Roger Corman movies S/D

Oh, and search: Day The World Ended, Not Of This Earth, Machine Gun Kelly, The Wasp Woman, House Of Usher, Masque Of The Red Death, Dementia 13, Wild Angels, The Trip, Dunwich Horror, Rock And Roll High School, and the aforementioned Targets

Pit and the Pendulum: fantastic Price, funky psychedelia closing titles, beautiful Barbara Steele

Man with the X Ray Eyes: I haven't seen this one since I was a kid, so maybe it would be a major dud now. All I can remember (though it's vague) is the ending, with Ray Milland wandering into the desert and into the tent of fundamentalists and then [spoiler]...that's the right movie, correct?

Search: Death Race 2000

Destroy: The Haunting Of Hell House, The Wild Angels, Little Shop Of Horrors (the original, which even bored me as a kid), Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage Blah Blah Blah, and I swear he had SOMETHING to do with Screwballs, the only movie that made me want to join a monastery.

Spaceship intercepts a distress call on a planet, picks up alien queen, brings queen on board, queen turns out to be a vampire and... Suffice to say, it's basically the plot of "Alien" a decade earlier.

All I remember is that it starred Basil Rathbone, a clean-cut, pre-drug Dennis Hopper as one of the crew, and that the alien queen looked absolutely freaky during her kill scenes...

(Obviously I am a Bogdanovich sympathizer.)

"Bloody Mama" with Shelley Winters, DeNiro, Bruce Dern, '69, is a trash version of "Bonnie & Clyde" and is one of the most accomplished Cormans, very funny. I'd rank it near the top of Corman's ourvre.

Ray Milland in a fairly good toupee, too, instead of those horrible things he occasionally wore later...

Favourite Corman is the Price/Poe stuff -- probably mostly an insult to the sources, but a lot of fun.

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/04/recycling-roger-corman_05.html

omg, The Intruder (with SHATNER fomenting racial hate in the early '60s South!) just came out on disc. It's very good.

omg @ creature from the haunted sea

http://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1p3Xt_uRsZa_c4dzAio1pN_Oq0-dFYUWKGNjsD7uT7_uB1fl0_Bv_18Z13tfwfNrrafWBQs3FpOv4

http://i24.tinypic.com/15oa2p3.jpg

Roger Corman is getting an Oscar!

director Roger Corman will finally be recognized by Oscar this year, with a Lifetime Achievement award for his prolific and influential body of work.

In addition to producing 300 pictures, and directing 50, the mild-mannered Corman also apprenticed and mentored some filmmakers you may have heard of, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdonavich, Monte Hellman and Curtis Hanson, just to name a few, and launched the acting careers of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Pam Grier, and Robert DeNiro, among others.

getting a retro in NYC too.

Pit and the Pendulum: fantastic Price, funky psychedelia closing titles, beautiful Barbara Steele

It has its moments, esp twd the end, but I find Price's camping really wearying. Did he ever pull back in these Poe movies other than Masque (which is the only one I've really liked so far)?

For understated (relatively speaking) Price, I would seek out WITCHFINDER GENERAL rather than any of the Corman Poes; alternatively, THE PREMATURE BURIAL has Ray Milland in the Price lead role, and is one of the best, most hysterical Corman horrors imho

oh, I've seen Witchfinder, love it.

new DVDs, a documentary:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2836

How did I not know until today that there was a 1995 Showtime remake of "A Bucket Of Blood" starring Anthony Michael Hall and Justine Bateman! Featuring cameos by Paul Bartel and Mink Stole! And Alan Sues!! Released on VHS as "The Death Artist" and never on DVD. Must see!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bf/The_Death_Artist.jpg

I'm 1/2 way through watching "Battle from Beyond the Stars" and it's a pretty damn enjoyable Star Wars ripoff. Some of the paintings they used for planet surfaces are breathtaking. The ship with boobs (and the ship with the rebel flag on it) is pretty silly. The special effects are lots of fun. And I'm digging that revealing costume on the Valkyrie warrior. The film itself is moving along at a decent pace.

