Roger Corman is the most consistent person on Earth.He has consistently churned out garbage for over half a century and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. With only 1 hour to work with,Corman still manages to kill half the time with lots of nothing.I guess that's his trademark.His use of the two person tight shot makes having a budget completely unnecessary.Why have a story or set when you can just have tight shots of nothing? So the "story" is about a woman who goes on vacation to Mexico,alone.She quickly befriends a fatherless child(not weird at all) and then meets a guy with a submarine.The submarine is human powered,very slow,can not move in a straight line and is not air tight(you need scuba gear to ride in this thing).The entire concept of the thing makes no sense yet we are treated to 15 minutes of it traveling underwater. All the Mexicans have eastern European accents while still managing to throw in 1 Spanish word per sentence.Did I mention the woman faints every 5 minutes? She's obsessed with finding this mysterious monster yet every time she goes looking she gets terrified and runs,when she doesn't faint. One time she sees an octopus and says she thought it was the monster.When we finally see the monster,IT LOOKS LIKE AN OCTOPUS! Then the Corman genius kicks in and we only see the monster out of focus while the woman moves in fast motion. Never watch this or any other Roger Corman movie.

When American tourist Anne Kimball learns from a Mexican boy that a sea monster has been rumored to be responsible for the disappearance of several locals, she becomes curious and begins to investigate. While deep sea diving, she comes across a scientist (Stuart Wade) in a floating contraption that looks somewhat like a giant Tylenol, she questions him about the alleged sea monster. Upon her own, she discovers a huge, one-eyed monster that looks like a combination squid/octopus that has a cute wiggle while it walks. Old local legend has it that a beautiful woman sacrificed to the monster will satisfy it enough to go away, and guess who is chosen. One of the local wise-men refers to the octopus as "the coward of the sea", but there's no Bert Lahr lion in this monster. Horribly bad acting and dialog (Wade actually tells Kimball to slip out of her bathing suit into a dry martini!) abound, this has no real conclusion, making the other giant octopus movie, "The Bride of the Monster", look like "King Kong" in comparison.

Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell) is an American vacationing at a sea-side village in Mexico. She hears stories about a man-eating creature dwelling in the cove.This film is a low budget science fiction film in every sense of the term low budget. Director Wyott Ordung (1922–2005) doubled as an actor (playing Pablo), and this was his first of only two times in the director's chair. In fact, his only real experience before this was a writer on another low budget flick, "Robot Monster".Most notable is the producing credit of Roger Corman, who took a modest $30,000 budget and earned more than ten times that back at the box office. No small feat, especially from someone just starting out in the business. This also marks a collaboration between Corman and cinematographer Floyd Crosby; Crosby had been making films over twenty years, but would be possibly best known later on for shooting Corman's finest films.This was also the debut of Jonathan Haze, a gas station attendant that filled the small role of Joe. He must have done something right, because Corman hired him for numerous productions over the next decade, including the starring role of Seymour in "Little Shop of Horrors".As for the film itself, there are things to like and things that could have been improved. The monster is actually rather cool looking, and when revealed is no disappointment. To use him sparingly, they also have a shark and an octopus, which may cause a few people to jump. The film is also rather short -- only 64 minutes -- so there is little time for the pace to slow down. Variety praised the film, calling it an "oddity" but "well-done", noting that "Corman's production supervision has packed the footage with commercial values without going overboard."The negatives are few, but worth pointing out. The forced romance was a bad idea, though probably almost necessary for a film of its day. This is somewhat compensated for by having the main character be a heroine rather than a hero -- not the strongest female lead, but a female lead nonetheless. The biggest issue is the sound. Clearly they had not invested in a boom mike, because scenes were either overdubbed, or the conversations were drowned out by the ocean waves...While not the best film of 1954, it has its historical merits and is fun in its own way. For a low budget film now sixty years old, I think it holds up respectably well.

I know many people judge a movie solely on its of special effects. This one doesn't have a lot of eye-candy, even considering the time it came from. But the story and the acting are above par for movies of this type and when all was said and done, I enjoyed myself watching this movie.