Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

ferbs54 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.

unclediggydo 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 "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" 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 monster 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 picture; 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 voiceover "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 only be 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....

lemon_magic Once this thing came to a conclusion, I sat for a minute and thought about how I wanted to punch Corman and Griffith in their respective chops for inflicting this movie on me. Based on the lines the actors spout at various points in the movie, this is apparently supposed to be a comedy of sorts, the same way "Little Shop Of Horrors" and "Bucket Of Blood" were horror-comedies. Well, for whatever reasons, those movies worked, and boy this one sure doesn't. Comedy is hard. Timing is everything in a comedy, and a spoof only works if the timing and art direction in it are better than whatever the subject of the spoof is. With its washed out, smeary photography and muddy, barely understandable vocals, and barely-there non- performances, it's obvious in the first minute that this movie is too raw and unpolished to get the timing right. A few more takes, a little bit better blocking, a few rewrites of a couple of the dopier scenes in the screenplay...even a more careful edit to weed out some of the dead air and draggy spots..."Creature" might have been at least mildly amusing. Or if they'd given up on the comedy and done a straight monster flick, it would have been a "5" instead of the "3". "Creature" isn't even especially good for a movie shot in less than 10 days. You can give this one a miss if you see it offered on cable or a late night horror host show.

Rainey Dawn 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