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Creature Fom The Haunted Sea
[Alpha Video]
1961; b&w
Directed by Roger Corman
Starring: Betsy Jones-Moreland, Edward Wain, Antony Carbone & Beach Dickerson
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This undisputed classic from 1961 is unique in the Corman canon. Ostensibly a parody of the monster schlock films of the time like Beast From Haunted Cave, Corman (as producer and director) really delivers the goods (or bads as the case may be) in this truly bizarre flick. You've gotta love any movie that can pull together elements like the Cuban Revolution, Cold War spy-jinks and the mob and mix it up with a monster that looks kind of like a wet tree trunk with black rubber gloves with hooks protruding from it for hands/flippers and softball-sized paper mache goo-goo eyes. It all starts with our narrator/"hero", who we soon see is a CIA spy already undercover in recently Castro-ized Cuba, on the trail of one quarter of the Cuban treasury (conveniently in gold bar form and apparently looted when Castro took over). There's an over-abundance of minute details that you're going to need to see the picture for yourself to understand, but basically the spy, going under the name Sparks Moran ("my real name is Agent X150") has gotten himself in the employ of an expatriate mobster who's in cahoots with two deposed Cuban military higher-ups to smuggle the gold out of Cuba. After a low-speed car chase where the Cuban police cruise around in a VW Bug, the mobster, his girlfriend, two accomplices, the spy, and the Cubans (and a handful of their soldiers) board the mobster's boat to head for… well, somewhere that ain't Cuba. But there's subplots afoot, as the mobster and his crew plan to get the gold and kill the Cubans. They kill one of the soldiers by suffocating him with a slime-coated plunger on the face and cutting him with some garden tools, blame it on a "monster" and subsequently scare the Cuban military men into changing course to the mobster's suggestion of a small island off Puerto Rico (where he knows an offshore reef area where he can stash the gold for later retrieval). Unfortunately, as coincidence would have it, there's actually a real sea monster in same area as the boat and it's on a killing spree. Once the mobster intentionally grounds the boat on a reef, forcing everyone to take shelter on a the island, and a convenient cover for his crew to ditch the gold over the side of the boat, things begin to pick up. Since the gold is now underwater, someone's gotta dive to get it; a perfect opportunity for sea monster murder both real and faked. With each dive for the gold, either the mobster, the monster or both dispose of somebody, thus making for loads of confusion and paranoia. As a crew mate, not a diver, the spy remains on board trying to woo the mobster's girlfriend away to a better life—but she's not having any of that. Finally reality clashes with fiction as the real monster attacks the boat and crew and tracks down and kills those giving his monster-ness a bad name—I mean, let's face it, that monster didn't whack anybody until someone started killing people on his turf and trying to make him look responsible. In the end, the spy survives with his girl of second choice (she's been telling him she loves him for the last quareter of the picture but until he sees the mobster girl die at the hands of the monster he doesn't really give her the time of day) and tells her he'll try to make her happy on his meager spy's salary. I wonder if this movie was as hilariously wacky to audiences when it came out as it was to me seeing it 43 years later; if not, then they don't know what they were missing.
—the Kommandant
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