David Vining's Blog, page 22

The Intruder

Roger Corman goes full political, as opposed to a little bit political in Creature from the Haunted Seas, in The Intruder based on the novel by Charles Beaumont (who also wrote the screenplay). It was obviously an attempt on Corman’s part to go serious to some degree, but the film’s lack of financial success sent him back to pure genre fare for the rest of his directing career. Which is unfortunate. I think the film is a bit overpraised in retrospect, but it’s a solid, somewhat derivative, b...

The Premature Burial

So…Ray Milland’s gonna get buried alive at some point, huh?

That predictability undermines a good bit of the first hour of Roger Corman’s second entry in his Poe Cycle, an hour still filled with the same kind of moody atmospherics and largely grounded performances that helped drive the earlier films. That first hour is solidly built, kind of frustrating because it meanders so much, and is fairly predictable. And then the last twenty minutes is gonzo awesome that I loved completely, taking...

The Pit and the Pendulum

The second of Corman’s Poe cycle, still written by Richard Matheson, The Pit and the Pendulum takes a two page short story and comes up with a macabre tale of murder to pad the runtime. Hey, I’m not complaining. It works quite well. It’s obvious that Corman hit some kind of gold mine when he managed to wrangle Matheson into working for him. Matheson brings a sense of focused narrative that allows for spare plots but strong characterization in order to bring out the eerie tone that Corman was...

Creature from the Haunted Sea

Really, this was just miserable. This is probably Corman’s least film, a dreary, unfunny farce of a comedy horror film that’s structure is so badly that it ends up actually making little to no sense. Desperate for laughs but achieving none of them, it’s an interesting contrast to The Little Shop of Horrors, another cheap production from Corman that strived to make comedic gold out of its limited budget and horror tropes. The problem here is probably because there are so many tropes of other ...

Atlas

What if Atlas was just some guy who never held up the world? What if he was some kind of ancillary figure in a story about a king trying to take over another Greek city state? What if it was kind of just boring? Well, if those questions have passed through your mind, then Roger Corman’s Atlas is the exact movie for you! Part of an effort to latch onto the sword and sandals craze of the time, Atlas is a drag of a film that has no real idea how to put together an epic. Apparently, Charles Grif...

The Little Shop of Horrors

Whether this was made because of a bet or because rules around royalty payments to actors were changing with the new year, The Little Shop of Horror was conceived of and filmed in something like five days. Corman’s lack of care around finishing out shots and scenes are the stuff of the IMDb trivia page, but the decision to push this bit of silly nonsense toward comedy works remarkably well. Consistently funny while dealing with things that, on the surface, should be scary but aren’t because ...

Last Woman on Earth

Another one of those films that Corman made at the tail end of another production on location (this one tied to Creature from the Haunted Sea), Last Woman on Earth has the distinction of being the first film that Robert Towne wrote for the King of Cult. It’s also Towne’s first acting role (not that he had too much of a career that way), but that’s about the extent of interest in the film. Towne demonstrates himself to be a capable writer, making the most in what must have been a very rushed ...

House of Usher

Now this, this is what I like. Moody, spooky, stylish, and focused, Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, adapted by Richard Matheson, is a fun, gothic horror film that borders on camp but keeps both feet planted well enough in its reality to have some real thrills by the end. It’s colorful, well-built, mysterious, and fun. There’s a certain thinness to it, a remnant of stretching the short story to feature film length, with Matheson mostly choosing t...

Ski Troop Attack

A man on a mission film made in a couple of weeks after the wrapping of Beast from Haunted Cave, sort of like how She Gods of Shark Reef was made in the remainder of time in Hawaii after Naked Paradise wrapped, Ski Troop Attack is pretty much the refuse of a production schedule. That it’s narrative ambitions are fairly modest ends up being a benefit to the whole thing, though. I mean, get a group of dudes, put them on a mission, carry out mission is not a hard formula, right? Well, Corman an...

The Wasp Woman

This is Roger Corman making a Universal Horror tribute for teenagers on the…frugal side of things. It feels like a largely unremarkable entry in that franchise, done by someone with talent trying to make something interesting but not really understanding how to integrate that something with the genre demands of the franchise. There’s the idea of a woman clinging to her youth, and then there’s the monster stuff. The integration of the two ideas are so poorly intertwined, the structure inelega...