Creature From The Haunted Sea (1961) Our own personal theory about this rickety little Roger Corman quickie.......Corman and crew might have taken their inspiration from the legendary 1953 "Beat The Devil"......in which director John Huston and writer Truman Capote turned a Humphrey Bogart crime caper into a tongue-in-cheek, dry-humored spoof........(an unknown type of genre in the irony-free early 1950's....)
Not that 'dry witty spoof' serves as an any kind apt description of "Creature From The Haunted Sea"........it mostly functions as a bluntly dumb farce......it's closer in spirit to Jerry Lewis movies than to 'Beat The Devil'........
But that never stopped us from smiling all the way through it. Even laughing out loud a couple of times........
Charles B, Griffith's spitball script throws together a motley collection of typical Bogart movie characters on a gangster's boat as it cruises around Cuba, transporting exiled Cuban army guys who've looted the country's treasury.......
Non-stop idiocy and dialogue worthy of a Mad Magazine parody spill out in all directions during the film's 75 minute running time.........
The ludicrous gangster crowd's been infiltrated by an equally doltish undercover agent......played by, believe it or not, future master screenwriter Robert Towne ("Chinatown" )
Towne's character 'Sparks Moran' a.k.a.Agent XK150 provides a withering, deadpan narration of the gang's perpetual misadventures......including their boat being stalked underwater by the cheapest looking, most ridiculous sea monster in film history.......(it resembles the first draft, long discarded attempt to create a new monster for the Muppet Show)
And yes, that's a Sparks Moran line we borrowed for the headline of this post and there's more where that came from and he keeps up a steady patter on the cretinous criminal cabal he's investigating......Anthony Carbone as the smooth Bogie-like leader.....("he was rejected by the Navy, the Marines and the SS' ) and Betsy Jones-Moreland as his tough-as-nails moll....("she got nailed cold pushing heroin in the laundry room of Boys' Town".....)
We've no logical defense whatsover for liking this movie.....(as of this minute, we've probably spent more time writing about it than Roger Corman ever spent making it)
But there's always a warm spot in our heart for Corman's little throwaway movies....... you can sense how much he loved making them, as low budget and awful as they were..........and you can delight in the way Corman provided on-the-job training and a launching pad for so many cinema giants (Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdonovich, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron among others....)
Come on.......who could dislike a movie where secret agent XK150 finds a convenient phone booth in the middle of a deserted beach? 3 stars (***) for a forever prime Guilty Pleasure.
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