David Vining's Blog, page 25

It Conquered the World

I get the sense that Roger Corman was far more comfortable with westerns than science fiction. He probably grew up with westerns. Sci-fi was largely a new creation in the fifties in movies, and there wasn’t much good to copy from. So, his writers, Lou Rusoff and Charles Griffith, were kind of left to invent conventions, and with low budgets there wasn’t much more they could do than have people sit around in rooms and talk science-fiction jargon back and forth. Heck, at least there are actual...

The Oklahoma Woman

I was pleasantly surprised by The Oklahoma Woman. After the steady decline of Corman’s output from the height of his moderately entertaining first feature, Five Guns West, he returns to that level with another western, a tale of a man trying to keep out of a local power struggle done with the thin simplicity that Corman’s filmmaking is known for. I mean…it still doesn’t quite work, key elements not quite making sense and characters being little more than character traits, but it has a cohesi...

Swamp Women

Roger Corman’s fast work ethic has descended into base exploitation. He also “shoots the rodeo” while the film is mostly people wandering around the woods. This would fit perfectly on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. It’s easily the worst script out of four substandard scripts he put to screen in his early career as a filmmaker, and he doesn’t seem interested in finding anything interesting to actually fill the gaps the screenplay leaves open. He’s blazing through production as fast as po...

Day the World Ended

Roger Corman takes a few thousand dollars and, instead of making a western, he makes another genre exercise on a limited number of sets and with cheap actors. This time, it’s scifi monster movies. I really didn’t expect these to appear for a little while longer, but I guess that the 50s were the height of the sci-fi craze in B-movies. So, it makes sense.

Nuclear annihilation has hit the world and Jim Maddison (Paul Birch) is a very suburban in taste prepper who has set up an isolated hous...

Apache Woman

If Corman’s first film reminded me of Sam Peckinpah’s work to some limited degree, Apache Woman probably reminds me of the earliest of John Ford westerns. It’s a land fight between two groups of people, and it’s kind of standard fare. There’s some effort at character-based storytelling with the central character being torn between cultures, but it’s ultimately just kind of lost in a series of double crosses that were pretty predictable from the beginning as Corman’s films show a burgeoning p...

Five Guns West

Roger Corman’s first directorial effort is a pretty bog-standard Western obviously done on the cheap and very quickly but showing a surprisingly adept command of writing sharp (if still thin) characters from R. Wright Campbell. There’s also a demonstration from Corman that he may be working cheaply, but he’s not approaching the production lazily. He’s doing everything he can that costs him no money to get as good a looking film as he can. He paid for a day of work from everyone, and he’s goi...

Roger Corman: A Statement of Purpose

When Roger Corman died last March, I got a very specific request to do a retrospective on him. I assume that the request as actually about Corman as producer, but I looked at the man’s filmography. He produced literally hundreds of films. It’s over 500. It’s a lot. I’m not gonna do that.

However, Corman’s early career was dominated not just by his manic low-budget producing efforts but by his own directorial efforts which started in the mid-50s, mostly selling cheap Westerns to American I...

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Henri-Georges Clouzot: The Definitive Ranking

Another one in the books!

The short ones come and go so fast that it feels like I’ve barely started before I’ve finished, and that’s exactly how I feel about Clouzot’s work. It’s put a bug in me to discover more of his work, namely the movies he wrote but did not direct before he started directing himself. However, beyond that, there’s really not that much. There’s Inferno, which I did watch but is incomplete and more of a documentary about Clouzot than anything else, but the death of Clo...

Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno

A view of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s filmography cannot be complete with at least acknowledging his lost, partially shot film, Inferno. Production began in the summer of 1964 and fell apart in about a month. Incomplete and unable to find funds to continue, Clouzot abandoned the film, eventually adopting some of his ideas into Woman in Chains, his final feature film. The story of the disruption of the film remained something of a mystery to the more casual of film goers until 2009 with the relea...