Creature From The Haunted Sea (1961) - Video On Demand

Creature From The Haunted Sea - Movie Review

As befits a Corman horror-comedy from the turn of the 60’s, the script for Creature from the Haunted Sea is absolute mayhem. The film manages to parody American gangsters, spy movies, Cuban exiles and revolutionaries and monster movies laced with enough satire to make the entire mix very enjoyable. The plot centers on a gang of criminals who offer to transport a band of exiles from communist Cuba - and a strong box of the treasury, which they intends to keep for themselves.

 A secret agent (Robert Towne) infiltrates the criminal gang acts as a narrator and all American hero. After killing their passengers and dumping their bodies in the ocean, they blame the deaths on a sea monster from local legends - They soon discover that the monster is very real.

The Spy learns that the Capetto gang plans to kill the Cubans en route and help themselves to the stolen gold. The US government naturally can’t have criminals killing good anti-Castro rebels so Moran must now infiltrate Capetto’s gang and save the rebels and the Cuban gold. Capetto’s has quite a crew of misfits. First, there’s his girlfriend, Mary-Belle Monahan (Betsy Jones-Moreland, from The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent and The Last Woman on Earth), arguably the deadliest and most ruthless of the whole bunch. Then there’s Mary-Belle’s brother, Happy Jack Monahan (Robert Bean), who is the most useless, apparently tolerated only because the boss fancies his big sister. Finally, there’s Pete Peterson Jr. (Beach Dickerson, from Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Dunwich Horror), the heavy muscle. Peterson’s dad was an animal-call mimic on the Vaudeville circuit back in the day, and Pete Jr. is even better than his old man. Trouble is, he sustained serious brain damage from (I’m not making this up) watching too many Clark Gable movies, and now animal calls are just about his only means of communication. Moran manages to get himself a position piloting Capetto’s yacht for the trip out of Cuba. He also manages to get himself smitten with Mary-Belle Monahan.

Capetto plans to murder one of the soldiers in his sleep and then pass off the death as the work of the legendary sea monster. Once they discover the body, the Cubans will surely want to change course, at which point Capetto will take them to an uninhabited islet off the Puerto Rican coast, “accidentally” wreck the yacht on the rocks blocking most of the approaches to said islet, and “lose” the strongbox containing the gold on the ocean bottom. He and his henchmen can then return for the gold at their leisure once the Cubans have given up and headed off into exile. But what Capetto doesn’t realize is that there really is a sea monster, and it sneaks aboard the yacht to kill a second man on the night Pete Jr. and Happy Jack put their leader’s plan in motion. Nor is this the creature’s last intervention into the gangsters’ affairs. The monster then trails the boat all the way to the islet, where it proceeds to kill off the soldiers, the mobsters, and the natives of the “uninhabited” island one by one.

The film was shot in Puerto Rico back-to-back with two other Corman productions, The Last Woman on Earth and Battle of Blood Island, from a script that had previously been filmed as Naked Paradise and Beast from Haunted Cave. Griffith rewrote the script to accommodate both the locations Corman was shooting on and a comedic storytelling approach, as opposed to the previous versions of the script, which had been straightforward.

Creature From The Haunted Sea - Cast & Crew

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