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Kubrick's Fear and Desire has nothing on the shoestring Sophocles of this Corman production. The contrast rests between the existentialism of Monte Hellman's direction and the cartooning of Charles B. Griffith's screenplay, the setting gives the filmmaker the edge—snowy South Dakota slopes stand in admirably for the void of human struggle, the characters navigate its whiteness, rising and falling. "Some freedom," grouses the gangster from Chicago (Frank Wolff) at the ski lodge before rounding up his henchmen for a robbery. Gold bars in the vault like "a cracker box with an iron door," the local guide (Michael Forest) smokes a pipe and is peculiarly nicknamed "Cowboy," he gets forced into the woods with the miscreants. An explosion rouses the eponymous monster in its lair, once in a while a scraggly arachnoid limb intrudes from the side of the screen to snatch cast members. Creature from the Haunted Sea has the proper send-up of the situation, Hellman here makes it melancholy and poetic: When a web-swathed victim suddenly opens her eyes as the wind screeches and howls, a tacky effect becomes a Cocteau evocation. "You can keep your nose out of it, unless you want a 38-caliber nose job." The dazed moll (Sheila Noonan) in a bathtub warbling "Home on the Range" points up the Key Largo recomposition, slowly and surely she becomes the film's aching center, anticipating the drifting heroines of Ride in the Whirlwind, The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop. Asked about a missing girl, this "underpaid model in the wholesale arts" gives the maxim of many a Hellman nomad: "Can't help you. Can't even help myself." With Richard Sinatra, Wally Campo, Linné Ahlstrand, Chris Robinson, and Kay Jennings. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |