As a Public Service Announcement, if you got to this page first, I will kindly redirect you to Part One of our Two Part look at Roger Corman's Caribbean Misadventure, Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), where we discuss his experiments in comedy-horror hybrids and how he turned a trip to Puerto Rico to film two pictures into three. And with a game leftover cast and a camera full of frozen film stock, the results of their efforts was a weird and wonky goof of a film.
Granted, not all of the ensuing bedlam works, but there were enough bits of business, I think, to sustain it all to the bitter end. Of course, we’re not quite there yet; the end of the movie, I mean. For, as you remember, when we last left Renzo Capetto (Carbone) and his gang of hoodlums, they had just killed one of their passengers -- all part of a hair-brained scheme to steal some gold from a group of unwitting expatriate Cubans, ousted by Castro. The plan was to rub them out, one by one, and blame their murderous malfeasance on a mythical sea monster -- not realizing there might be a real monster stalking them all, too!
Now, the first inkling that something preternatural is afoot happens right away, the morning after they first killed one of the Cubans, to be precise, when General Tostada (Alverez) reports that not one, but two, of his men have been murdered under dubious circumstances.
For this a confused Capetto blames both deaths on his (alleged) sea monster, which, indeed, snuck aboard and killed the second Cuban. After Tostada buys this, Capetto chastises his witless minions, Happy Jack (Bean) and Pete (Dickerson), who killed the other one but can’t seem to remember killing the second guy. Honest.
Meanwhile, Sparks Moran (Towne), being an idiot, keeps reporting the wrong info to his CIA handler, including Capetto’s eventual destination. And when he’s not doing that, this infatuated dope keeps trying to flip an uninterested Mary-Belle (Jones-Moreland), Capetto's girlfriend, so they can run off together -- which goes about as badly as you’d think, because she thinks he’s nothing but a contemptible creep; and besides, she would never, ever, leave her ‘little Boopsie-Woopsie.’
But as the bodies keep piling up, they’re not piling up fast enough to suit Boopsie Woopsie -- I mean, Capetto -- despite the constant clandestine assists by the real monster. And so, to speed things up, he changes plans and successfully runs his boat aground on some rocks near Ilsa DiBaracho, a deserted island somewhere off of Puerto Rico. And as they abandon ship, the strongbox with the gold is “conveniently” dumped over the side, where it settles to the bottom of the Caribbean. All according to plan.
Now, the plan from there was to send Happy Jack in one of the lifeboats to nearby San Juan for the needed equipment so he, Jack and Pete can salvage the treasure. But the wily Capetto has no intention of actually finding it, and will instead hide the treasure even further; then stall for a period until telling the Cubans there’s no hope of ever finding it and to just give up. And once they clear out, he’ll retrieve the treasure at his leisure and use it to open a retirement home for geriatric hoodlums.
But when Happy Jack returns with a rented boat and the scuba gear, Capetto’s plans, once again, are completely scuttled. Why? Well, turns out Tostada’s men were a crack Frogman unit before they went on the lam.
Here, Tostada makes a fatal mistake and orders his men to split up once they hit the bottom to help speed up the process. This, of course, allows Capetto and the others more easy pickings and they take them out one at a time, again, making it look like the monster did it. Thus, each attempt ends in disaster and with one or two less Cubans as Capetto and the others, and the monster, sabotage all of these efforts.
Also of note, that deserted isle wasn’t as deserted as they thought, as Capetto’s crew starts fraternizing with the natives: Happy Jack winds up with a girl named Mango (Gonzalez); Pete, after an extended animal call / mating ritual, falls for a hefty gal named Porcina (Sandoval) and winds up stealing her away from her jealous husband; and a girl named Carmelita (Rodriquez), a prostitute Jack brought back from San Juan, has the hots for Moran; but he’s still hung up on Mary-Belle, who only has eyes for Capetto and his money -- if they ever manage to retrieve the gold, that is. (Sensing a pattern here.)
Things get even more convoluted from there, with talk of mutiny, double-crosses and triple-crosses that go absolutely nowhere. Then, while skipping out on the latest treasure dive, as Happy Jack and Pete play in the surf with their new girlfriends, the monster attacks, pulling Mango beneath the surface. When the others realize she’s gone, it’s already too late.
Here, a not-so-Happy Jack blames Capetto, thinking he killed Mango. But Capetto thinks the Cubans did it. Meanwhile, Pete thinks the monster did it because, he freely admits, he’s the only one dumb enough to believe this fabrication really existed all along. And as things fragment even further, Capetto gets everyone back on the same page, promising to end all of this the next morning, starting with Tostada.
Thus and so, as we finally breach the climax with yet another attempt at retrieving the gold, while Capetto and Happy Jack manage to kill Tostada, the monster attacks Happy Jack when he spots something and lingers behind: the skeletal remains of Mango. And while he does manage to get a spear into it, the monster manages to catch and kill him.
Back on the boat, after all the bodies are retrieved, Mary-Belle is inconsolable. She initially blames Capetto for this, sure he killed her brother; and so, Moran takes the opportunity to once again woo her away, only to wind up pushed over the side and into the water. And then tries again when Carmelita pushes Mary-Belle over the side, too, only to get punched in the face.
