Roger Corman first gave us the delightful A Bucket of Blood before trumping his surprisingly effective horror comedy a year later with Little Shop of Horrors.  Unfortunately, in 1961, he ended his satirical mayhem with Creature from the Haunted Sea.  Granted, it is the best noir horror comedy musical ever made.  It holds this paradoxical crown of being the best of its kind (perhaps, natch, because it is the only of its kind) as it simultaneously stands as one of the worst films ever made because Corman and his screenwriter, Charles Griffith, knew it couldn’t be done seriously, hence they skedaddled clean past campy and slammed head-first into, to put it simply, goofy with this very poorly executed sea monster parody.

   A gaggle of American low-lifes-cum-gangers are hired by a Cuban cartel to smuggle a chest of gold into Puerto Rico before the consequences of the recent revolution catches up with the purloined cash of the former regime.  The motley crew of gangers plot to kill the protectors of the loot using the alibi of the unlikely sea monster when, alas, a real antagonist appears.

   Indeed, the plot of Creature from the Haunted Sea bares the trademark campiness which made Corman and Griffith’s previous two horror comedy efforts a success.  It seems remarkable that a figure named Renzo Capetto, a.k.a. Capo Rosetto, a.k.a. Ratto Pazetti, a.k.a. Zeppo Staccato, a.k.a. Shirley Lamour (Antony Carbone), a Bogart-by-way-of Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny imposter, amid Petet Peterson Junior (Beach Dickerson), the muscle of the crew who almost exclusively communicates via animal cries (I’m not making this up) and a moldy Cookie Monster/Bert hybrid with excessive matting who just happens to wear flippers, could not sustain a narrative unto themselves. 

   Furthermore, Creature from the Haunted Sea is the only film in recent memory in which a character attempts to knock another out with a fish (yes, a fish!), which is second only to death by toilet plunger, itself usurped by the tautological observation by Sparks Moran, a.k.a. Agent XK150, a.k.a. Narrator (Robert Towne), “It was dusk.  I could tell because the sun was going down.”

   However, midway though the grossly underlit and scantily recorded film--a flashlight is almost required to view the feature as the characters sound as if they are speaking through the bowels of a rusty drainage pipe--what little personality Corman has managed to evoke is almost instantaneously eliminated as Griffith loses complete and utter control of the script. 

   What remains of Roger Corman’s Creature from the Haunted Sea is a misdirected afterthought that, perhaps in better hands, could have made for a wry satire of the    Creature Features of Yesteryear.  Unfortunately, even the Godfather of Frugal cinema mismanaged his meager finances as his skimming on the celluloid necessities called lighting and sound makes for a very laborious, tedious noir horror comedy musical that might (or might not) have been.

 -Egregious Gurnow

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