EDITOR’S NOTE: Creature From the Haunted Sea was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 14, 1968 at 1:00 a.m.

Sparks Moran is also known as XK150. Played by Robert Towne, he is to get into the gang of Renzo Capetto (Antony Carbone) and stop them before they steal money from Cuba and pay for General Tostada (Edmundo Rivera Alvarez) to start a counterrevolution.

The gang isn’t all that normal. It includes Capetto’s lover Mary-Belle Monahan (Betsy Jones-Moreland), a homicidal nice guy named Pete Peterson Jr. (Beach Dickerson) and Mary-Belle’s brother Happy Jack (Robert Bean). They have created a legend that the Creature from the Haunted Sea is killing the Cuban soldiers but there is really such a monster that is chasing the crew.

Everyone falls in love but only Sparks and a local sex worker named Carmelita (Blanquita Romero) survive. The creature, however, is happy because it ate well.

Directed by Roger Corman and written by Charles B. Griffith, this movie was written fast and made even faster. Yet Corman seems to have good memories of making it. He said, “It’s been suggested that Creature from the Haunted Sea is my most personal film. That’s actually not a bad suggestion, considering it’s got my favorite ending of them all — a last scene I invented on a whim and literally phoned to Chuck Griffith from Puerto Rico. This was the 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. “We have always killed off our monsters with fire, electricity, floods, whatever,” I told Chuck. “This time, the monster wins. The final shot in this picture,” I insisted, “is the monster sitting on the chest of gold at the bottom of the ocean floor. The skeletons of all the people in the picture are scattered around him and he’s picking his teeth. That’s it. The monster wins.”

You can watch this on Tubi.