Meantime, just as Capetto and Mary-Belle kiss and make-up, where she ironically confesses that no matter who he killed, she will love him until the day she dies, the monster promptly surfaces, attacks, and kills her -- rather ludicrously.
Chaos then reigns as the monster presses forward onto the deck, killing the rest of the Cubans. It then turns its lethal attentions on Pete, who is also killed.
But this buys Moran time to take one of the dinghies and safely make it to shore with Carmelita, where they take shelter in the trees.
Meanwhile, Capetto makes it to shore in the other dinghy, but the monster chases after him, storms the beach, and then closes in for the kill.
With everyone else presumed dead and the monster returned to the bottom of the sea, with the late Mary-Belle now out of the picture, Moran declares his love for Carmelita and plans to live happily ever after with her.
But they’ll have to live on the salary of a spy, about $41.50 a week. Because while he got the girl, someone else got all the gold. Well, some thing. Which brings us too…
As with most Roger Corman productions, the story of making the film was usually a lot more entertaining than the finished product itself. Creature from the Haunted Sea, though a whole six-pack of irreverent absurdity all on its own, was no different.
“Every picture I did with Roger was an adventure!” said Betsy Jones-Moreland (Weaver, 2003). “When I came home at night and tried to tell people about it, I think they had a hard time believing me! Or when a picture was over and I had survived it -- ‘cause there was always a question of survival with Roger. You really had to check yourself every day to make sure you were alive, because you’re always in danger. There’s always some goddamn thing about to kill you or eat you, or you were going to fall into a pit and never get up -- there was always something.”
Jones-Moreland first worked with Corman on Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1957), where she would get her first taste of the chaos involved in low-budget filmmaking. There, she would experience missing wardrobe truck keys, cast defections, and tight leather costumes that tended to shrink when they got wet and then baked in the hot sun. She would also survive some horse stunts gone awry, a disastrous ship launch, twice, and survive a dangerous undertow in shark-infested water.
“The rudder on our Viking ship fell off,” said Jones-Moreland. “Well, this ship wasn’t seaworthy, and we floated out into the ocean in it. And sat there. No way to get back. No way. We thought we were going to end up in Hawaii. Roger was going crazy, up and down the beach, storming and screaming. We could see him waving his arms, we could seem ripping the cap off, throwing it into the sand.”
And when filming wrapped, it appeared that this would be the last time the actress would ever work for Corman. “I kept track of my hours and felt that I should be paid for those hours -- we went way the hell beyond the hours we were supposed to work,” Jones-Moreland told Weaver.
“Well, when I said I wanted to get paid for these hours, and I didn’t get paid for these hours, I went to the Screen Actors Guild. Everybody said, ‘You’ll never work for Roger again!’ I said, ‘That man is crazy. Who the hell would want to work for him again?’ Not working for him again wouldn’t have bothered me at all."
However, “But I did like him. I liked Roger. He’s a monster, but he’s a man with great drive, a tremendous energy and tremendous charm. I wanted to kill him a few times, but I liked him. I never felt hostile toward Roger, but I wasn’t going to be ‘had’ by him, either -- I worked for that money, I earned it and I wanted to get it.” And she did.
Cut to about a year later, where, after starring as Stella Kowolski in a smash revival of A Streetcar Named Desire (-- her co-star was Virginia Arness, wife of The Thing himself, James Arness), Jones-Moreland got a call from Corman barely a minute after the rave reviews on her performance hit the papers:
“We can now no longer wait to rave about Miss Betsy Jones-Moreland, who portrays Stella du Bois (sic) Kowalski. Good grief, but this young woman is good!” said critic Charles Stinson (The Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1959). “A fellow reviewer of mine had long praised her both in notice and conversation with me. I had not seen her work before Streetcar. That was my misfortune. What a subtle and beautiful variety of voice tones she can command, what lovely timing she has, and -- curious gift -- how powerfully and artfully she can manage a scream of anguish.”
Apparently, Roger wanted Jones-Moreland to be his Last Woman on Earth (1960). (According to Weaver, he originally wanted Allison Hayes but she turned him down.) He promised it was going to be shot in CinemaScope and Technicolor. He promised her it was the biggest budget he had ever worked with. A totally lavish endeavor with no spared expense. They’d be shooting on location in Puerto Rico and everyone would be staying in a luxurious hotel.
Said Jones-Moreland, “Roger Corman, as I have said many times -- many, many, many times -- could charm snakes off bird eggs. He could charm anybody into doing anything on the planet. I thought he had the most engaging smile of anyone I have ever known in my entire life, and he has a gift for making you feel like you’re a part of something important. Albeit it’s not important and you’re not a part of it, he makes you feel as though it is and you are, I think that’s how he’s gone as far as he’s gone. He just has this incredible ability to charm people.” (Weaver, 2003.)
And so, a charmed Jones-Moreland signed on and flew to Puerto Rico, where a reality-check hit her like a ton of bricks. And while the film was shot in color and in scope as promised, with everything else, well, she had been conned again. Her first clue was being asked to provide her own wardrobe.
“I got off the plane, I was supposed to be met at the airport, and there’s no one there to meet me. I had this enormous amount of wardrobe (I had seventeen wardrobe changes) and I literally dragged it through the airport, crying. I was so goddamn mad. It was hot. It was wet. It rained every twenty minutes (that is not an exaggeration). And it was so humid … You just cannot believe the bugs -- I lived with a can of bug spray in one hand the whole time. The second day in Puerto Rico, my ankles swelled up to be the size of my thighs. I had a terrible reaction to the water. Well, I ran all over this place, running to doctors, trying to get pills, anything.”
There was also no hotel room for her, and she was assigned to Corman’s barracks. “We stayed in a house, all of us, one house, with one bathroom. The entire company had to come back from work and everybody had to go to the bathroom, ‘cause there weren’t any bathrooms in the jungle, believe me. And if there had been, you wouldn’t have used them, because a barracuda would have gotten your parts. So everybody would come back and use the bathroom and the toilet immediately plugged up -- that would always happen. We were always out of hot water because there were twenty-five of us trying to take a shower.”
Her co-star also had a bone to pick with Corman over the housing situation. “Roger had all of us sleeping in a dorm, sort of like summer stock,” Anthony Carbone told Weaver (Fangoria, 1997). “I told Roger that this wasn’t summer stock. And I told him if you want to send me home, I don’t mind if you don’t pay me. But I’m not gonna stay in this place. So we got rooms at a hotel, Betsy and I, and that worked out all right.”
“Jack Marquette and two or three others promptly moved out [on arrival],” said Jones-Moreland (Weaver, 2003). “I didn’t have the clout to move out; Roger said, ‘Stay in the house.’ So, I stayed in the house. Finally, [with Carbone] I got the hell out of there, but I stayed for as long as I could.”
Santa Fe New Mexican (October 1, 1961).
In the supplemental booklet for the 2024 Film Masters release of Creature from the Haunted Sea, Weaver noted that “The villa rented by Corman to house his actors and crew members was less than luxe; the one air-conditioned bedroom went to Jones-Moreland to ensure that she would look as good as possible on screen.” As the only other woman on the production, Kinta Zertuche was her bunkmate, who told Weaver, “I felt very, very lucky to be able to have that, because the climate was really a misery.”
On the commentary track of the same disc, Weaver asked Corman if there was any truth to these allegations on the horrible accommodations while filming in Puerto Rico. “They’re exaggerating a little bit,” said Corman, laughing. “The house was in fairly good condition. It wasn’t perfect. But in Puerto Rico it was as good as we could get is what it amounted to -- because there weren’t too many houses that you could rent for a short period of time. It worked out alright. It was not the greatest house in the world but if I could’ve found a better one, I would have.”
And the accommodations weren’t the only things Corman had over-exaggerated. “I was doing my own makeup, my own hair, my own wardrobe, my own everything,” said Jones-Moreland. “I had no mirror, no nothing. I had to dress and undress on the beach in the middle of everything and everybody -- there was no trailer or anything like that.”
And to add insult and injury, when it came time to shoot the skin-diving scenes, the actress would once again risk life and limb to get the shot. “Then there were those goddamn air tanks we had to carry on our backs. They were very heavy, sixty or seventy-five pounds, and at one point the three of us had to jump in the water with these tanks on. Supposedly we were jumping off a boat, but actually we were all jumping off the dock.”
Thus, already encumbered by the cumbersome equipment, Jones-Moreland dove off the pier with her co-stars, Carbone and Robert Towne. “To go down with those big tanks was really something; it was scary, it was a trip, because I had never done that before,” said Carbone (Fangoria, 1997). “I don’t know if Betsy admits it, but I think she was a little scared.”
Believe me, she was. But don’t take my word for it: “I can’t swim, not worth a nickel, and [the heavy tank] started to pull me over backwards,” Jones-Moreland told Weaver. From there, panic set in and she lost her respirator. “I’m gulping water, gulping water. And we’re practically in a sewer -- we were in a place where people lived on their houseboats. This was not the best water to have going in your eyes and your mouth!”
Carbone agreed, telling Weaver (Fangoria, 1997), “Oh, god that was awful! But that was all right with Roger, you know -- Roger always has that attitude of, ‘That’s fine! That’s all right!’ We’d say, ‘Hey, we’re dyin’ here!’ and Roger would say, ‘That’s all right, you’re gonna make it. It’s gonna look great!’”
But fear not, a rescue was on the way, as Jones-Moreland recalled, “I’m swallowing water and choking, and I cried out, ‘Throw me a rope! Throw me a rope!’ And they threw me a rope -- both ends. BOTH ENDS! And I was so goddamned mad! Tony and Robert finally helped me, they kept me up -- they could swim and I couldn’t. (Bob Towne could swim like a fish.) I finally got the damn tank off and got up there, and I stood toe-to-toe with Roger and I cussed a streak. A streak! ‘Cause I damn near drowned in that sewer, and I was not happy about it. That was one of my days with Roger.”
“I think we had a thing together for a while, Betsy and I, where we’re both thinking, ‘What are we, CRAZY? What are we even DOING here?” said Carbone. “She’s just a lovely lady, Betsy, and we had a wonderful time. She was constantly working and giving and trying.”
Another righteous Jones-Moreland meltdown with Roger was soon forthcoming on the second feature, too. “There was a scene in Creature from the Haunted Sea with a manta ray. I had it put in my contract that I was not going to get into a tank, or any other place, with a manta ray, but there we were in the water together! Knowing Roger, he would have you eaten by a manta ray and still have the camera running, and say, ‘The bloody part, we’ll fix it in the lab.’ That was his answer to everything, ‘We’ll fix it in the lab.’”
