Hail to the King: A Tribute to Roger Corman

Roger Corman, whose eight-decade career in Hollywood earned him nicknames like “The King of the B Movies,” died last Thursday at the age of 98.

I cried. Telling my children, I did.

As the resident cult film nerd here, I have written a lot about Roger over the years (he told me to call him “Roger,” so I will), and it is one of the great joys of my life that writing for this site gave me the opportunity to interview him.

As a fan, I get to be an admirer and advocate for his work. It’s commonplace to dismiss b-movies or genre movies as cash-grabs or just dumb, but I will always stand up and say that I unironically think many of the movies that Roger made are capital-G Great, and if you happen to know the circumstances or budget constraints under which they were produced, that makes them even more compelling accomplishments. They are often archly funny, or stunningly atmospheric, or racially progressive, or culturally subversive, or formally experimental. No Roger Corman film will ever be a guilty pleasure for me. I mean, some of the hundreds of films he produced stink — I doubt he’d argue — but most of the films he directed and many of the high points of the ones he produced are take-me-to-my-happy-place films that I will watch forever.

And my kids love them! What a joy it has been to share with my kids the Roger Corman/Edgar Alan Poe films, first at home on video and then more recently on the big screen thanks to Los Angeles' own American Cinematheque repertory screenings. Last month I took two of my daughters to see House of Usher, and a few months ago I took most of my family to see Masque of the Red Death on a newly-struck 35mm print on the big screen. As part of American Cinematheque's ongoing Hail to the King: The Films of Roger Corman series, I kept hoping that Roger might make it out to one of the screenings. That I might be able to say hi again, and introduce my girls. The screenings are ongoing, and we will keep attending, but it makes me sad that the joy of seeing Roger in person again is forever off the table. 

As someone who loves classic films and Hollywood history, I can only sit in awe of the careers he impacted directly. The names of people who worked for Roger are all out there and have been repeated a million times — Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, Dennis Hopper, Bill Paxton, Joe Dante — the legendary writers he relied on, like Richard Matheson, Robert Towne, and Charles Beaumont, and the actors whose careers he resurrected, re-framed, or extended, like Vincent Price and Boris Karloff. I’m not sure any individual in the 97-year history of talking pictures has had a more significant roster of talent (that's right -- Roger Corman was born the year before talking pictures were introduced). These Corman-alumni are largely responsible for independent films existing at all. The landmark book on the rise of independent cinema is called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — and both of those eponymous movies trace their roots to Roger. 

My friend Howard Rodman, past president of the Writers' Guild of America, said when Roger passed that the last of the Founding Fathers was gone. Howard meant “of Cinema.” The last of the Founding Fathers of Cinema. Writ large. In Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award acceptance speech for Oppenheimer, he pointed out that movies are only about 100 years old. Roger Corman helped shape them for almost the entire time we’ve been watching these flickering lights on our various screens.

Now...as a filmmaker, Roger has been a guiding light. When I was in film school, I couldn't afford film stock or processing. I couldn't necessarily get professors to sign off on certain projects I wanted to do. So I just did what I needed to do to Make The Thing. I shot on video, I made the phone calls and got the buy-in and found the collaborators and Made The Thing. And then I submitted The Thing to the film festivals and competitions that featured all of the officially-sanctioned projects...and I beat them. My producing partner had a closet full of Vincent Price VHS tapes he'd grown up on, most of them directed by Roger Corman. When I got the chance to shoot the interview with Roger, I called my friend Mark to help me film it --Mark had worked with me on a number of scripts, Public Service Announcements, and other projects for probably a decade -- and as we were setting up, Mark told me how he had grown up watching Death Race 2000 at his grandmother's house. I found my people by finding people who found the movies through Roger Corman.

How to say this? I'm not being hyperbolic -- I do not think I am the same person in this world without Roger Corman. And I'm not even somebody who he hired! 

Look, Billie Jean King said, "You have to see it to be it." I understand that Billie Jean King didn't mean, "white guy sees white guy do a thing," but making films is tremendously expensive, and our most recent Writers' Guild Strike was explicitly about making it possible for people who aren't independently wealthy to make filmed content. I have four Emmy Awards and a career in making films that literally provides for my family. I have a Hugo Award for writing for this site, which I do largely because of the films Roger Corman opened me up to. I just...I don't think my life exists as it is without Roger Corman. 

And that's a hell of a thing! 

If you have heard any of the news stories, you heard all the names, and you probably thought "wow," or whatever. But what gets lost when you talk about a legend is that it's really...it's just a human being, and they don't walk through their day as A Legend. When I reviewed the documentary Corman's World,  the moment that most struck me was when Jack Nicholson almost broke down in tears at the thought that someone wouldn't respect Roger. He said, "If Roger doesn't know how important he is, I'll go to his house and tell him right now." Utterly Singular Hollywood Legend Jack Nicholson believes that he owes his career to Roger Corman. 

I am very lucky. I got to tell Roger Corman myself that he inspired me as a director.

That interview I did with him — since he was always producing, an off-camera comment that took place after we wrapped our conversation and we were breaking down the cameras led to me coming back to discuss a potential film project with him. Per IMDb, Roger has 491 producing credits. His first was in 1954, the same year On the Waterfront came out, and he has a few more coming out still. That averages out to a little over seven movies a year, for seventy years. If Roger hadn’t done it, the idea that anybody ever could have done it would have been utterly unbelievable.

Gale Anne Hurd, whose legendary career as a producer includes the Terminator films, Aliens, and The Walking Dead, got her first job in movies with Roger. In a recent interview with journalist Madeline Brand, she said of Roger’s passing, “There’ll never be another.”

There will never be another. 