Sorry, it's "Battle Beyond the Stars" not "from Beyond". Spaceship boobs getting to my head.

Also it's cool that they ripped off the old school film wipes.

Also it sort of looks like the film starts with someone playing with a slinky.

I remember when BBTS came out, they had the Space Valkyrie Lady on some kids TV programme explaining how groundbreaking the film was, because other SF flicks had taken place *among* the stars, this was happenning *beyond* them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzlwciBehOs

That metallic space bra is a force to be reckoned with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx9Ni9xGLV0

Death Race 2000 forever!

Nice interview with him on the most recent episode of Gilbert Gottfried's podcast.

Is Machine Gun Kelly actually worth a look?

50% off sale on all Shout Factory Corman movies (likely to celebrate the fact that they just got the rights to pretty much his entire film library):

https://www.shoutfactory.com/sale/march-madness
https://www.shoutfactory.com/blog/shout-factory-and-ace-film-hk-announce-major-acquisition-of-roger-and-julie-cormans-new-horizons-picture-film-library/

RIP Dick Miller

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-xjn2ci0Ss

Dick Miller (L), the secret hero of Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966), confronts nihilist nogoodnik biker trash over their use of fascist symbols as fashion accessories. pic.twitter.com/iGAYo5NEJw

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) January 31, 2019

Miller roundup

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6176-that-guy-dick-miller

Dick Miller and I were friends for over 60 years. We made many movies together over many decades but I will always think of him as the beat artist Walter Paisley in A Bucket of Blood. Dick was able to take what was written and reach the deepest depths(1/2) https://t.co/Rr4sgAajIY

— Roger Corman (@RogerCorman) January 31, 2019

Aw man, RIP. I first saw Bucket of Blood when I was about 7 or 8, and it left an indelible impression.

dude showed up everywhere in Corman flicks

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*KlalYOOarpj_pDwo.jpg

I always chortle when he pops up in films I'd forgotten he was in, like After Hours

sort of looks like a less angular Charles Napier

Corman's feminist narratives

https://brightlightsfilm.com/she-gods-gangsters-and-gunslingers-the-new-woman-in-the-early-films-of-roger-corman/#.XTXQtKl7lBw

I watched The Wild Angels for the first time last weekend; struck me as a mostly formulaic bikesploitation film of the period, even though Diane Ladd was already good with crap material. I'd forgotten this was the source of "we wanna ride our machines..."

The Trip (rewatch) is much more "serious" (oh, Nicholson) but better too, including Fonda, being a vulnerable Everytripper instead of a deadpan motorcycle boy. Too many of those fast-cut montage sequences (which get a separate credit, so I assume Corman didn't touch them), and I really like the laundromat scene, and how often PF's "bad" hallucinations seem to put him in other Corman movies.

At the LA Premiere of The Irishman. I thought the film was brilliant. Martin Scorsese did his first feature with me called Boxcar Bertha and Robert De Niro's first role was in Bloody Mama. It's nice to see them finally have a little success. pic.twitter.com/QjJ26xPZ69

— Roger Corman (@RogerCorman) November 1, 2019

The only living filmmaker who matters has spoken

We must preserve Roger Corman forever at all costs pic.twitter.com/xrZiyByZDs

— Screen Slate (@ScreenSlate) November 2, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcpmM-eTESI

New 35mm print of Masque of the Red Death at MoMA tonight; looked great as you might expect. A little too much laughter for my taste, but there are your smug jerkoffs.

They showed a few AIP trailers first, and I thing the dad who brought a couple 8-year-olds might've been surprised by the breasts hyping The Student Nurses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubG521MU3yA

I had forgotten how the Hoptoad-Patrick Magee subplot ended in Masque -- pretty grotesque and nearly arbitrary. I assume the Poe story (not "Masque," but "Hop-Frog") makes more sense, if indeed it has anything to do with the film treatment.

48-hour Corman marathon streaming right now

"Bloody Mama" with Shelley Winters, DeNiro, Bruce Dern, '69, is a trash version of "Bonnie & Clyde" and is one of the most accomplished Cormans, very funny. I'd rank it near the top of Corman's ourvre.