But Jones-Moreland didn’t get into the water without a fight. And after a healthy rhubarb, Corman finally said “Just do it! Just get in the goddamn water! I don’t want to hear any more about these f@cking fish.!” Jones-Moreland was so mad at him, she vowed, “If a shark comes along and takes off my leg, I am going to beat Roger to death with the bloody stump.” (Editor’s note: As I was snapping vid-caps for this write-up I discovered Jones-Moreland misremembered and the manta ray scene actually appears in Last Woman on Earth.)
Now, it should be noted that the actual underwater sequences for both Last Woman on Earth and Creature from the Haunted Sea were not shot in Puerto Rico. (Only the surface shots were filmed there.) No. All of those underwater scenes were shot at Marineland -- Marineland of the Pacific est. 1954 -- located in Palos Verde, California, where the crew could shoot through the large picture windows at the marine life teeming therein. It’s the same place they used for Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). In her Weaver interview, Zertuche also recalled shooting in a similar facility somewhere in the San Fernando Valley.
The observation tank after the Marineland park closed in 1987.
Meanwhile, back on location, there were also plenty of dangers to be found filming on land, too. “We were shooting in the jungle, and all of a sudden, all the Puerto Rican guys started to disappear -- they would just vanish into the weeds. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. Then these small horses with people on them came flying by! And they were bandidos -- they were real bandits! I thought it was a joke at first, but it was no joke. The Puerto Rican guys took off and I stood there like an idiot. This is why I say, you have to pinch yourself and be sure you’re alive every day when you’re working for Roger -- this kind of thing goes on all the time!”
As for Corman’s style of directing, “Roger does not direct -- maybe he did later, but he didn’t then. He moved the camera, he got it from Place One to Place Two, and if you happened to be in the shot, that was fine, but he didn’t tell you what to do in that shot. If Roger exposed film it didn’t matter what was on it, just so long as it was exposed -- he was happy, he was overjoyed. That was all he needed to do, expose film. And anything that was on it, was a blessing. On Last Woman on Earth [and Creature from the Haunted Sea], it was business as usual and ‘We’ll fix it in the lab.’”
Even though they did come to loggerheads on more than one occasion, Jones-Moreland admitted that while “Roger was really put-out if things didn’t go his way, he was never abusive,” she said (Weaver, 2003). “I’ve worked with directors who are abusive, and he was never that. He would scream at everybody equally.”
Now, while Jones-Moreland had a cantankerous relationship with her director, she got along fine with her co-stars. “Tony Carbone was a wonderful actor,” she said. “I was very impressed with him and I liked him very much. I thought he was a very exciting, dynamic, interesting actor.”
But if anybody told her Robert Towne was going to go on to win Academy Awards, “I would have said they were stark raving mad. However, he had things to say -- you had to know that. There was something about Bob that you knew that he had things that had to be said. It was his first sale of a script as far as I knew, he was just beginning and that sort of pleased me; the fact that we were all puppies in a basket together; all doing this ‘wonderful’ movie -- because Roger made us think it was a ‘wonderful’ movie!”
“He was [always] trying things -- he was in a ‘trying period’ at that time,” Carbone said about working with Towne. “He was very agreeable and charming, and he wanted to make a good film. He was also very interested in acting at the time, and I thought he did a nice job.”
And while his acting career pretty much dried up after this Puerto Rico misadventure, Towne would go on to write The Tomb of Ligeia (1959) for Corman as well. He also did a few TV scripts for The Outer Limits (S01.E31) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (S01.E12). Towne would also work as a script doctor for Warren Beatty on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and Heaven Can Wait (1978). And would later latch onto Tom Cruise for Days of Thunder (1990), The Firm (1993) and the first two Mission: Impossible entries (1996, 2000).
And from these humble beginnings Towne would be famously nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay three straight years (1973-1975) with The Last Detail, Chinatown, which he won, and Shampoo. In fact, at the 1975 ceremony, Towne was quoted by The New York Times (December 28, 1975), saying, “This joint looks like a meeting of the Roger Corman Alumni Association,” as several other Corman graduates took home statues that night: Francis Ford Coppola, Ellen Burstyn, Robert Deniro and Carmine Coppola; along with those nominated but didn’t win -- Diane Ladd, Talia Shire and Jack Nicholson.
Nicholson’s loss on his efforts for Chinatown was a bit of a shocker, losing Best Actor to Art Carney; but I contend it shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise because Carney was f@cking amazing in Harry and Tonto (1974). Regardless, this was something Corman would never let Nicholson forget. “You son of a bitch,” said Corman as the ceremony concluded. “You kept me from sweeping all of the top awards.” Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Foreign Language film with Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973).
Meanwhile, turns out Corman was supposed to have a role in Creature from the Haunted Sea, too. Said Griffith (Senses of Cinema, 2005), “So I finished the script [Roger dictated] in three days and my grandma Myrt took the pages out to the post office and mailed them out. I was nowhere near the set for that one, but I got even with Roger in the character of Happy Jack Monahan, which I wrote for him. I wrote him as a grinning sadist. He had to jump off something as he hung himself from a tree, and he had to cry!” Griffith called it The Seasick Monster.
(I'm not even sure who these people are?!?)