I am sad the Roger is gone. But I am so, so grateful that he was here.

Roger Corman
1926-2024

Microreview [film]: The Last Woman on Earth (1960)

This movie is hot garbage

The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964) follows the lone survivor of a global plague, as he does resourceful things to survive, fight off hordes of zombie vampires, and try to work out a cure to the plague that might allow others to live. He's pretty active.

By contrast, The Last Woman on Earth is about two jerks who fight over Evelyn (get it? "Eve"?), one of the jerks' wife, while asking her to make breakfast and coffee, and she reads books about having a baby. I kept waiting for her to realize that these guys are dipshits and come into her own — and at one point she even said something along those lines — but Friends, I waited in vain. I fell asleep with five minutes left in the movie, while the two jerks were duking it out over "possession" of The Last Woman on Earth, and when I woke up, I rewound the movie to actually see the last five minutes, watching for the moment where Evelyn steps out and tells them both to go to Hell. Friends, I rewound in vain.

This movie was written by Robert Towne! Academy Award-winning writer of Chinatown! Astute readers of this site will know that I am a huge Roger Corman fan, and though this film was produced and directed by Roger, there is literally nothing I can recommend about this movie.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 3/10

Bonuses: What's the mathematical equivalent of blowing a raspberry at the screen?

Penalties: -1 for there being entirely too goddamn many dudes in a movie called The Last Woman on Earth, -1 for literally everything else in the movie

Cult Film Coefficient: 1/10. Really, really bad.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

The Roger Corman Interview

Roger Corman has been, arguably, the single most important voice in the history of independent cinema. It was an absolute honor to be able to sit down with him in his office to discuss his new film, Death Race 2050, and specifics from a career that spans seven decades.


For the uninitiated, Roger Corman began writing, directing, and producing in the mid-1950s. He launched the careers of actors like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, and revived or reinvigorated the careers of Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and others. As a producer, he gave directors like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and James Cameron their starts in filmmaking. He worked extensively with writers such as Twilight Zone alumni Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who were also seminal sci-fi and horror writers in their own right. His distribution company won foreign language Oscars for the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

But at the end of the day, this is a guy who just made a lot of great movies. From the 1950s beatnik satire A Bucket of Blood to the 1960s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, to the 1970s punk hallmark Rock n Roll High School and beyond, Roger Corman may have spent a career working with low- and medium-budget films, but he managed to create lasting art, documents of the times, and just goddamn fun movies, and he continues to do so.

If you haven't, check out Death Race 2050, streaming on Netflix and on DVD and VOD or watch the original, Death Race 2000, on DVD or streaming on FilmStruck. And enjoy the interview. I sure as hell did.

Posted by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musician and songwriter, and Emmy Award-winning producer.

ESSENTIALS: 24 Cult Films for Late, Late Nights

I feel like I should preface any list of "Best" cult films or "Most Important" cult films with the disclaimer that there is no list. The thing that makes cult films memorable is that they are a representation of a unique voice, and different voices appeal to different people. Plus, there are just so, so many movies out there, nobody can see them all. If you've got a film that you (or you and your friends) love and quote and everybody else thinks you're nuts, I think you're doing the thing right, and it doesn't matter if that movie's on a list anywhere or not.

The other key thing about cult films is that they are usually produced outside of the mainstream, so a lot of lists of "Best Cult Films" that I see online are rehashes of movies like The Big Lebowski or Office Space, which were box office flops, but gained a second life through word-of-mouth after their disappointing theatrical runs. I love both of those movies, and they certainly have cult followings — Office Space prompted Swingline to actually make a red stapler, and The Big Lebowski started a religion — but now they're so well-known I don't need to invoke them here.

Since I get to make this list, I wanted to focus on movies that didn't show up on the other lists. I also wanted to stay away from "The Worst Movie Ever" kinds of films (plus, I already covered that ground), and try to share movies that I think are legitimately good, or moving, or compelling, even if you can see their seams sometimes.

These are in no particular order, but they are all perfect for late nights or rainy days:

1. Carnival of Souls

After a traumatic accident, a woman becomes drawn to a mysterious abandoned carnival. - IMDb

Mistakenly thought to be in the public domain for decades and widely available in grainy, garbled versions, Carnival of Souls has a new blu-ray release from Criterion with restored picture and sound that really shows off this movie for what it is. It's a legitimately eerie movie, beautifully shot, full of evocative imagery and intelligent subtext. This movie also has special significance for me, because seeing the original Criterion Collection release of this movie alongside films by Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, and Bergman was the first time I really understood that cult films didn't have to be a guilty pleasure. That release made me realize that there were other people like me who loved both art house cinema and outsider cinema and took them equally seriously.

2. Chimes at Midnight

The career of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff as roistering companion to young Prince Hal, circa 1400-1413. - IMDb

For many years, the crown jewel of my DVD collection has been a DVD-R of this movie, which was only briefly released on VHS and was extremely difficult to find and even more difficult to own. But this is another movie that Criterion has recently rescued from the pit of abysmal picture and sound quality. And good thing, too. This movie and the never-completed Don Quixote were Orson Welles' dream projects. Constructed from texts pulled from four Shakespeare plays, Welles made John Falstaff, who has more lines than any other character in Shakespeare, the tragic hero of his own movie. The larger-than-life Welles plays the larger than life mentor to Prince Hal, later King Henry, and the thread of wasted talent and unbridled excess that runs through the film cannot help but reflect on the former boy-wonder of Welles himself. It is a movie that was financially and logistically hard to make and it shows, but it is full of stunning images, and a truly heart-rending conclusion.

