• The cheezy bug-eyed monster
• The low rent Humphrey Bogart guy
• The stupefyingly bad hard-boiled voiceover narration
• The stupefyingly bad humor
• The underwater sequences
• Legend Films’ colorization

Now, let’s talk about these things shall we? Blurting the same lively jazz tunage as his “Little Shop of Horrors” (also available from Legend Films), Roger Corman’s CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA is a dingbat creature feature comedy that mixes monsters with mobsters. Well, sort of. They’re American criminals on the lam from Cuba with some Cuban ex-soldiers on board the boat. I just liked the alliteration of monsters … *clears throat*    Moving on.

CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA is a monster mash-up of the famous olden days creature feature and an exotic crime tale. The bad guys – which is nearly everyone in this picture – led by our poor man’s Bogart, are scheming about a trunk full of wealth, suddenly available thanks to turmoil in Cuba. (Leave it to Corman to exploit political upheaval in Cuba for a monster flick!) Unbeknownst to them, one of their number is a government agent deep under cover. (He’s a real schmuck and provides the copious and laughable voiceover material.) They’re speeding away from Cuba. But an unexpected monster attack throws a kink in the works and an on-purpose boat-meets-rock incident – it’s part of the baddies’ scheming; don’t ask – leaves them beseiged by beast AND stranded.    The comedic content of CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA would blush at the compliment were I to call it sophomoric. Luckily, the hour-long eruption of hokum that is CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, is charming when it should be annoying. What it can’t seem to help is the tedium. When as much is going on as I’ve described – and I’ve just give you the broad strokes, believe me – you’d think the film would be more action-packed or tension-filled or, well, something. But it’s lackadaisical in the extreme (PARA-dox!) and the monster pretty much doesn’t show up til the last quarter of the film. Though that seems to be a common structure among these oldie B creature features.

But, hell, even the poverty-stricken “Creeping Terror” kept its monster in the limelight for tons of its running time. You’d think Corman could have kept his shitty patchwork, thrift-shop critter on-screen for a greater bulk of the running time. And, before you start, I know all the arguments: Don’t show the zipper running up the monster’s back, and keep the beast in shadows until the great reveal, and all that. But let me tell you something. That only counts for GOOD movies. Because GOOD movies maintain the viewer on a diet of suspense and tension until the monster’s big reveal. There’s substance.    With bad monster movies, the appeal is in the campiness, which means the shitfuck monster needs to be FRONT AND CENTER. Because, really, that’s what we’re here to see when we’re slumming it in the B’s.

[IMPORTANT NOTE: There are upsides. The underwater sequences are cool. Period. And Legend Films' colorization makes them even cooler. They also make the monster even more badass without shaving off a teensy, single ounce of its sublime godawfulness - that ripe ingredient that can make a bad picture great. (In greater quantities, as I've said, but I'm done being mean. It's just a low budget monster movie, after all.)]    Also, Legend Films’ color process meets its usual high bar and the original B&W is included.

But Pasolini’s cinematic gospel is the anti-epic. Shot with stark simplicity in bare-bones style, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is exactly what its title suggests. This movie is the closest thing I’ve seen to a literally faithful adaptation of a biblical book. It’s barely even an adaptation. As I say, it’s essentially that gospel in film form. This shouldn’t suggest I come from the literal-rendition-is-best school of thought. I’m not. Any shift in medium generally requires adjustments. Even here in Pasonlini’s remarkably literal rendering of the Gospel of Matthew, there are slight shifts. It’s unavoidable. When moving from simple, non-descriptive prose like that of the gospel, the director must decide how things appear. What does Joseph look like (here, utterly every-day and nothing like the standard conception)? How does Yahweh’s messenger appearl to deliver messages – such as when to get moving to avoid slaughter? In this case, in the form of an androgynous youth.

Pasolini’s no-frills approach, though, interprets as little as necessary. The film’s verbiage appears about 95-99% lifted directly from the mythic text of Matthew itself. Ditto the progression of scenes. This is as close as you’ll ever get to a direct expression of a biblical document in cinematic medium. Pasolini is fervent but reserved and objective. He lets the Gospel of Matthew speak directly to us through his film. Pasolini is channeling.

The spartan style lends an immediacy and heightened realism that stands in direct contrast to the Hollywood spectacle movie (hey, I like those too). Pasolini has done a rare and magnificent thing: He has translated a work of literature to the screen almost unfiltered – so that the material speaks for itself. Pasolini is an artistic messenger. And the fact that he was able to do this with not just any writing, but with a major world myth speaks wonders for his talent. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW’s raw matter-of-factness is as powerful as Hollywood’s costume-and-set-heavy epics, because the film’s purity allows the source material to speak for itself without any bias, other than that contained in the original work, and also because Pasolini displays a enrapturing minimalist sensibility. Even the slaughter of the innocents scene benefits from Pasolini’s technique. It is not melodramatic but the film’s directness and unflinching eye make this arguably the most gasp-grabbing filmed version of this part of the Christ tale.

