In all honesty, Roger Corman has made some great genre movies back in his days. Basically every movie he did based on Edgar Allen Poe material is a great one. Nevertheless he seems like a person who has never taken himself or his movies too serious. It's why he still is king of the B-monster movies and he even received a special honorary Academy Award for his career this year. As silly and as bad as his movies often are, they are still cult classics because they are so fun to watch.
Corman must have thought to exploit this and decided on making a full-blood comedy, that is making fun of the genre that made him big. This movie does however makes it painfully obvious that comedy simply wasn't Corman's thing. The comedy of the movie is incredibly lame and you can tell that halve of the time the actors were improvising to still try desperately to add some comedy to some of the sequences. It doesn't work though and instead lets the movie seem even more amateur like than it already did. The harder and more desperately they try, the less funny it all gets.
So no, "Creature from the Haunted Sea" just isn't a very fun movie to watch, which is the movie its most disappointing aspect.
Of course there is an awful lot more wrong with the movie though. I would be curious to find out how much of the story was to blame for this. Charles B. Griffith was a writer who worked Roger Corman on several of his movies, including one of his best known ones, the 1960 version of "The Little Shop of Horrors". The story for this particular movie is quite hard to follow and understand because it's all so poorly written and being handled in the movie. It makes the movie all quite boring and annoying to watch.
Roger Corman is notoriously cheap, so none of his movies exactly have a slick look over them. The movie has some horrible picture and sound quality, which at times makes it even hard to understand what the actors are saying. Especially the singing sequence sounds awful. The monster itself is also awfully cheap looking and is laughable but not in a good way really.
The movie is not just a spoof of the type of movies Corman makes but it tries to trow in a lot of other stuff as well. It spoofs some of the popular type of crime thrillers and film-noir of its time. The main lead even looks and acts like Humphrey Bogart. This all would had been fine, had it all worked out a little bit better and funny for the movie.
Yes, it really is all that bad!
2/10
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