3. A Bucket of Blood

A frustrated and talentless artist finds acclaim for a plaster covered dead cat that is mistaken as a skillful statuette. Soon the desire for more praise leads to an increasingly deadly series of works. - IMDb

I will go to the mat with anybody who says Roger Corman isn't a good director. He's certainly known as a producer of exploitation films and for launching the careers of people who went on to be iconic directors, but his directorial work (which he pretty much stopped doing in the late-1970s) was extremely sharp, both in terms of visual style and intelligence. A Bucket of Blood is one of the best satirical take-downs of the art scene I think I've ever watched, and it wraps it inside the costume of a schlocky horror movie. It's funny, full of gentle social commentary, and has just enough of an "ick" factor to create some intentionally cringe-worthy moments. If you've ever wanted to see the Beat Generation get some comeuppance, this one's for you.

4. Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill

Three go-go dancers holding a young girl hostage come across a crippled old man living with his two sons in the desert. After learning he's hiding a sum of cash around, the women start scheming on him. - IMDb

I'm much more of a Corman guy than a Russ Meyer guy, but when it comes to exploitation films, you have to give Russ Meyer his due. Meyer is most closely associated with busty women with quick tops, but there's actually no nudity in this, his best-known movie. Busty women, sure, and car races, and inexplicable danger aplenty. This movie is also notable for being the source of most of the movie dialogue samples used in White Zombie's breakout album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1. That's actually what got me to watch this movie in the first place.

5. Blacula

An ancient African prince, turned into a vampire by Dracula himself, finds himself in modern Los Angeles. - IMDb

There are a lot of 1970s blaxploitation movies you can watch and have a pretty great time with, but the thing I love about Blacula is how William Marshall's performance really elevates this movie way past what you think it would be from the amazingly schlocky title. He was primarily a Shakespearean actor, plays the character of Prince Mamuwalde totally straight, and sells it. This movie is at its heart a love story, and despite some *ahem* lines that ring out particularly jarringly to modern sensibilities, the performances in this movie should earn it far more prominence among horror fans than I think it currently has.

6. Killer of Sheep

Stan works in drudgery at a slaughterhouse. His personal life is drab. Dissatisfaction and ennui keep him unresponsive to the needs of his adoring wife, and he must struggle against influences which would dishonor and endanger him and his family. - IMDb

This underground film shot in south Los Angeles in the early 1970s is not to be confused with a blaxploitation film. This is a poetic and deeply touching movie that went unseen for over two decades because of rights clearance issues with the music in the film. The picture of daily life in Watts that it shows is both stifling but also affirming and moving. When it was added to the National Film Registry in 1990, that helped raise awareness for the movie, and ultimately led to a limited theatrical release in 2007. It is now available on DVD.

7. I Bury the Living

Cemetery director Robert Kraft discovers that by arbitrarily changing the status of plots from empty to occupied on the planogram causes the death of the plots' owners. - IMDb

I came across this one on a Public Domain movies site years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised. What the description here doesn't include is that the director doesn't want to be killing people, and begins thinking that he's descending into madness. As this starts to happen, there are a couple of visual effects sequences that are really striking, and take on the air of a twisted re-imagining of Fitzgerald's "eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg." The film suffers a little from a Scooby-Doo ending, but there are rumors that there was a different ending originally shot. That's going to have to be one for the angels, though, because in 1958 nobody was keeping alternate endings of B-pictures around for archivists to find later.

8. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula

Dracula travels to the American West, intent on making a beautiful ranch owner his next victim. Her fiance, outlaw Billy the Kid, finds out about it and rushes to save her. - IMDb

I reviewed this movie before, and you can read that at your leisure, but for our purposes here I will simply quote one line of that review: "At some point in 1965 or '66, some actual human being must have had this thought: 'Let's get John Carradine to play a vampire again, but this time we'll stick him in the Old West, name the movie after two characters not actually appearing in the movie, and shoot the thing for a nickel in, say, my back yard in Encino!'" The IMDb description is actually not correct: Carradine is never identified as Dracula because they didn't want Universal suing them, and "Billy" in the film did not have a previous career as a notorious outlaw. So if this sounds like it's up your alley, it probably is. If it doesn't, man, you've been warned.

9. Plan 9 from Outer Space

Aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop humanity from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb). - IMDb

This is also an objectively bad movie, but Edward D. Wood Jr. deserves a place on this list if for no other reason than that Ed Wood is maybe the greatest movie ever made about movies. Plan 9 is also, and I don't know anybody who would argue with me on this, the closest Ed Wood ever got to making a decent movie. The idea of a bomb made out of the sun's rays is not the worst sci-fi idea ever, and the story is more or less coherent. As opposed to, say, Glen, or Glenda?. Plus, the reach of this movie has been remarkable, from the Tim Burton biopic to the name of Glenn Danzig's record label, so it's worth watching if you haven't actually seen it. May I recommend watching Ed Wood and then Plan 9 as a double-feature?

10. Primer

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention. - IMDb

Of course, if you'd actually like to see a good sci-fi movie made for no money, you might want to skip ahead a few decades to Primer. This movie has a reputation for being quite a mind-bender of a time-travel movie, and it does not disappoint. I would argue that only with (many) multiple viewings and some graph paper could you actually untangle what's happening in all the different timelines, but at a certain point, it doesn't matter. The storytelling is dizzyingly complex, but you get the impression director Shane Carruth knows what's going on, and that he's going to take you somewhere worthwhile, so you go along. It's a tense and confusing ride, but I'm not aware of another movie like it. I actually prefer Carruth's poetic, disjointed follow-up Upstream Color, but start here.

11. It's Such a Beautiful Day

Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche, in this new feature film version of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film trilogy. - IMDb

As long as we're talking about bending minds, let's also dip our toes into the animation end of the pool. Don Hertzfeldt bends minds with the best of them, and I am truly at a loss as to how he is able to tell such elliptical stories with stick figures and still elicit powerful emotional responses from me. I am a big fan of Don Hertzfeldt, and this re-packaged collection of three of his related short films is a perfect example of why. Bill seems to be emotionally falling apart, but then it seems like he's actually mentally falling apart. His journey yo-yo'ing closer to and farther away from "sanity" and "reality" is both tremendously imaginative and tremendously moving. Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow short film was absolutely robbed of an Oscar, too, for whatever that's worth.

12. Sita Sings the Blues

An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. - IMDb

Animator Nina Paley made this animated feature film on her own. By herself. Alone. Feature film. Bill Plympton does the same kind of thing, and I am simply in awe of these artists. Paley's movie tells the story of Sita and her lover Rama from the Hindu epic Ramayana, and intertwines that tale with the story of the dissolution of Paley's own marriage. It's simply a beautiful, enthralling piece of work that not only explodes with imagination, but is full of beautiful visual design, too. It blurs the line between myth, fiction, and documentary, and is set entirely to torch songs. What's not to love?

13. The Beaver Trilogy

It begins in 1979 with the chance meeting in a Salt Lake City parking lot where filmmaker Trent Harris is approached by an earnest small-town dreamer from Beaver, Utah. - IMDb

And speaking of blurring lines...man, this one's something. As quick as I can tell it: Trent Harris was working at a TV station in Utah when they got their first video camera, and he was testing it in the parking lot when a guy called "Groovin' Gary" spotted him and came over.Gary always wanted to be on TV, and had his car adorned with images of Olivia Newton-John. He invited Harris back to Beaver for a talent show that Gary wanted recorded. In it, Gary dressed in drag and performed *as* Olivia Newton-John, to the befuddlement and ridicule of the small, conservative town. That really happened. A couple of years later, Harris moved to LA, and fictionalized the story a bit, and shot it as a short film with a pre-Fast Times Sean Penn. A couple of years later, while at USC film school, he made another go at the same story with a pre-Back to the Future Crispin Glover. If you can't find this amazing, unique gem, track down the new documentary The Beaver Trilogy, Part IV, which tells the whole story in stunning fashion.

14. The Sid Saga

Spurred by house guests Bob Sandstrom and Karlene Sandstrom leafing through his scrap book and asking about photographs in it, Sid Laverents begins to tell his life story. - IMDb

This is simply one of the crown jewels of amateur cinema. I don't know how to find it, except UCLA shows it sometimes and it occasionally airs as part of the sporadic TCM Underground series. But it is truly unforgettable, with Sid Laverents taking viewers through a stunning, three-part filmic biography that not only tells the story of Laverents, but of 20th Century America, too. It begins in poverty and vaudeville, goes through World War II, the 1950s and Cold War, the aerospace boom and introduction of the space program, and finally the rise of amateur film and videography that put storytelling tools into the hands of everyday people. And it's all told first-hand from Laverents, who lived it all. I reviewed this film a couple of years ago, and it is absolutely worth tracking down.

15. Head

The Monkees are tossed about in a psychedelic, surrealist, plotless, circular bit of fun fluff. - IMDb

Whoever wrote this IMDb summary can suck it. This is anything but "fan fluff." This is the weirdest damn thing, and as far from the Monkees TV show as I can really imagine. It's a smart, self-indulgent, self-reflexive piece of meta-storytelling made by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, who would immediately after this project go on to collaborate on Five Easy Pieces, with Nicholson exploding into the mainstream world in Easy Rider in between. The Monkees got a bad rap at the time, and I think it persists, that they were just a slapped-together attempt by a record company to make an American version of the Beatles. That may have been their genesis, but their songs are great, the guys were interested in things beyond the show, which came through in songs like "Randy Souse Git" and this film, which was reportedly the first time Americans had seen the now-famous footage of  the South Vietnamese Chief of Police executing a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner. Fan fluff, right? This was Tor Johnson's final film, and also, in a restroom, Peter Tork gives Davy Jones the advice that, "Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor."

16. The X from Outer Space

The spaceship AAB-Gamma is dispatched from FAFC headquarters in Japan to make a landing on the planet Mars and investigate reports of UFOs in the area. - IMDb

In the 1960s, the Shochiku studio in Japan, which was known for more serious, art-house films like those of Yashujiro Ozu, decided it wanted to get in on some of that sweet Godzilla money that Toho was pulling down, and this film was their attempt. In it, some swinging astronauts jet back and forth between Earth, the moon, and Mars for reasons that are clear, but don't make any logical sense. While exploring, they get some goo on the ship, which hatches into a giant space chicken called Guilala. The English dub of this movie is legitimately terrible, but the original Japanese version, subtitled, is wonderful. It is everything I love about silly, 1960s monster movies, and may even exceed some of the Godzilla movies with shady aliens in them.

17. Suspiria

A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders. - IMDb

This movie, by Italian horror icon Dario Argento (who also co-wrote the unmatched Once Upon a Time in the West), is the real deal. It's creepy, scary, grisly, bloody, mysterious, and atmospheric. It hits all of my favorite notes of horror movies, and has an ending that is serious nightmare fuel. Emerging from the giallo scene in Italy, it took things a step farther, and is really not for the faint of heart. But man, this is such a great horror movie. I've written before about the line that connects certain films between the 1950s and early 60s, ultimately resulting in Rosemary's Baby, and I think Rosemary in turn made Suspiria possible.

