Creature from the Haunted Sea is an ultra low-budget spy comedy & slapstick horror, set early in Castro's Cuba.

Our undercover spy (Robert Towne, though credited as Edward Wain), posing as "a notorous gumball machine bandit," hires onto a ship that is secretly taking gold bullion out of Cuba.

Soon the spy plot is beside the point & the film sets out on a new tangent with a wonderfully ridicuous sea creature.

Latino stereotypes like General Tostada aren't at all funny, but once the boat has set out to sea & nobody is any longer pretending to be Latino, it all begins to work at least a little.

Despite being a very bad film, it is jam-packed with wise cracks, puns, & one-liners, many of which are actually kinda funny. Plus there is a moment that parodies musicals but with seemingly made-up-on-the-spot lyrics; it's as funny as a better bit from Saturday Night Live.

Anthony Carbone as "Renzo Capetto aka Capo Rosetto aka Ratto Pazetti aka Zeppo Staccato aka Shirley Lamour" impersonates Bogart of The African Queen (1951) amusingly, & every shipboard character is quite the clown.

Appreciating Creature from the Haunted Sea has a lot to do with the viewers frame of mind. You gotta not mind that it's intentionally lousy & intentionally foolish, & just flow with the folly. If the mood for such junk can be sustained a little longer, it can be fun to watch Creature back-to-back with the awful Last Woman on Earth filmed at the same time with the same locations, same boat, three of the same actors.


Also from the Corman cheapy factory is Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), with a snazzy-jazzy score & some competent minor character actors who start it off with the feeling that might only be half bad.

Near a ski resort in South Dakota (where the film was actually shot) dull characters recite dull dialogue marking time waiting for something to happen that would justify calling this a horror film.

Everyone goes skiing by day, boozing & dancing by night. For a teaser one of the gold-thief skiers sees super-stupid transparent ghost FX in the snow, filling about five seconds of screen time, & totally unrelated to any other scenes.

Eventually two skiers go in the haunted cave to wait out a storm, to their regret. Then additional people are wandering willynilly into the cave to keep things pointlessness lively.

During the last reel, everyone encounters a spider-person puppet with floppy tentacles/spider legs. The main body of the spider-person puppet looks rather like sticks plastered over with lint.

The "beast" also generates lint or webs to stick people to the cave walls so that it can suck out their blood at leisure, until at long last (quick! avert your eyes! spoiler alert!) someone sets it on fire, the end.

After waiting the whole damned film for anything to happen, we at least get to see a lot of the lint & sticks monster, which really is a fun creature just on the basis or the ridiculous. And though most of the film is merely dumb & dull, the climactic scenes with the lint & sticks monster are distinctly of the "so bad it's good" school.

As public domain films both of the above Corman cheapies have been released in a variety of packages. They can also be downloaded safely, legally, & for free from archive.org.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl