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Creature from the Haunted Sea poster

Creature from the Haunted Sea is a 1961 horror comedy film directed by Roger Corman. Written by Charles B. Griffith, the film is a parody of spy, gangster, and monster movies (mostly Creature from the Black Lagoon), concerning a secret agent, XK150 (played by Robert Towne under the pseudonym Edward Wain), who goes under the code name "Sparks Moran" in order to infiltrate a criminal gang led by Renzo Capetto (Antony Carbone), who is trying to transport an exiled Cuban general with an entourage and a large portion of the Cuban treasury out of Cuba. Filmgroup released the film as a double feature with Devil's Partner.

It was the last of an unofficial trilogy of black comedies by Griffith and Corman which also included Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. Corman later said "the surprise to me was there were three of these low-budget comedy-horror films... that were all so audacious; I mean, it’s so wild to do films that cheaply and on that short a schedule and with such insane subject matter. It seemed to me I would have either a great success or a colossal failure. It was disappointing that they were all modest successes. And it didn’t figure that I could do something so wild and get a little conservative return on the money and the end would be so routine."

In 1982 Corman said "“Hardly anyone has ever seen this movie or even knows that it exists" but the film has developed a minor cult reputation.

Plot[]

During the Cuban Revolution, deported American gambler and racketeer Renzo Capetto (Anthony Carbone) comes up with a get-rich-quick scheme and uses his yacht to help a group of loyalists headed by General Tostada (Edmundo Rivera Alvarez) escape with Cuba's national treasury, which they plan to use to stage a counterrevolution.

American secret agent XK150, using the alias Sparks Moran (Robert Towne, credited as Edward Wain), has infiltrated the gang which consists of Capeto's brazenly felonious blond girlfriend Mary-Belle Monahan (Betsy Jones-Moreland); her deceptively clean-cut younger brother Happy Jack (Robert Bean); and a gullible, good-natured, and homicidal oaf named Pete Peterson Jr. (Beach Dickerson), who constantly does animal impressions.

Unfortunately, despite his other role as the story's omniscient narrator, Sparks is too much the Maxwell Smart-style bumbler to figure out what is going on because of his own incompetence and his hopeless infatuation with the completely uninterested Mary-Belle, who regards his attempts to rescue her from a life of crime with an amused contempt.

Capetto plans to steal the fortune in gold and then to claim that the mythical "Creature from the Haunted Sea" rose and devoured the loyalists, but it is he and his crew who murder the Cuban soldiers with sharpened, claw-like gardening tools and leave behind "footprints" made with a toilet plunger and a mixture of olive oil and green ink. However, he does not know that there really is a shaggy, pop-eyed sea monster lurking in the very waters where he plans to do the dirty deed and that the creature may make his plan all too easy to pull off.

When the monster's insatiable hunger upsets his scheme, Capetto decides to sink his boat into 30 feet of water off the shore of a small island and then to retrieve the gold later. Complications ensue when the male members of his gang get romantically involved with the natives, with Pete hooking up with Porcina (Esther Sandoval) and Jack with her pretty daughter Mango (Sonia Noemí González), and local working girl Carmelita (Blanquita Romero) takes an instant liking to Sparks.

Capetto and his gang go scuba diving to attempt to salvage the loot, but the creature picks them all off one by one except for Sparks and Carmelita, and the movie ends with the creature sitting on the undersea treasure and happily picking its teeth. The creature burps and the bubbles roll up with the credits.

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