18. Bay of Blood

An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate. - IMDb

Staying in Italy with a giallo contemporary of Argento's, we have Mario Bava's Bay of Blood. Bava was making his mark a decade before Argento hit the scene, so a lot of what Argento would build on came from Bava. And it goes way beyond that. Because Bay of Blood is not a "proto-slasher" movie, it is a full-bore, perfect example of a slasher movie, made almost a decade before slasher movies were a thing. You could pretty much take the cliched rules laid out in Scream that govern slasher movies and apply them one-for-one to this movie, but if that's the case, that means this movie invented those rules. I don't know if American filmmakers in the early 1980s looked at this movie and drew inspiration, or if Bava was simply ahead of his time, but this movie is about as good as straight slashers get, and it accomplished that while creating the lexicon, so I think that's one hell of an achievement.

19. The Wicker Man

A police sergeant is sent to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl whom the townsfolk claim never existed. Stranger still are the rites that take place there. - IMDb

When I was in college and found 1) the Internet and 2) a pair of amazing video stores near my dorm, I spent some time combing a bunch of lists to find movies to rent. The Wicker Man consistently showed up on lists of "the scariest movies ever made" and that sort. So I rented it and I thought it was stupid. But I just sort of missed it — there's something sticky about this movie. Even though I didn't think I liked it, something made me want to revisit it, and when I did, a switch flipped and I fell in love with this movie about the collision of modern life, Christianity, and very, very old pagan beliefs that have still never really gone away. It's a movie with a lot going on under the surface, and which was also plagued for decades with a "the movie that could've been" legend that told the tale of how we never got to see the director's real vision of the movie. That has since been solved, despite the original camera negatives being used as fill underneath the M1 motorway connecting London to Leeds. And for what it's worth, my copy of The Wicker Man DVD actually came in a wicker box.

20. Equinox

Four friends are attacked by a demon while on a picnic, due to possession of a tome of mystic information. Told in flashbacks by the sole survivor. - IMDb

To be honest, this movie is mostly remarkable because of the people that worked on it. As a film on its own, it's only ok, and the present-day framing device of a police detective interviewing a survivor of all that went down is...clumsy at best. So you've really got to have some patience to get to where the movie begins to cook. This film was created by friends who met through Forest J. Ackerman (Uncle Forry), who founded Famous Monsters of Filmland in Los Angeles, and decided to make their own film. These friends, including Jack Woods and Dennis Muren, went on to become transformational figures in Hollywood through their contribution to sound and visual effects. It's truly remarkable to see their first film, knowing that they went on to redefine the modern cinematic language. No hyperbole. There are entire passages of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 that are cribbed directly from this film, and while the humans-talking-to-each-other portion of the movie is clunky, the finale, made from stop-motion, rotoscoping, and glass mattes, is legitimately badass.

21. Incubus

On a strange island inhabited by demons and spirits, a man battles the forces of evil. - IMDb

You notice how vague the plot summary for this movie is? That's about right. I mean, what I remember from this movie is William Shatner and some girl hiding in a barn, and then I think they ran for a bit...and maybe one of them was briefly possessed, but I couldn't swear to that. This movie is totally forgettable except for one kinda important thing: it was spoken entirely in Esperanto. You know what Esperanto is, right? It's an invented language that blends elements of the Romance languages, English, and probably a few other languages into what was hoped to be a universal language. Created in the 1880s, it took almost 100 years to make a movie in the language, and that was Incubus. So if you want to watch a movie where Bill Shatner speaks a made-up language, this is your only option, folks. Who gives a shit if it is entirely, and utterly, forgettable otherwise? But look: I have friends who have learned Swedish to watch Bergman movies in the native language, and friends who have learned Japanese to watch anime in its native language (I have undeniably awesome friends), so if you want to be able to turn the subtitles off in Incubus, you can currently learn Esperanto in the free language-learning app Duolingo on your phone.

22. Venus in Furs

A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death. - IMDb

This is definitely an outsider kind of film. I haven't seen any other of Jesus "Jess" Franco's films, but from what I know, a number of his films have veered into the more hardcore elements of mixing sex and cinema. Venus in Furs certainly has sex and nudity, but what it has more of, and in spades, is atmosphere and intrigue. The story is told through the eyes of Jimmy, a jazz musician, who sees a beautiful girl at a swanky party, then finds her merdered body on the beach, then sees her again, walking around. There's a wonderful current of I Spit on Your Grave-style cosmic retribution for sexual violence that runs through the movie, but mainly it's just sort of out-there and entrancing. Like the jazz musician at the center of the movie, you're never quite sure what's going on, and you're kind of ok with that because it's a unique ride you want to get to the end of.

23. The Masque of the Red Death

A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land. - IMDb

To be honest, I didn't realize this was my favorite of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe movies until I wrote songs about a bunch of horror movies, and the one I wrote for this one turned out to be my favorite. Like in Bucket of Blood above where Roger Corman is a good director, and in Blacula where performances can elevate an otherwise straight exploitation film, for me Hazel Court makes this movie. There are a number of wonderful things in this one, from the dwarf circus performer who murders a friend of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) to avenge an insult to a girl he loves, to the amazing set design that was the apotheosis of the Corman/Price/Poe look, that if I have to let this one movie stand in for all the wonderful films in this series of movies, I'm happy to do so. If you can only watch one Roger Corman movie this Halloween season, I recommend this one.

24. Perversion for Profit

This anti-porn short film shows a flood tide of filth engulfing the country in the form of newsstand obscenity. - IMDb

This is maybe a bit of a cheat. This isn't a narrative film or documentary, but I guess you could say it's a sort of outsider cinema. This instructional film was created in 1965 to warn America of the dangers of the secret filth hiding in the newsstands in the form of comics, men's, and women's magazines. This film is amazing in many ways. There's the slice-of-life sense of giving the modern-day viewer a picture of what life was like in the mid-1960s, and what people could see walking into the corner drug for a magazine, but mainly it's a totally un-self aware look at the hypocrisy of the morality police. The fact is that this movie is a half-hour of words talking about how terrible the "smut" problem is in America, while showing the "smut" in question in full detail. There are very tiny black bars over nipples or eyes, but it's clear to see that this film became, in a sense, exactly what it beheld. By damning pictures of nude women while showing pictures of nude women, today this seems like a way to get soft-core porn into the hands of moral crusaders who could only enjoy nude bodies if they felt they were also condemning them. This movie is a really interesting artifact that says a lot more about the people who made and watched it than it does about they people they were trying to denigrate. It's a fascinating time-capsule that conveys a very different message these days than it was originally meant to.

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning producer, folk musician, and cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Microreview [film]: The Fantastic Four (1994)

This was a movie we weren't supposed to see. Well, I saw it, so joke's on...me?

Sometimes when somebody buys the movie rights to a piece of intellectual property, there's a clause in there that states that the rights will lapse if the buyer doesn't actually make the thing in a given period of time. There have been a few examples recently, and the results are usually unwatchable. There's the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, which started filming two days before the rights were going to lapse, and there's the bizarre pilot to a Wheel of Time TV series that aired on FXX in the dead of night. Long before those, however, was The Fantastic Four. Variety did a good recap of the story behind the 1994 film produced by Roger Corman, and there's a documentary coming out in the next few months that goes into more depth. But the tl;dr version is that the 1994 film was made solely so Constantin Films could retain the rights to the Marvel property, and the film was never intended to be shown. Avi Arad from Marvel even reportedly bought up every copy and had the negatives destroyed to keep it from being seen.

But while that may have worked with the original film elements of The Magnificent Ambersons, that genie doesn't go back into the bottle in the age of computers and the internet.

I am on record as saying unreservedly that I love Roger Corman and believe he has been a singular force for good in American cinema. So if you come at this film wondering what a Roger Corman adaptation of a Marvel comic book property would look like, then it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect. There clearly wasn't a lot of money, so The Thing is a dude in a suit, whose mouth seems to have one pattern of movement, which it goes through every time he's talking. Reed Richards' ability to extend his arms and legs looks terrible. Sets rely more on smoke machines and lighting than on being actual sets, and your prosthetics and makeup are probably on par with an entry in the Leprechaun movie franchise.

But there's so much more here than just paltry production values. Some of it is acting — Jay Underwood as Johnny Storm is particularly egregious, Henry from Punky Brewster plays an astronomy professor at the beginning of the film like he's the top dog at the Al Pacino School for Scenery Chewing™, and Kat Green as Alicia Masters is put in a few spots that Vivien Leigh wouldn't have been able to make even vaguely human. Some of it is the use of early CGI to render the Human Torch, which looks spectacularly bad, and almost caused me to do a real-life spit-take. But mainly what really undermines this movie more than anything are the spectacular collapses in logic and motivation. Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Two lurking, evil-looking guys who appear to be skilled surgeons keep Victor von Doom alive after a terrible accident, and we next see them ten years later as Dr. Doom's bumbling, incompetent sidekicks
• After a mishap in space, Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm apparently fall something like 23,000 miles back to Earth, where they land in a field and are happy to be alive, but incurious as to how that could be possible
• The Jeweler is also a villain in this movie
• The Jeweler falls in love with Alicia, and when Dr. Doom raids his lair, The Jeweler holds Alicia hostage, as though it would mean anything whatsoever to Dr. Doom if this weird guy in a sewer killed a girl he'd never met
• Ben becomes The Thing, except for the one time he really needs to be The Thing, and briefly isn't, but then suddenly is again

Also, it should be said that the final shot in the movie is one for the Terrible Movie Hall of Fame™.

In the final reckoning, though, this one's hard to get my head around. It's not awful enough to be a truly to-shelf terrible movie, but it's certainly not good. The fact that everyone is obviously trying to hard to make a good movie actually makes the whole thing a little sad. On the whole, it's probably more worth seeking out because of the lore surrounding it than the actual content of the film.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 3/10

Bonuses: +1 for Rebecca Staab as Sue Storm, who looks more like a drawing of a comic book character than anyone I've ever seen in another comic book adaptation; +1 for 3-5 legitimate (although unintentional) laugh-out-loud moments; +1 for its place as one of the cult film Holy Grails

Penalties: -1 for crumbling under the weight of basic logic and human emotion; -1 for the Jeweler. Seriously, Dr. Doom isn't enough for your origin story? You need a weird troll running around kidnapping blind girls, too? Why is he in this movie?

Cult Film Coefficient: 4/10. It's worth watching if you can track it down, but don't put yourself out.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and nerds of a feather, flock together co-editor since 2012.

How Classic Horror Continues to Inspire

Regular readers may know that I have an abiding love of classic horror movies, and some may also know that I am the singer and songwriter for the alt-folk band Sci-Fi Romance. This month, those two things came together in a way that, I have to admit, surprised me, when I found myself writing, recording, and releasing an EP of new songs inspired by a half dozen of those movies.

See, every October, my wife and I stock up on Fall seasonal beers, turn the lights down, and watch as many old horror movies as we can. The classic Universal monsters, Roger Corman and Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Mario Bava, maybe Sam Raimi, the old micro-budget RKO pictures produced by Val Lewton, drive-in oddballs, and anything else that may be tangentially related or catches our eyes. This year, the first movie we watched was Corman's The Fall of the House of Usher, and while we were watching it, I got a weird, fully-formed idea completely out of the blue.

"Why don't I write a song for each movie we watch, dig up my old four-track cassette recorder I haven't touched in over 15 years, record the songs immediately after I write them, and put the whole thing out for free?" Yes. Why wouldn't someone do exactly that? Nostalgia upon nostalgia, and all my nerd buttons pushed simultaneously.

The thing that did it, I think, that sent me in this odd direction, was that for the first time I understood the humanity in Usher's decision to bury his sister alive. My experience of these films — many of which I saw for the first time when I was a kid — was one of sensationalism and spooky atmospheres, and something that fit in with my regular diet of Scooby-Doo and Adam West as Batman. You know, some crazy person in an old castle with lots of old candles and spiderwebs, and a bland dope who wanders into a bad situation they can't comprehend, before everything catches on fire and burns down 90 minutes later. So admittedly, much of my continued enjoyment of these films is nostalgic. Some of it comes from an increased appreciation for the craft of the actors and filmmakers involved, who were so evocative and (usually) inventive with very limited resources, either financial or temporal. But sometimes my enjoyment of them suddenly leaps beyond all of that, when I make a profound emotional connection with a character that everybody thinks is nuts.

This first happened a dozen years ago when I re-watched Frankenstein. I had long admired Karloff's performance as the monster, of course, but this was the first time I had really felt Colin Clive's Henry Frankenstein. Clive was a drunk who died in his thirties, so who knows how much of the haunted, longing pain in his eyes was acting and how much just followed him around everywhere he went. But man, it hit me, and I wrote a song about it. Now here it is 12 years and who knows how many bands later, and I had the same thing this time with Vincent Price in Usher. Just like it had before, that connection made me want to write a song.

And that turned out to be the key. I suddenly watched these movies with an entirely different outlook, realizing that these classically trained actors, who had all done Shakespeare and Ibsen and all of this had had to find an emotional way into these characters to ground their performance at the center of all this great atmosphere, set design, and macabre plot elements. I'd always found the 1931 Dracula to be bizarre, with Dracula's casual strolling about among people who know he's a vampire and have sworn to stop him. But this time, I asked myself why the hell he left Transylvania in the first place, and the answer made everything else fall into place: he was desperately lonely. He wants to be around people, he's used to unquestioned dominion, and he doesn't perceive a threat from Van Helsing and the dopey Jonathan Harker. Also, Dwight Frye's performance as Renfield is amazing.

I couldn't watch Dracula and not watch Ed Wood, and the fundamentally joyous soul of that movie has always spoken to me. Ed's response to being told he made the worst movie someone's ever seen is "Well, my next one will be better!" for Pete's sake. That song came easily. Karloff was kind enough to explain straight out in The Body Snatcher the reason behind his seething creepiness, which was that as a low-class, forgotten cab driver he had managed to get and hold sway over a powerful, well respected physician and medical professor, and he would do absolutely anything in his power to keep that sense of power and meaning. In Bride of Frankenstein, we watch Karloff's monster grow in his humanity and fill up with an aching pathos, like Dracula, seeking connection. His longing for it gave me a chance to write what I consider both a very funny and a very sincere song. It's a celebration of possibility, but since we know how the story ends, the context gives everything a very different meaning.

Finally, for what was probably my favorite song on the EP, I tackled Corman's Masque of the Red Death, which is my favorite of the Corman/Poe/Price movies. It has the most going on, and is to me the most interesting because of what is actually a pretty acute exploration of human nature. I had no idea what to write about, where to hang my hat, as it were, for a song about this movie. And then I saw the sadness with which Hazel Court portrayed Juliana, Prince Prospero's mistress, who had always resisted committing her path to unrepentant evil, as he had. I loved her performance, and hope I did it justice.

Our world is different now, and today a lot of violence comes out of nowhere. It is sudden, profound, and often committed outside of context. People with mental illness fire into crowds, terror attacks come out of nowhere, and we worry things like GMOs and technology may ultimately harbor us ill will. Horror movies of today have come to reflect those fears. For several years, most mainstream horror movies were simply sadistic parades of people being killed brutally for reasons that remained at arms' length, and now zombies have gnawed their way to the top of every medium's genre output. I think these earlier films, despite a lack of special effects, despite their limited budgets, and despite much actual onscreen violence, used what they had, which were their gifted casts. Products of a different time, they told different kinds of stories — fundamentally human stories — that might not get the recognition they deserve. I can't imagine writing a song about Paris Hilton in House of Wax, but I could write one about Henry Jarrod as played by Vincent Price. Beneath the arched eyebrows and pencil mustache, there was more of me.

October is available as a free download here. Happy Halloween, everybody.

Posted by — Vance K, cult film aficionado, lover of terrible movies, and resident baritone at Nerds of a Feather since 2012

We Rank 'Em: The Roger Corman-Vincent Price Poe Movies

From 1960-1965, Roger Corman released eight films that were billed as being based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe (we'll come to the "billed as" part later). All but one of them starred Vincent Price. Taken together, they represent arguably the high-water mark of Corman's directorial work, they cemented Vincent Price's status as a horror icon, and helped establish the screenwriting career of the unbelievably influential Richard Matheson.

I confess that ranking these movies proved much harder than I anticipated, since I love all of them, and each for different reasons. But I nevertheless persevered, for the sake of our faithful Nerds of a Feather readers...

Bonus: An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
Not officially part of the canon, since Corman didn't direct it, this is a collection of staged recitations of Poe short stories performed by Vincent Price. The second part of the Midnite Movies double feature on the Tomb of Ligeia disc from MGM, this collection showcases a series of remarkable performances by Vincent Price, and I don't believe it's very widely known, even among Price fans. Pieces include The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado.