Said Corman (1990), “I had mentioned to Chuck that he could write a minor part for me and he deliberately came up with Happy Jack Monahan, without question the most complex acting role Chuck ever created. In every scene Happy Jack had to express a different, powerful emotion. In one scene he fights like a brave tiger. In another, he runs away with cowardice. He laughs with hysterical joy, then cries uncontrollably. He falls in love with a girl, then ends up hating her. I know Chuck did this to drive me crazy.”
Meanwhile, when Bobby Bean finally made it to Puerto Rico, Corman assigned him to Dickerson’s sound crew as a boom mic operator on Last Woman on Earth. But his inexperience showed as something went terribly awry.
Said Jones-Moreland, “A year or so after we made that picture, Roger calls -- this is ten thousand miles and at least 12 months later. He says, ‘We have no sound. Beech Dickerson didn’t get any sound. You gotta come in and wild-track it.’ Not loop it -- wild-track it. We didn’t have a guide track, we didn’t have anything to go by. We just had to throw in some words and just hope that it matched the mouth somehow or other.”
If it was any consolation, apparently, the sound was totally botched on Creature from the Haunted Sea, too; and since Dickerson and Bean were in front of the camera on that one, maybe it was the equipment all along?
“The [biggest] problem with Last Woman on Earth and Creature from the Haunted Sea was the fact that the spontaneity [was lost] because they had to be looped,” said Carbone. “When you loop a picture, you lose the whole emotional content. Especially that many loops -- I think I did 465 loops in a day, and you don’t even know where you’re coming from anymore.”
But that was a future headache for Corman; for now, after reading Griffith’s script, he decided that Happy Jack “was too big a role, and required an actor.” And so, he relinquished the part to Bean.
“Roger was supposed to be in it, he was going to play my brother and he was going to play it like an idiot,” said Jones-Moreland. “Then at the last minute, this kid named Robert Bean came in and he played the part. He was fine, but I wish that Roger had done it -- I think it would have been a lot of fun.”
And it was the cast that helped sell Corman and Griffith’s nonsense on screen. The irascible and delightfully foul-mouthed Jones-Moreland definitely held up her end as the femme fatale; and I loved how Carbone played Capetto like he had just wandered off the stage of a third-rate, botchilized dinner theater production of To Have and To Have Not (1944), got lost, and wound up on Corman’s set.
Also, despite his own misgivings, Towne acquits himself rather well as the lovelorn Sparks Moran. But Beech Dickerson kinda steals the movie, playing a complete moron, who finally got the perfect role to fit his raspy, cartoonish voice.
“Beech was another one of those oddball characters that Roger had in his wake,” Zertuche told Weaver. ‘He was young, small in stature, and very easy to get along with. Very cooperative. He did a little bit of everything. He was willing to take a stab at anything Roger wanted him to do.”
From its haphazard beginnings, Creature from the Haunted Sea was intended to be a comedy that just so happened to have a monster in it. But according to Jones-Moreland, something caused a tonal shift halfway through filming. “The only problem with that movie is that it started out to be a takeoff on everything Roger had ever done. It was to be a comedy, a laugh a minute,” she said (Weaver, 2004). “Then all of a sudden, somewhere in the middle of it, that got lost and it got to be serious. You never knew whether it was a fish or a fowl, and it turned out to be -- foul, I guess. Every day was a new adventure, and we didn’t quite know from minute to minute what we were doing.”
“I thought it was very funny!” said Carbone. “As a matter of fact, I think Roger should’ve added other things to it. But time, you know -- he was always a stickler for time.” And I’m sure the rush to get it done as time and money ran out fueled that tonal shift Jones-Moreland was talking about.
Now, allow me a quick aside here. As I took a break from shoring up this exhaustive (and exhausting) after-action report, I noticed a serendipitous post from a Pauline Kael bot on the Artist Formerly Known as Twitter, which pulled a quote where she was discussing Werner Herzog’s magnificent Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). And to quote Kael, “Aguirre is trancelike: we experience the disorientation of the Europeans lost in this primeval lassitude. And the absurd humor is like a wink that you can't quite believe you saw; there's no preparation for it and no follow-up -- Herzog never acknowledges it.”
Look, I am in no way saying Creature from the Haunted Sea should ever be mentioned in the same breath as the Herzog movie in terms of quality. Of course not. However, it struck me that Corman’s attempts at absurdist humor plays out the same way. He never acknowledges it.
Admittedly, the film shines best when it is accidentally funny -- especially in the throwaway bits. The best gag in the film is when Capetto is cleaning his gun, which then immediately falls apart, punctuated by a cartoon stinger, as Moran’s narration claims he’s the world's deadliest weapon’s expert. Apparently, the gun wasn’t supposed to do that, and Corman did another take and Carbone assembled the gun perfectly. He thought the first take was funnier.
But some of the more planned and overt comedy elements worked, too -- they just never came off as planned. “We had all the remaining Cuban generals get into a little rowboat for a scene where they had to come ashore,” said Corman (1990). “But we overloaded the boat in the harbor and it accidentally started to sink. The cameraman [Marquette] asked if he should cut. I said, no, it’s shallow water. Keep shooting. As soon as their heads go under, then we cut and we’ll pull ‘em out. It was phenomenal. These Puerto Rican actors were cooperative. Their boat was sinking and they were all standing straight up, just as they had been directed to do. Didn’t even flinch. Nobody was making movies like these!”
