“Everything is wrong…strange…We can’t be sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn’t look as it should.”
--Flight Leader, Flight 19, gone in 1945.
Roger Corman was born in 1926, the year Houdini died. After he served in the navy, he made his first film The Monster from the Ocean Floor in 1954. Fiendishly, he returned again and again to explore the power from water. There was The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1956): “SHEER HORROR as a living nightmare stalks the ocean floor!” “See! The battle for life at the bottom of the sea!” and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957): “From the depths of the sea…A TIDAL WAVE OF TERROR!” So it was only natural that he would be drawn to The Hoodoo Sea.
“The Bermuda Triangle is a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by a line from Florida to the islands of Bermuda, to Puerto Rico and then back to Florida.”9 However, disappearances of ships and aircraft have strayed well beyond this anomalous area, to include the Caribbean island Martinique, location of To Have and Have Not. One year after that film was shot, in the winter of 1945, the five Avengers of Flight 19, a Flight Leader and 13 other men, were lost off the Florida Keys. Bogart and Bacall would return to this very place in three years for the making of Key Largo.
What brought Roger Corman to The Bermuda Triangle were the tax incentives. Arriving in Puerto Rico in 1961, he quickly directed The Last Woman on Earth and produced Battle of Blood Island. Then, with a week before the crew had to return to America, he decided, why not direct one more film?
Whereas Bogart had script writers like Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Truman Capote, Roger Corman had Charles B. Griffith, a man who had set new standards in black-comedy with his screenplays Bucket of Blood (1954) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Corman remembered telephoning the States, “‘Chuck, I need another comedy-horror film and you’ve got a week to write it…There’s no time for rewrites. I’ve got a small cast so write for them’…He was very sleepy and I wasn’t certain he understood completely the story line we discussed, but he agreed.”10
The result, Corman confessed was “truly insane.” Inspired by the nearby revolution of Fidel Castro, Creature from the Haunted Sea “was a story about a band of Batista’s generals making off with a treasure chest of gold from Cuba. The man they hire to captain their boat is a mobster. He murders the generals and covers up the crimes by inventing a story about an undersea monster who devours people. But there is an undersea monster.”11
Next page: The Return of Bogart
