dross and this tedious nonsense is a severe test to viewer patience. Its plot revolves around a scare story invented by a gang of U S adventurers who try to scare off treasure hunters with tales of a monster guarding the treasure .Guess what -turns out there is a monster after all and he wreaks havoc on the gang .

The tone is intended to be humourous -the gang leader is played as a Bogart parody ,there is a bungling and inept US spy ,a gangsters moll and -most teeth clenchingly irritating of all - a crew member who communictes mostly in bird and animal noises .Add some dated Latino stereotypes and a laughable inept monster and even at artound 70 minutes this an ordeal.

To work a comedy horror needs to be funny and horrific -this is neither,

Rather trashy movie from Roger Corman

[chris_gaskin123 · 2/10 · 11 April 2005]

I've only seen Creature From the Haunted Sea the once and is one of Roger Corman's poorer efforts. He has certainly made better movies than this.

A crook and some others head for a Caribbean island and as he plans to kill some of these on the way, he decides to make up a story that a sea monster killed these people. What he doesn't know is that a sea monster does really exist and it then appears, causing panic and is rather hungry. The monster attacks the ship and kills some of the people and disappears to the bottom of the sea.

The monster in Creature From the Haunted Sea looks rather pathetic, a mutated version of the gill man. It has ping-pong-ball eyes and large teeth showing and is actually a man in a rubber suit.

This would have been better if it was a drama, not a comedy. The cast is mostly made up of unknowns and their acting is rather poor.

Come on Roger, you can do better then this.

Rating: 1 and a half stars out of 5.

How Bad Bad Can Be

[bkoganbing · 2/10 · 15 December 2009]

What can you possibly say about Creature From The Haunted Sea? Whatever else it is I doubt that Roger Corman was trying to make either a comedy or a political statement. Personally I think he was trying to make the worst film of all time. But in trying so hard, he achieved a certain amount of campiness that save it from being a total bore. Bad films like anything else have to come natural, just like bad plays as we learned in The Producers.

The setting is 1959 in Cuba and the former Battista people are scurrying to get out of Cuba. But not before they seek to loot the treasury for a counterrevolution. General Edmundo Rivero Alvarez looks to gangster Antony Carbone for help because the Battista regime was pretty good for those wise-guys as we learned in The Godfather Part II.

But Carbone and his crew have ideas for the loot which is in the form of gold bullion and for the Cubans. But a certain sea monster has his own ideas about what to do with all of them as they land on a sparsely inhabited Caribbean island that the monster calls his turf.

No one will ever confuse this sea monster with a Ray Harryhausen creation. It looks like someone's bad idea for Halloween costume. The acting is on a level of my junior high school plays. It's a wonder any of these folks had careers after this, including Roger Corman.

But Corman did achieve a quirky campiness in making this film. I guarantee you will laugh yourself silly when you see how bad bad can be.

so bad it's embarrassing

[princess919 · 1/10 · 23 December 2006]

I am a huge fan of bad movies, my father and I regularly watch a movie because it has a terrible review.

There were many funny moments for example the lines "it was dusk I could tell 'cause the sun was going down" and "I did the only thing a trained American agent could, I got the hell outta there." But the whole movie felt somewhat pointless.

I know many people have stood up for the movie saying that it has real comedic value but this movie was so bad i just felt embarrassed watching it was actually painful. In the last ten minutes the movie does improve but I do think that, that may have been because most of the characters were dead.

Creature gets dunked

[djderka · 5/10 · 5 May 2020]

I agree with Bruce. Corman early films in b/w are hysterical. My favorite is Bucket of Blood...only there ain't no blood, but a send up of beatniks and conceptual art.

Creature starts with a chess game in a sleezy bar with a hot undercover operative and the narrators mission to Cuba. From a guy who mimics animals in his dialogue to a hot babe in a black sheath dress on the beach, this becomes a series of funny 3 stooges type script.

It is hard to describe the plot...but a Gilligan type goes under cover to find some gold? and make it with the look alike Anna Karina. A phone box in the middle of the jungle is hysterical..the movies is a collection of odd ball scenes, a creature that appears in the last 4 minutes of the film, a sinking boat, a boat captain who thoroughly looks like Humphrey Bogart in African Queen.

