Legendary producer-director Roger Corman was at the height of his prolific creative powers when Puerto Rican tax incentives sent the enterprising filmmaker and his crew—including future CHINATOWN screenwriter Robert Towne—to San Juan to make a movie. It ended up being three: while wrapping THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, Corman called up his LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS screenwriter to draft the script for CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, and in the meantime he financed a quickie war picture, BATTLE OF BLOOD ISLAND. As a complement to our “Waves of Mutilation” series, we present “Corman in the Caribbean,” a pair of beachy island horror movies to cool off at the end of hot summer days.
CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA
Dir. Roger Corman, 1961.
USA/Puerto Rico. 75 min.
TUESDAY, JUNE 2 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 11 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 – 10:00 PM
Recently emboldened by shooting THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS in two days on a successful bet, Corman squeezed an extra movie out of his and his LAST WOMAN ON EARTH cast’s plane tickets by calling up screenwriter Charles B. Griffith (recently of LITTLE SHOP and A BUCKET OF BLOOD) to crank out a new script. The result is another madcap macabre satire that knowingly plays its low budget for big laughs.
Commenting on history as it unfolds, CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA was shot during the waning days of Cuba’s Batista government. It’s narrator introduces a story of “robbery, double-cross, and murder,” in which Renzo Capeto (Anthony Carbone), an American gambler and con man, is hired by Batista’s generals to help them abscond with the Cuban treasury. While fleeing revolutionaries by sailboat with secret agent “XK150”—played by future Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne—on board as an infiltrator, Capeto hatches a plan to knock off the Cubans one-by-one while blaming it on a fictitious sea monster. Or is it fictitious? In a knowingly absurd twist, it just so happens that the same monster he’s invented just happens to be lurking beneath their vessel.
In few movies is the fun the cast and crew were having so apparent on screen. One gets the sense of the movie as a “working vacation,” and Griffith’s script provides the perfect opportunity for no one to take themselves too seriously: Towne might not have cut it as a leading man, but he and Carbone are perfect in their roles as deadpan hams. And yet against all odds, the movie is recognized by Corman as one of his most personal. Everyone is an inept con, there are no heroes—and in the end, the guy in the cheap monster suit with tennis ball eyes wins.
LAST WOMAN ON EARTH
Dir. Roger Corman, 1961.
USA/Puerto Rico. 75 min.
TUESDAY, JUNE 2 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 9 – 7:30 PM
The first and bigger of Corman’s Puerto Rican thrillers, Last Woman on Earth is shot in widescreen color (advertised on the poster as “Vistascope”) and makes beautiful use of the Caribbean scenery. Anthony Carbone plays a wealthy industrialist on vacation with his wife in Puerto Rico—and as a workaholic, he brings along his young attorney (screenwriter Robert Towne, billed as “Edward Wain”) to discuss business matters. After scuba diving, the trio emerge to discover that apparently all oxygen had vanished, and and few people are left alive. While facing an uncertain future, new personal dynamics begin to develop among the three.
LAST WOMAN ON EARTH is a pithy doomsday thriller in the mold of THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL that doubles as a bourgeois critique. (For an auteurist reading, one can’t help but speculate about Corman’s own workaholic tendencies and estrangement from Hollywood’s monied elite.) One of the oddest pleasures of the film is Robert Towne’s frankly kind of bad performance as the young lawyer: according to Corman’s autobiography, he had taken so long, by Corman’s standards, to finish the script that the only way Corman could afford to fly him out to finish the script was to hire him as the co-lead. (Take a moment to let the logic of that settle in.) Nevertheless, he gets an A for effort.