Another memorable scene – the wilderness temptation – is made all the more powerful through the film’s avoidance of flash and bang. Indeed, short though it is, it is a pivotal moment in the Christ myth, an equivalent to Buddha’s overcoming of Mara or Arjuna’s conquering of his fear and sorrow, and Pasolini makes it one of the finest moments in the film. It is a stellar example of how simplicity can be spun into a force of beauty.    I also cannot forgo mention of Pasolini’s obvious fascination with faces. It’s another of his creative transparencies. By this awkward phrase, I mean that just like Pasolini applies his talent yet allows his material to have its own voice, he also fearlessly lets the camera linger on shots of faces. Pasolini knows that faces have power and his art is to allow them to speak for themselves.

At heart, this tale of the God-man is a very human story, especially as Pasolini allows his film to express itself – and his film is the expression, through the cinema medium, of the Matthian gospel. The grandiose epics that were the norm for the Bible movie are great entertainments, and sometimes even great films. But in the application of the pomp and circumstance, some of the humanity – and therefore some of the divinity – is lost.

Pasolini’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is among the most potent of mythological films and boasts a purity few movies of whatever variety can claim. It is beyond great entertainment and is – simply – great.    LEGEND FILMS’ release of Pasolini is bound to be controversial for some – but that’s appropos given the director in question. I understand even his Jesus movie was found distasteful by some due to his unorthodox (ha!) approach – ironic given that Pasolini brought a Bible tale to the screen with less story alterations than any other Bible-based film I’ve ever seen.

Kudos to LEGEND FILMS for putting both versions of the film on their DVD. The Italian version is longer by around 3/4 of an hour, clocking in at about 2 hours 17 minutes. The English language version is considerably shorter, only an hour-and-a-half. I understand – this is neither endorsement nor condemnation – why the American version was shorn so much. I expect U.S. distributors were loathe to unleash a movie that long that was comprised largely of scriptural narrative set to tableau, long stretches of dialogue that are simply extended quotations from the Bible. Of course, much of this time is spent with one actor doing most of the talking – the man who portrays Jesus with stunning screen presence. But still, it’s a guy talking. That may sound crass, but I’m pretty sure the film distributors stateside – who I’m pretty sure weren’t averse to crass pragmatism – figured American audiences just wouldn’t have the patience.

If there is an upside to the English-language cut – in and of itself (I’m getting to something else, just wait) – it’s that its probably less overwhelming (and pacier), particularly if you’ve but dipped your toes in the art film world. Which is more a comment on American audiences – or at least distributors’ assessments of American audiences – than on Pasolini’s brilliant film.    Since this is the LEGEND FILMS release of the movie in question, there is also the issue of colorization. This studio is one of the big contributors to the world of colorized classics. Personally, as long as its done artfully and respectfully, I’m not offended by that. I’m also far from averse to taking aim at sacred cows, which isn’t always malicious. Sometimes reinterpretation is a beautiful thing. At any rate, LEGEND FILMS generally does a solid job of colorizing its pictures. Hell, Ray Harryhausen has even supervised some of their colorization gigs.    And the colorization on the English version – the longer, original Italian version is in B&W – is well done. It looks good and, as I’ve said before about the LEGEND FILMS approach to colorization, it looks like an old movie shot in color rather than a B&W classic that’s been painted over in neon color-by-numbers style.

Most of the time, the movies being colorized aren’t great or revered films, though, admittedly, one of the first, as I recall, to show up in such form was George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” which is both great and celebrated. But a lot of these colorized movies are public domain B films and there’s far less chance of aesthetic offense in that case.    But I’ve never before encountered a great arthouse classic that’s been colorized. That said, the folks at LEGEND FILMS did a good job with the colorization and I’ve got no problem with it. Hell, if you’re going to be an iconoclast – and I think Pasolini qualifies – then you can’t complain if somebody down the road does something rebellious to your work. Of course, I’ve no idea what Pasolini would say to the colorization of his GOSPEL, and it’s beside the point.     It’s a chance to see what Pasolini’s minimalist, B&W opus would be like with a vividness more in line with the traditional Bible epic. Even if that were the only reason to do so, it would be justification enough since the original version is available here, too, another practice of LEGEND FILMS of which I heartily approve.

My one, single, solitary quibble with this release is that the Italian version, while letterboxed, is not anamorphic, whereas the colorized English version is. It’s a shame they didn’t take the trouble to do that – but at the same time, that centering of Pasolini’s arid film in the center of a widescreen TV brings an almost newsreelish quality that only makes the realism even keener.