Amazon.com Customer Reviews
 Rated 2 out of 5
Vintage Roger Corman
Only one man could produce and direct a movie as outrageously stupid as The Creature From the Haunted Sea: Roger Corman. I might as well start with the monster. If you thought low-budget Japanese monster movies featured the most patently fake monsters in the cinematic universe, you haven’’t seen Corman’’s creature from the haunted sea. A kindergarten class could make a better monster out of shoelaces and a couple of buttons. You have to see it; I can’’t even begin to explain how ludicrous this monster is. The story is also laughable. After Castro’’s revolution, counter-revolutionary forces have stolen the treasury of Cuba, and their plan is to sneak the gold off the island in an American boat. They choose Lorenzo because, according to their reasoning, the fact that he is an American gambler makes him beyond reproach. Lorenzo’’s crew is, in a word, unreal. First, there is his best girl Marybelle and her brother Happy Jack, who got his name from the twitch he developed from watching too many Humphrey Bogart movies. Next up is Pete Peterson, Jr., whom, as the narrator actually explains to us, is the son of Pete Peterson, Sr. Pete’’s only talent is his ability to mimic any and all kinds of animals, but he’’s never been the same since blowing his brain out of whack imitating a whooping crane years earlier. Then there is the "hero" of our story, an American spy who makes Maxwell Smart look like Albert Einstein. He never really understands what is going on, but he diligently reports his non-findings to headquarters using his home-made, undetectable radio set constructed using simulated hot dogs for knobs and tubes inside of dill pickles. His narration of the story is filled with incredibly philosophical statements such as "It was coming on dusk. I knew because the sun was going down." Getting back to the plot, the crooked Americans want the gold for themselves, so they hatch an elaborate plot to kill the Cuban soldiers on board one by one and make each death appear to be the work of a mythical sea creature. What they don’’t know is that the creature, as ridiculous as he is, actually does exist. Featuring such unexplained oddities as a pay phone (with a steady stream of users) existing on a deserted island, this movie goes out of its way to insult the intelligence of every creature who ever harbored a conscious thought. As a result, the film is pretty darn funny at times, although one is hard pressed to see whether or not Corman intended this to be a comedy or a serious monster movie. I for one never know what Roger Corman could possible have been thinking.  Rated 3 out of 5
BRUCE says
The first time I saw this film was when I was 13 or so on a late night horror movie show in the mid sixties, I thought it was just a really dumb movie, but I liked it, I thought it was just someone trying to make a serious horror film that just turned out funny. When I saw the film for sale on DVD I just had to buy it, just to see if my boyhood memory of the film was true what I found was a film that must have been planed to be funny or at least I hope so, as a fan of really campie movies I have to rate The Creature from the Haunted Sea right up there with Plan 9 and other dumb movies, call me weird but I just like it its good for a giggle.
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