#Creature From The Haunted Sea

[weirdlookindog]

[jacobchabot]

You're not the boss of me now.

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Cover for a fly-by-night DVD release of Roger Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea, featuring some ill-chosen and surely stolen Bob Eggleton artwork.

[randomdeinonychus]

A random selection of Roger Corman posters.

Rest in Peace to an absolute legend.

[amazingmrcinema007]

My October watches part 2.

Lyle (2014): ★★/5

Name The Demon (2024): ★★★/5

Scream Bloody Murder (1973): ★★★/5

Terrifier 3 (2024): ★★★.5/5

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961): ★.5/5

Them! (1954): ★★★★/5

Sisters (1972): ★★★★/5

The Evil Within (2017): ★★★.5/5

The Undead (1957): ★★★/5

[brokehorrorfan]

The Devil's Partner and Creature from the Haunted Sea will be released together on Blu-ray and DVD on January 16 via Film Masters.

The Devil's Partner is a 1960 horror film directed by Charles R. Rondeau and written by Stanley Clements and Laura Jean Mathews. Ed Nelson, Edgar Buchanan, Jean Allison, and Richard Crane star.

Creature from the Haunted Sea is a 1961 horror-comedy directed by Roger Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors) and written by Charles B. Griffith (Death Race 2000). Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, and Edward Wain.

The Devil's Partner has been newly restored in 4K from original 35mm archival elements. Creature from the Haunted Sea has been newly scanned in 4K from 35mm archival elements with supplemental 16mm.

Both films are presented in 1.85:1 theatrical and 1.37:1 television aspect ratios. Creature from the Haunted Sea's TV version features 15 minutes of additional footage shot years later to extend the runtime. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

The Devil’s Partner audio commentary by Larry Strothe, James Gonis, Shawn Sheridan and Matt Weinhold of the Monster Party Podcast

Creature From the Haunted Sea audio commentary by film historian Tom Weaver with contributions from Roger Corman, Kinta Zertuche, and Larry Blamire

Interview with Roger Corman

Hollywood Intruders: The Filmgroup Story: Part III featurette

Recut trailers

Creature from the Haunted Sea theatrical trailer

The Devil’s Partner essay by author Mark McGee

Creature from the Haunted Sea essay by film historian Tom Weaver

In The Devil's Partner, an elderly man regains his youth after making a deal with Satan. In Creature from the Haunted Sea, a gangster knocks off his crew members, blaming their deaths on a legendary sea monster.

Pre-order The Devil's Partner and Creature from the Haunted Sea.

[affiches-cinema]

Creature from the Haunted Sea, 1961.

[schlock-luster-video]

Remembering Creature From the Haunted Sea star Anthony Carbone on the anniversary of his date of birth.

[weirdellis]

We had so much tech problems. Skip ahead 7 minutes if you want to watch this Stream of Scott Sackett and me chewing the Thursday fat.

[justyeghost]

Today's Feature Presentation:

It's got gangsters. It's got Cubans. It's got spies. And it's got a cheaply made sea monster... oh, and it's a Roger Coman Quickie, so it'll be fun...

Catch it on my Twitch Channel or below the cut.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

There are only two good things about Creature from the Haunted Sea. The first is its laughably stupid-looking monster, whose comedic appearance was used in the opening credits of Malcolm in the Middle. It brings back warm memories. The second is that it’s in the public domain. This means you can easily find it for free or packaged together with 49 other horror films for less than $20 - like I did. That price tag is a valuable lesson, which we’ll get to in a bit.

During the Cuban Revolution, American gambler and racketeer Renzo Capetto (Anthony Carbone) is hired by deposed General Tostada (Edmundo Rivera Alvarez) to smuggle the national treasury out of the country. Capetto and his criminal crew, which include his girlfriend Mary-Belle Monahan (Betsy Jones-Moreland), her brother Happy Jack (Robert Bean) and animal impressionist Pete Peterson Jr. (Beach Dickerson) come up with an idea. They will murder the General and his loyalists, then keep the gold for themselves. To avoid suspicion, they will convince the Cubans they are being stalked by a sea monster. Little do they know a real-life monster is following their ship. if the secret agent onboard, XK150 (Robert Towne) had any kind of brains, he’d be able to figure this out quickly and put an end to it.

Even though this is a horror comedy and that much of the criticisms that could be thrown towards Creature from the Haunted Sea were likely intentional, the movie’s not funny so they turn into marks against it anyway. The characters are flat, uninteresting and annoying, with Pete Person Jr. easily winning a gold medal in irritation. Speaking almost entirely in animal noises thanks to a brain injury, his schtick gets old immediately. You’ll spend the brief 75-minute running time wishing he would shut up or get torn apart by the sea monster, which is obviously a scuba diver covered in seaweed (or something that looks like it) with toothpicks glued on the end of their gloves, vampire teeth, and ping pong balls for eyes. Go into any Halloween store on November 1st and you could piece together something better.

