Creature from the Haunted Sea

Roger Corman's Creature From The Haunted Sea (1961) is the least well known of the producer-director's horror-spoof trilogy (other two films in it are Little Shop Of Horrors and A Bucket Of Blood). That's sort of a pity, because it's a funnier film than A Bucket Of Blood, and has some interesting attributes -- the first is the presence of future screenwriter/producer Robert Towne, working under the name Edward Wain, in the lead role; the second is a script that manages to send up American gangsters, Cuban exiles and revolutionaries (and the movies about them -- if Errol Flynn had lived to see this, he might've been tempted to sue), spy films, and almost everything else it brushes up against. It even unintentionally burlesques the James Bond movies with its pre-credit sequence mixing action, violence, and (very goofy) sex. The movie comes to us courtesy of Alpha Video in a fair little edition, mastered from a somewhat worn and faded but basically intact print, marred by scratches but perfectly watchable. The disc will never win any awards for quality, but at $5 or $6 retail it probably wasn't trying to, and you'll get your money's worth in laughs out of the movie.Indeed, watching the disc for this review, it dawned on this writer that Creature From The Haunted Sea was the distant ancester of Airplane!, Top Secret et al. And it's also true that a good mastering job would have cost considerably more than was spent on the movie itself, which looks to have been shot in under 10 days. There are no technical flaws in the disc, and the sound is adequate within the limits of the source (they didn't spend a lot of time on the audio for the movie, either) -- once you hear Fred Katz's goofy opening music, it's impossible to take anything about this release too seriously. The usual Alpha Video five chapter breakdown has to suffice.