David Vining's Blog, page 23

A Bucket of Blood

This is such an odd contrast to I Mobster. I don’t know if they were made back to back, but being back to back in Corman’s filmography creates this fascinating comparison between the two. The first was Corman working with real money and coming up with a fairly bland product. The second is this movie made with almost no money in five days based on a weird idea, an effort to combine horror and comedy, and an effort to just have fun during production. One turns out a whole lot better than the o...

I Mobster

This is the first time I’ve felt genuine disappointment in Roger Corman’s work. I’ve liked others of his movies less (some a lot less), but this was Corman’s first movie with a real budget. Brought in by his brother, Gene, to 20th Century Fox with a $500,000 budget to adapt an anonymous mobster novel for the big screen. And, it looks and feels like something Corman would have made for $50,000. I know that my knowledge of the star system of the late 50s is incomplete, but it’s hard to differe...

Teenage Caveman

This does not have the best reputation amongst Roger Corman’s filmography. Some of that comes from the bad title (that Corman objected to, wanting to call it Prehistoric World) but also to the sheer cheapness of it all (there’s an obviously fake deer slung over a shoulder at one point that’s just kind of funny). However, in the realm of bad Corman movies…it’s far from the worst. It’s got a horrendously random structure that feels like scenes haphazardly thrown together. It’s full of stilted ...

She Gods of Shark Reef

Apparently filmed adjacent to Naked Paradise, She Gods of Shark Reef was independently produced by Ludwig Gerber who failed to sell the film to a major distributor, eventually selling the final product to American International Pictures. It’s not hard to see why Gerber was unable to get Universal or Warner Bros. involved. Outside of the title, this is a dull little experience that hinges on cliché, pretty sights of Hawaii, some nice looking girls, and a thin story with thin characters. It fe...

Machine-Gun Kelly

Most notable for being Charles Bronson’s first lead role, Roger Corman’s Machine-Gun Kelly is a real departure for Corman. It’s a character piece. It has all the trappings of a trashy, exploitation film about a gangster, but ultimately, outside of some hard slaps to a woman, it’s much more sedate and introspective than I would have ever expected from a Corman film. A lot of that credit goes to the writer, R. Wright Campbell, who delivered the kind of character-centered script that Corman was...

War of the Satellites

This is it! The first Roger Corman directed film I can unabashedly say that I liked! I mean, this ain’t art and it’s not great entertainment, but it’s solidly good schlock with a surprising effort to create something realistic in terms of space travel (reminding me of Fritz Lang‘s Woman in the Moon). Some things don’t quite make sense, seemingly there just to keep the plot going, but this is probably the best script that Corman has worked from since he started directing, thanks to Lawrence G...

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent

Roger Corman goes epic fantasy on the super cheap, the script by Lawrence Goldman having surprising echoes of the Biblical tale of Moses for some reason. To be fair, cribbing structure from well known stories is not a bad idea, especially if one is working on a very tight deadline and need SOMETHING to get through to the end. Still, the stilted delivery of everything and wayward, aimlessness of its first half puts a real dagger in the heart of any enjoyment I have of the film. I mean…Corman ...

Sorority Girl

Bad girls are out there doing bad girl things! Corman is just here to inform of real social dangers, not to exploitatively take advantage of a trend to quickly sell a frugally made film and make a profit as swiftly as possible. He’s here for the social good! Okay, he’s not. However, I will say that the script Corman is working from, written by Leo Lieberman and Ed Waters, is more grounded than the work that Charles Griffith had been writing. It’s also kind of confusing with a couple of chara...

Carnival Rock

Something of a companion piece to Rock All Night, especially with the presence of the musical group The Platters in both, Carnival Rock is more of a plot-driven exercise than the earlier film. Adapted from a teleplay by Leo Lieberman, who also wrote the adaptation, it’s a little drama about unrequited love that ends up feeling a bit overlong for something of a wane story. It didn’t grab me in any way, lacking the exploitation of his work with Charles Griffith but without the depth of a great...

IT – Retrospective, well, more like a long rambling series of loosely connected thoughts about IT

A couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to read Stephen King’s novels in publishing order until they bored me. I’ve made it into his 80s output, and I picked up IT, his magnum opus. Reading it in about a month, the 1200 page novel is…a complete and total mess. The first 20% had me hooked, though. It was great. There was this promise and sense of ill-defined danger that worked marvelously well as King jumped us between 1958 and 1985 with this sense of impending doom infecting everyt...