Personally, I especially liked the running gag with the toilet plunger, and how Moran's attempts to woo Mary-Belle away from Capetto usually wound-up in some form of grievous bodily harm being acted upon his person as she always beat the living crap out of him. The mating ritual between Pete and Porcina is a scream. (Dickerson does a pretty good chimp imitation.) And I also loved how Capetto gives Mary-Belle a tiny little bon voyage wave and a tip of the hat after the monster snatches her away. And speaking of, if nothing else, there's always that goofy-assed monster to gawk at.
Stuck in Puerto Rico and unwilling to import anyone else, Dickerson found himself promoted to chief Monster Maker on Creature from the Haunted Sea. When Corman said, “We needed a monster that can run on land and swim underwater,” Dickerson, who had played this game before -- again, see our review of Teenage Caveman (1958), asked, “What do you mean ‘we’? Every time you say ‘we’ 'you' don’t do a damned thing.” (Franco, 1978).
But Corman assured Dickerson he was more than capable of building what he needed for the princely sum of $150 -- including materials. And so, “This kid -- Bobby Bean, another actor in the movie -- and I made a monster that ran on land and swam underwater,” and, to his surprise, “the thing held up,” said Dickerson.
“And it was a funny monster -- we stole army helmets (from Blood Island) and stacked them to form its face. We draped its body in oil cloth, to give it a sleazy look, and we gave it fangs -- we cut out holes and pasted in the teeth. We got two tennis balls and a ping-pong ball and cut them in two -- that was the monster’s eyes. Then we draped it in steel wool. That monster was seven and a half foot tall -- we spent a fortune on steel wool. Those were the good old days.”
Further testimony said materials included five helmets from that war movie, some chicken-wire, and a ton of Brillo pads for the misshapen head; the body consisted of a lacquered wet-suit covered in strips of oil-cloth and more shredded sponges for that briny-deep sensation; while the feet appeared to be nothing more than an off the rack set of scuba-flippers.
Meanwhile, the beast's deadly teeth and claws were also nothing more than carved balsa-wood and stripped pipe-cleaners. And those great-googly-moogly eyes were indeed a combination of tennis and ping-pong balls. “And I must say,” said Dickerson (Corman, 1990), “that son of a bitch, he ran on land and swam underwater for the whole shoot; and when it was over, he went to heaven.”
"ME WANT COOKIE!!!"
As for their end results? Well, I think the pictures of the gangly thing speak more volumes than I ever could. I mean, JUST LOOK AT IT!?! “We really had to do some deep concentration in order not to laugh when we saw it," said Carbone (Fangoria, 1997).
Said Corman (Weaver, 2024), “I told him what I wanted and to do as well as he could on such short notice and with very little money. And that’s the best he could do. But I thought it sort of fit the overall goofiness of the film.”
To bring this gangly critter to life, from what I could dig up, I believe Dickerson split time with co-star Bean for that dubious honor, with Dickerson handling the underwater stuff while Bean did most of the heavy lifting on land. Said Carbone, “The kid (Bean) who played it was alright; he really tried hard to be that creature, whatever that creature was to him. Once Roger saw it, he should have (just) shot from the creature’s point of view, so you never saw it. That would at least keep a semblance of fear. Because when you see this creature, you gotta laugh.”
And for once, and somewhat fittingly, their creation was destined to have the last laugh on everybody:
"We have always killed off our monsters with fire, electricity, floods, whatever,” said Corman (1990), dictating to Griffith over the phone. “The final shot in this picture is the monster sitting on the chest of gold at the bottom of the ocean floor. The skeletons of all the people in the picture are scattered around him and he's picking his teeth. That's it. The monster wins." The End.
However, the completion of the three movies itself was only half the story; for even after filming was completed, Corman's tropical misadventures were far from over.
“It was so cheap to make pictures in Puerto Rico that Roger decided to make a third picture,” noted Marquette (Weaver, 2003). “By this time, I was ready to go home; I told him if this third picture takes over eight days, I’m gone. I can’t stay. I’ve got other commitments.”
Corman would get it done in six, but when filming wrapped, as Marquette’s recollection continued, “Meanwhile, his secretary (Zertuche) never paid the bill at the Caribe Hilton; the bill for me and the other people I’d signed for. I told Roger his girl hadn’t paid the bill and they won’t let me go until the bill is paid. Another couple of days go by, and still the bill is unpaid. I said to Roger, if this bill isn’t paid, you’re not going to be able to release any of these three pictures you’ve made because part of ‘em is going to go missing because I had all the negatives. That’s when Roger finally paid the bill and I went home.”
Jones-Moreland would later corroborate this shady tale, telling Weaver, “We finally got to the point where Jack, who was the cinematographer, hid the last reels of the films. He hid them, because we didn’t have tickets to get home, we didn’t have money to get home, and the crew wasn’t getting paid. We were truly stranded. Roger was going on to other things -- and we weren’t!” said Jones-Moreland.
“Roger talked to his brother on the phone a lot, and the brother (Gene), I understand, is even tougher. Good cop, bad cop -- he’s the bad cop. Roger and his brother were going to go on and do something else, and his method of operation was to leave everybody [connected with the finished pictures] and go on. [But] Jack hid the film -- he stashed it in another freezer or something -- and he wouldn’t let Roger have it until we not only got our checks, but we got our checks cashed and we had the money in our hot little hands.”