Shot on a 16mm silent camera, it was dialoged looped. You can do a lot with old 16mm film cameras and a Nagra audio recorder is you have talent and ingenuity and a low, low budget forcing you to be creative. Remember these were B movies with a super market budget, no Psycho budgets. Many are great and deserve to be watched again.

There is no spoiler, I am not sure how it ends.

For Corman Completists Only?

[ferbs54 · 5/10 · 19 December 2017]

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 "The 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"'s 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 creature 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 affair; 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 voice-over "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 be only 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.

So Bad It's.... Bad

[mbrahms26 · 1/10 · 25 April 2020]

I know this film was meant to be a farce, but still. The acting was wooden and the plot incoherent. At one point, the gangster's moll breaks out into a cocktail lounge song to some inexplicable piano accompaniment, and continues to sing through a shootout on the boat that claims the lives of three men. I guess the creature overlooked killing the piano player at the end, although it killed practically everyone else.

Which movie are they reviewing?

[JohnHowardReid · 2/10 · 14 May 2015]

What previous reviewers don't tell us is which movie they are reviewing, namely the 63 minutes theatrical version or the 75 minutes television take. The latter version is available on an excellent Alpha DVD and that is the version I watched last night. I thought it was awful, although I'll admit it had a few promising ideas here and there and maybe if it was "condensed to make the laughs come faster" (to utilize a prized slogan of showbiz patter back in the days when newsreel theatrettes dotted every second or third New York street corner) it would have seemed a lot more entertaining. As it is, all the jokes fall flat and most of the promising plot twists are negated by surprisingly incompetent direction, poor acting, lazy editing and "B" budget scruples.

I Can't Believe This Movie Went Over So Many Heads!

[derbycityusa · 10/10 · 13 August 2013]

This movie was a parody, nothing more, nothing less. It was not meant to be taken seriously in the least bit. It wasn't meant to be scary in the least bit (one idiot's movie review actually criticized the movie maker for having such a phony looking sea monster...DUHHHH!) Yet, over half of the lame brains writing reviews here, don't appear to understand that. It was you see, a DELIBERATELY BAD MONSTER MOVIE, like "Airplane" was a deliberately bad action, adventure film! Funny? Yes! Hilarious? No, but this movie was as low budgeted as it was way ahead of it's time... way ahead! Some of these other movies followed suit, but much later though. Movies like, Airplane, Scary Movie, Scary Movie II, Scary Movie III, Scary Movie IV, The Naked Gun, The Naked Gun 33 1/3, Hot Shots, Hot Shots Deux, ... God need I go On!

Decent drive-in surrealism.

[austex23 · 6/10 · 27 September 2000]

This is a film without any concept of quality. It makes a mockery of character, place, and plot, casually and thoroughly, almost subversive in its contempt for form and content. Have fun watching and thinking about the two or three days the cast and crew spent filming this and wondering exactly what they thought they were doing. Though it has slow moments, I have enjoyed this film all three times I've seen it. Underrated for sheer strangeness.

Dopey Kelp Monster Attacks Phoney Mobsters!

[MooCowMo · 1/10 · 8 October 1999]

Stupid, boring attempt by Roger Corman to blend horror and humor in yet another cheap, cheesy quickie. This time, Corman manages to get Robert Towne (writer of such cinematic gems as Personal Best and Chinatown) to "act" as secret agent XJ150, who attaches himself to a group of brainless mobsters out to steal the Cuban treasury. They manage to cowvince their dim-witted Cuban soldiers that a sea monsters is responsible for killing them, except the real monster shows up to cowfuse the issue. Now, the MooCow uses the term "real monster" pretty loosely here. The "monster" is a swatch of plastic kelp, sporting two ping-pong balls for eyes, and two diver's flippers for feet. It is singularly unscary and unfunny. Betsy Jones-Moreland, a long-time B actress, plays the lounge-singing gun moll with a heart of plaster. When not crooning "Creature from the Haunted Sea", she spends much of the film rolling dice in a bathing suit. Another cretin "talks" in animal sounds, for pretty much no reason. How this miserable moovie managed not to be MST3K-ified, is beyond this cow. Low production values, including audio that sounds like it's projecting from the sea monster's butt, and poor lighting further muddle the film. The MooCow says typical Corman, avoid if possible. :=8P