Even before the dreadful creature shows up, this premise is just dumb. I know if my shifty shipmates told me two men were just murdered by a sea monster I wouldn’t believe them. No one with their head on straight would. What’s much more likely to happen to Capetto is that the Cubans will see right through his dumb scheme and chop him up into shark bait.

It’s a bad movie and would’ve been bad even in 1961 when the Get Smart comedy thing was popular. If there was any kind of justice in this world, this desert of laughs would’ve been forgotten to the ages. Instead, it made its way into the public domain and regularly finds itself for sale/viewing. The problem is that no one cared about this movie then and they certainly don’t now. Every print you’ll see is scratchy and dusty, with muddy sound that will require you to crank up the volume just so you can understand what the hell is going on. Worse, you won’t find any subtitle option anywhere. You practically have to read the Wikipedia article just to understand what’s happening. It got so bad with the disc I was watching that I actually wound up going on Tubi, hoping that a better print would be available there. I got “lucky”, starting watching again. In no time, I was looking forward to the commercial breaks. At least those were lively, professionally made, colorful and audible.

Suddenly, it hit me. The only reason I was watching this movie is because it came in a box set I bought years ago. I would have to do this 49 more times to “get my money’s worth”. Meanwhile, there are thousands of other movies I could be watching. Even a horrible film like The Snowman or The Love Guru didn’t make me exhausted because I was able to passively absorb them. This was work. A job I wasn’t going to get paid for so I’m cutting my losses. I might've wasted my money, but I'm done wasting my time.

Even if you were sent back in time to see Creature from the Haunted Sea in a top-notch theatre with impeccable audio in the most comfortable seat ever made, I still wouldn’t recommend it. Today, presented like this? It would take all the gold in Cuba to convince me to hit "play". (On DVD, September 13, 2021)

[weirdlookindog]

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

[movie-titlecards]

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

My rating: 5/10

Some of the humor kind of works by virtue of simply being profoundly silly, but overall this is kind of dull and occasionally rather racist.

[cinemaquiles]

Sarcófago: Criaturas do Fundo do Mar (Creature From The Haunted Sea, 1961) legendado

[garbage-connoisseur]

Creature from the Haunted Sea

Today's feature is an infamous old Roger Corman flick. Everyone reading this are probably well aware of who Roger Corman is, but if not here's a quick summary: Roger Corman is a pioneer of super low-budget schlock. He was active as a director in the 1950s and 1960s, making Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft adaptations starring Vincent Price, directing the original Little Shop of Horrors and creature features with titles like "It Conquered the World", "Attack of the Crab Monster", "Swamp Women", "Teenage Cave Man", "She Gods of Shark Reef", "The Wasp Woman" etc. More importantly Corman eventually took on the role of producer of low-budget grindhouse movies and helped lunch a thousand careers by giving unknown directors the chance to show what they could do with minimal budgets such as Joe Dante (Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins). In this particular case we're dealing with a comedy movies parodying old spy films. A sort of Roger Corman "Austin Powers", "Naked Gun" or "Johnny English" I suppose.

The jokes are hardly the high point, but they are also not painful to watch, which puts it above the admittedly very low bar of the vast majority of bad comedies. It's more "sensible chuckle" than lough out loud funny is what I'm trying to say.

Of course this movie isn't noteworthy for its hot takes on 50s secret agent movies. The star of the show is the titular creature of the Haunted Sea:

But we will get to that. First the plot: In a wonderfully animated segment by Sergio Aragonés of MAD Comics fame we are introduced to the setup. A coup has happened in Cuba and the old guard is making off with all of the contents of the treasury to bide their time elsewhere and plan their own coup:

Robert Towne (the writer of Chinatown and Mission: Impossible) plays the secret agent XK150 (a model of sports car) and is instructed by XK120 to go undercover as a crew member on a ship that is smuggling the contents of the Cuban treasury out of the country. XK120 is also introduced playing a game of chess against herself, which she handily wins right as XK150 enters.

I can only imagine how long she has been sitting there, waiting for him to drop by so she could reveal her great achievement of beating herself at chess. A very normal thing to do.

As a side-note I tried looking up the position, to see if it was referencing some great play - but it turns out this position has never once happened in real life.

I probably should lower my expectations just slightly.

The Cuban gold is being transported along with a Cuban general and his men out of the country on the boat of a crook and owner of a Cuban casino. The Casino owner secretly plans to murder the soldiers, blaming a monster he makes up, dump the gold in an accident, and then come back for it later.

Now, comedy dictates that when he plans to fake monster attacks, a monster with that exact description must also appear. And what a glorious monster it is.

Now, people usually talk bout how terrible looking this creature is, and that is absolutely true. Yet we must not forget that this is a comedy movie, and the monster is directly responsible for the funniest moments in the movie.

I have to believe the monster looking this bad was fully intentional and thereby hugely successful.

That' right. I sad it. The Creature from the Haunted Sea is good actually.

My copy of the movie is from one of those 50 movies on 12 discs box sets, and is in the Public Domain and therefore available for free viewing all over the place. I do hope someone does a nice blu-ray remaster eventually though.

[amazingmrcinema007]

No thoughts, head empty.