And if the film’s score sounds familiar to you, it should. It was the same recycled themes used in A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. According to Mark Thomas McGee (Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, 1998), “Each time Katz was asked to write music for Corman, Katz sold the same score as if it were new music.” Whether Corman ever noticed this, or cared, was anyone’s guess.
A quick word on Paul Julian, too, whom I’ve mentioned a lot in this Corman retrospective, who provided the wonderful and at times eye-popping animated credit sequences for some of his films. It’s rare when the credit sequence is a highlight in a film, but Julian was just that good.
Paul Julian.
The artist was a veteran of Termite Terrace, who worked for Leon Schlesinger. Schlesinger, of course, provided Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warners. Here, Julian worked as a background artist in the Friz Freleng unit, providing the surroundings for the antics of Bugs Bunny in Hare Trigger (1945), the first appearance of Yosemite Sam, and Baseball Bugs (1946).
He would also famously imitate a car horn as he navigated around the crowded studio; a sound Chuck Jones noticed, which led to Julian being the voice of the Road Runner, starting with Fast and Furry-ous (1949) and ending with Sugar and Spies (1966). He would go uncredited due to a contractual obligation to Mel Blanc as the exclusive male voice artist for the studio.
He would leave Warners in the 1950s and join UPA (United Productions of America), where he worked on the Mr. Magoo shorts and would define the eerie look of the Academy Award nominated adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1953). I also highly recommend his take on The Hangman (1964), a macabre cautionary tale of the complicit and the complacent. Julian would also do some work for Hanna-Barbera, providing the fantastic world of Jonny Quest (1964-1965) and the other-worldly look of Space Ghost (1966-1968) and The Herculoids (1967-1969).
And for Corman, he would provide titles for Swamp Women (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters, Not of this Earth (1957), The Little Shop of Horrors, The Terror (1963) and Dementia 13 (1963), while others were provided by Bill Martin: Carnival Rock (1957), Teenage Doll (1957), Sorority Girl (1957), Teenage Caveman, and Night of the Blood Beast (1958).
When it was finally finished, Creature from the Haunted Sea was released into theaters in late 1961, usually paired up as a double feature with Charles Rondeau’s The Devil’s Partner (1961), a Faustian tale of black magic that was shot back in 1958 and sat on a shelf until the Cormans picked it up for release.
“The film had a mild success,” said a disappointed Corman (1990). “I couldn’t believe you could do such insane stuff on film and get a little tiny profit. As I’ve said, it should’ve been a big success or a big failure. It was neither.”
The Sun Herald (December 8, 1961).
To help recoup the costs, when it came time to sell the pictures off to television, Corman ran into a bit of a problem. Both The Last Woman on Earth and Creature from the Haunted Sea barely broke an hour (both about 64-minutes each), and were well short of the magical 70-minutes. And so, in March of 1963, Corman reassembled the cast in Santa Monica to shoot some nonsensical inserts, which were to be directed by Monte Hellman, to expand them both to 75 minutes.
One of these inserts was a title song, sung by Jones-Moreland, because, according to Brad Stevens (Monte Hellman: His Life and Films, 2003), with a name like Creature from the Haunted Sea it deserved a branded torch song. “Roger got all three of us back together, me and Tony and Bob,” said Jones-Moreland (Weaver, 2003). “We just had to add minutes, so there’s a lot of scenes of us just walking up the beach.”
Said Carbone, “It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, shooting extra scenes a couple of years later and sticking them into movies, getting ‘em to be the length Roger wanted, I guess. For Creature, we shot the scene when Betsy sings on the boat. They also set up a telephone on a rock on the beach, and Bob Towne made a call from it.” (Probably the best overall gag in this extended cut.)
Hellman would also shoot inserts for Beast from Haunted Cave and Ski Troop Attack. Said Hellman, "That was probably the most fun I've ever had because I was the producer, writer, and director, and I had absolute control over the crew and how the money was spent and everything. It was really fantastic, plus the fact that it was totally off the wall stuff." (The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, 2004.)
And there ya go. Roger Corman beat George Lucas to the Special Edition by nearly thirty years. Who knew? Basically, if you watch the movie and it begins immediately with the animated credits, you’re watching the theatrical cut. If it opens with Moran fleeing from some assassins, who then winds up in a cafe with another agent and gets his orders, you’re watching the extended TV version. Anyhoo…
While they are all considered Cult Films today, none of Corman’s horror-comedies did particularly well at the box office. But time has been kind to all three. These days, Corman’s cult seems to prefer A Bucket of Blood as the superior film due to its satirical bite, or The Little Shop of Horrors due to its insane production history and a cameo by Nicholson, but Creature from the Haunted Sea will always be my favorite of the bunch and, I contend, the most absurd and the most amusing -- and in some instances, downright hysterical.
There’s also some confusion on how to order them. By release date it goes A Bucket of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea. But if you dig into production schedules of the films we’ve mentioned it shows that Ski Troop Attack and Beast from Haunted Cave were filmed in February, 1959; A Bucket of Blood in April, 1959; Last Woman on Earth and Creature from the Haunted Sea were shot in July and August, 1959; and Little Shop of Horrors wasn’t shot until December, 1959. Little Shop would be released first, as Haunted Sea was held up for nearly two years -- I will assume over those sound issues and a lack of urgency due to the poor box-office of the other hybrids.