This was just on. The shootout at the end is all-time. Whatever happened to Don Stroud? Pretty much all of my movie watching needs are covered by London Live and Talking Pictures these days.

Stroud returned to his native land of Hawaii

All this time I hadn't seen The Intruder until now. If this had been Corman's only movie, we'd probably be talking about it more now rather than as a "hey, did you know Corman directed a serious movie about racial hate and violence?" footnote. Unbelievable performance from Shatner - his character is the prototype for every CPAC'er.

Yeah, it's pretty great and unnerving (if also ultimately way too optimistic about the frothing mob's ability to see through their paper tiger demagogues).

Still alive & hanging out in the Criterion Closet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-paCwBPzHX0

Who would be the Corman of today -- Blumhouse? Being alive and apparently immortal, maybe the answer is still Corman. Is he still cranking out movies? The last exec producer credit I found was Pirhanaconda (2012).

Using the content factory metric, it's probably the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime or a streamer.

The dynamic has kind of reversed, right? Instead of a future Scorcese training up from the schlock-mill, we get Chloe Zhao and Ben Wheatley graduating to franchise schlock after proving they have critical chops.

Well, yeah. And in many cases the old 'Schlock Mill' has been replaced by music videos in the career narrative.

I don’t think there’s anyone like Corman. He’s very much from a time and a place.

wow, 97 years old

Criterion video rules, obviously.

I don't think Marvel movies really qualify as shlock in the Corman sense, they're closer to those 60's biblical epics than anything else. Meg 2 a better example yes.

Asylum do the Corman thing except they have no interest in fostering talent and no love of cinema.

To Allen's point, the grindhouse and drive in circuits that Corman flourished in no longer exist and DTV/streaming aren't quite the same thing.

I like this, from the Wiki article on Pirhanaconda:

The film was written by Mike MacLean, who had written Dinocroc vs. Supergator and a number of scripts for Roger Corman. Corman hired him to write the film.[3]

MacLean said: "I learned from Roger that a cable movie is a different animal than a theatrical release. First and foremost, cable movies must be faster-paced. With a theatrical release, the audience has driven to the mall, bought a ticket, and fought the crowds for a seat. They've made an investment in the viewing experience, so they're not walking out on the film if it's pacing is a bit leisurely. A cable movie audience has the remote within reach... So you have to keep things moving, which means showing the creature soon and often".[3]

That his legacy hasn’t warranted the honorary Oscar at this point is par for the course.

Non-televised award in 2009: https://www.oscars.org/governors-awards/2009/roger-corman

reading the great biography/oral history Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman, King of B Movies by Chris Nashawaty

i’m pretty unschooled in Corman so this has been a wild ride, the variety in his output in the first 20 years already is really fascinating. And man the sheer output: the book fairly whips along because there’s no time to dig in on any one production, five more are happening at the same time lol!

so many good interviews too, everything everyone says is pretty much gold

Schrader Being Schrader (from FB):

ROGER CORMAN. Let's not too sentimental about Corman. Even in my exploitational extremes I couldn't interest Corman in my scripts. Rolling Thunder began at AIP but moved on to 20th. Roger wouldn't touch Blue Collar even with Pryor. As soon as they could
Coppola, Scorsese and Demme all moved away from AIP. Roger was better at hyping his rep than at making good films or supporting good filmmakers.

I'm not getting what he's saying about Rolling Thunder because AIP released it after Fox dropped it for being too violent.

...and by then Corman had long moved on from AIP and was running New World.

A teensy bit butthurt still, Paul?

RIP, good time to watch the recent Last Drive-In tribute on Shudder

As soon as they could Coppola, Scorsese and Demme all moved away from AIP.

Schrader says that like it's a gotcha, wasn't that famously part of Corman's pitch to directors? "Do a good job and you'll only have to work for me once?"

Corman's favorites of the 50+ films he directed: https://www.fangoria.com/original/roger-corman-movie-list-1/