No matter which order you count them, Corman’s comedy experiment had run its course and had come to an ignominious end. Said Corman (1990), “I stopped at that point. I had done three of these. It was time [once again] to move on and do something else.” And that something else would be abandoning these black and white double features and teaming up with American International Pictures to spend the budgets of both on just one expansive picture done in color and in scope with higher production values.
The end results of this would be, of course, House of Usher (1960), which, with the help of Vincent Price (star), Richard Matheson (script), and Daniel Haller (production design), launched Corman’s highly successful Edgar Allan Poe cycle -- The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), The Masque of Red Death (1964) and the Towne scripted The Tomb of Ligeia. Sorry, The Haunted Palace (1963) doesn't count -- nope, don’t let the title fool you -- that was H.P. Lovecraft.
And while there were definitely broad comedic elements showing up in Tales of Terror (1962) and (especially) The Raven (1963), remember, that was American International’s money. As for his own money, the financial lessons he’d learned on A Bucket of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors, and Creature from the Haunted Sea would wind up scuttling another script by Griffith, a comedic take on Poe’s The Gold Bug, which was to be set in the post-Civil War south, where a carpetbagger (Basil Rathbone) runs afoul of a plantation owner (Vincent Price), who has the Midas touch.
The Grand Island Independent (June, 1975).
And as the decades progressed, Corman would remain leery of the amount of humor in his films until around the release of Death Race 2000 (1975), and even that wasn’t done without a bitter fight, which led to a lot of personal acrimony between Corman and its director, Paul Bartel.
Now, the above tales of comedy and terrors and comical errors is hardly an isolated incident when it comes to Roger Corman and his productions. And even though I like his movies a lot, and his frugal reputation and uncanny knack for finding worthwhile talent and giving them a chance is well earned, from everything I've ever seen and read about the guy, charming though he may be, I've always felt that Corman, personally, was kind of a turd. A totally endearing turd, sure, but a turd nonetheless.
Believe me, when I say 'turd' I mean that most reverently. And if 'turd’ is too strong of a word, feel free to sub in ‘scoundrel’ if that helps. Said Gray, “Despite the fact that he’s capable of a generous gesture, [Roger] sometimes cannot resist -- out of ingrained thrift -- trying to keep all the marbles for himself. He seems to be ruled by a reflex that often will not let him share the fruits of his (and everyone else’s) labors.”
In her research, an anonymous Corman staffer told Gray that “their boss would gladly sacrifice ten dollars if someone else lost twenty dollars as a consequence.” Gray also discovered that many Corman veterans agreed with this assessment, and that “essentially, part of what attracts Corman to money is the gamesmanship involved in getting and holding on to it.”
Bartel would affirm this point of view, telling Gray, “I always thought that even more than money, taking advantage of people was the objective for him, because that was proof that he was winning and everybody else was losing.”
Apparently, that shortened shooting schedule on Little Shop of Horrors had less to do with a bet Corman made that he could make a whole film in two days and more to do with a pending rule change on paying residuals for actors that was due to take effect on January 1, 1960. This would require producers to pay actors in perpetuity with any future releases of their work. And so, before these new rules went into effect, Corman crammed one last film into the last week of December under the old rules so he wouldn’t have to pay anything out.
“Such sentiments are harsh,” concluded Gray. “But they capture the spirit of the film that Corman has said contains his all-time favorite ending, one that he himself dictated to Chuck Griffith. The Creature from the Haunted Sea closes with the monster, still unvanquished, sitting on a chest of gold on the ocean floor. Corman speaks of this as possibly his most personal screen effort. He clearly identifies with the monster.”
And that’s why I'm always baffled as to how this cinematic grifter was able to con the same people, who should've known better, into not only working for him, but bending over backwards to help him get his film in the can again and again and again. "Cheap and generous, an artist and a chiseler," perhaps our featured heroine sums up the dichotomy that is Roger Corman best:
“You cannot help liking Roger, he has such great charm, and you can’t beat the fact that he started out with a nickel and a half and built what he built,” observed Jones-Moreland (Weaver, 2003). “He discovered people, he employed people, he used people. Yeah, he used people -- he found talented people that needed to work and were not working and he used them, but he gave them work. I want to make all that clear, because it’d be easy to mistake what I’m saying for Roger-bashing. By no means do I intend to do that.” (Me either. Honest.)
And don’t let the double-negative fool you. “You can’t not like Roger. You have to be lured by that wonderful, wonderful smile and that ability to make you feel important. Anybody, anywhere has got to respond to that -- I don’t care who you are, you have to respond to that feeling that he’s taking you in and you’re part of the family and your input is important. He just generates that, and I don’t even think he works at it. I think it just happens.”
Thus and so, it looks like our lovable “monster” always won in the end.
Originally posted on June 18, 2011, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) The Filmgroup / P: Roger Corman / AP: Charles Hannawalt / D: Roger Corman / W: Charles B. Griffith / C: Jack Marquette / E: Angela Scellars / S: Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Robert Towne, Beech Dickerson, Robert Bean, Edmundo Rivera Álvarez, Esther Sandoval, Sonia Noemí González, Blanquita Romero
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