7. Tomb of Ligeia
Ligeia has some of my favorite locations from the series, including the crumbling stone cemetery where Price buries his beloved bride at the beginning of the film. It inflates to feature length some of the situations that fueled either subplots or shorter segments in other Corman anthology films, and combines elements of several Poe stores under a single title. The result is enjoyable and atmospheric, but maybe not as memorable on the whole as the other films in the series.

6. The Pit and the Pendulum
Stephen King will disagree with me for not putting this one higher on the list, but while The Pit and the Pendulum pioneered many of the stylistic traits that would become synonymous with the series, the later films used them to more mature effect. The vividly saturated camera filters and bizarre angles helped define the rest of the series, and gave one of Poe's best-loved stories a tangential, but emotionally consistent treatment.

5. Tales of Terror
An anthology film that features three segments culled from possibly a half-dozen Poe stories, this movie straddles the line between outright Gothic horror and comedy. Other films in the series would commit to one or the other and do each better, but the wine-tasting competition between Vincent Price's effete and refined wine connoisseur and Peter Lorre's town drunk is unbelievably winning and plain fun. Basil Rathbone's appearance as an unscrupulous medium/psychiatrist is also noteworthy and sets up a fantastically...drippy...climax.

4. The Raven
Outright comedy, The Raven pits Vincent Price, who dabbles in white magic, against mighty sorcerer Boris Karloff, who began the evening by turning Peter Lorre into a raven. A young Jack Nicholson's appearance as Peter Lorre's son should give aspiring actors everywhere hope, because Jack is one of the greatest screen actors of all time, but man, he's not very good in this. This is a legitimately funny movie, and come on - it stars Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Jack Nicholson. What's not to love?

3. House of Usher
The one that started it all. A bleached-blonde Vincent Price is a sight to behold, but still, and after I-don't-know-how-many viewings, I'm not sure if it's a good sight or not. Premature burials, centuries-old tombs, a family curse, possible incest, this lurid adaptation is straight from the Gothic horror playbook and would've made Matthew Lewis himself proud. And when the house starts coming down, matte paintings and miniatures or not, it's pretty awesome.

2. The Haunted Palace
One annoying feature of the Corman-Poe movies was their habit of splashing non-sequitur lines of Poe's stories or poetry on the beginning and/or end of the movies a propos of nothing...certainly not anything we've just seen onscreen. But here The Haunted Palace really takes the cake, since it's not even based on anything Poe ever wrote, and divorced of their original context, the lines of Poe that are slapped onto it almost literally have no meaning at all. Of the films in the series, this is probably the most faithful adaptation, but it's an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft, which is one of Lovecraft's best novellas. The movie is a wonder of art direction, has some memorably eerie scenes of mutant townspeople, and a nice dual performance by Price.

1. The Masque of the Red Death
Here, Vincent Price is his most vile and gleefully evil, the colors are the most saturated, the camera effects the most extreme, and the actual emotional content of the film the most engaging. Most of these films are like windows into Grand Guignol dysfunction, which is lurid fun. But Masque of the Red Death has a real sense of good and evil, right and wrong, and characters who have to make choices between the two. If these films are guilty pleasures for me (which they aren't really, since I don't feel guilty for liking them, in all their mustache-twirling archly villainous glory), this one makes the strongest argument for simply being a good movie.

Cult Films 101: The Corman

I swear by this mighty beard, Vance, if you don't shut up about
Dementia 13 already, the Apocalypse is coming right the f*$% now.

Welcome back to Cult Films 101, where this week's film is Dementia 13. This is a b-horror movie about some folks jockeying to inherit a fortune but instead meet untimely ends at the blade of an axe murder, and it's an example of the third main type of cult film...The Corman. Made in 1963, Dementia 13 was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Now, from 1972 to 1979, Francis Ford Coppola had about as good a run as any director has ever had, cranking out four consecutive, unassailable film classics -- The Godfather, Parts 1 & 2, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. But ten years earlier, like so, so many fimmakers of his generation, he was working for Roger Corman.

If you ask my honest opinion, I'll tell you that Dementia 13 is a good movie. It manages a not inconsiderable bit of atmosphere, has a number of memorable scenes, inventive camera work, and it clips along well enough for 70 minutes to keep you entertained. But let's be honest, the real draw here is that this was Francis Coppola's first credited directing job.

This trait is the unifying factor for The Corman category of cult movies. They could be good, bad, or indifferent, but they launched the careers of filmmakers who subsequently went on to make remarkable work. Most often, these movies will have been made under extremely tight budgets and restrictive production circumstances (often both, and for Roger Corman), and sometimes those conditions will have gotten the better of the movies and made kind of a mess of them. But we watch hoping for that flash of genius, the little recognizable spark that, with hindsight, we can point to and say "That! There's the birth of something amazing!"

"Dear Ma - I made it to Hollywood, where shirts are
optional but high socks are totally required."

At the University of Texas, my alma mater, the Harry Ransom Center contains many, many treasures. One of them is a letter a young William Faulkner wrote to his mother. It is the first piece of writing in which appears, fully formed and breathtakingly, the style that is now recognizable as William Faulkner's "voice."

When we watch films like Coppola's Dementia 13, Christopher Nolan's Following, Wes Anderson's short film Bottle Rocket, Katherine Bigelow's Near Dark, or watch a 20-year-old Jack Nicholson in The Cry Baby Killer or Crispin Glover and Sean Penn in The Beaver Trilogy, we're looking for the joy of that discovery.

And also, it makes us feel better to know that Francis Coppola started with Dementia 13 and Battle Beyond the Sun before becoming a genius. It gives us hope. Because if everybody had to crank out a Reservoir Dogs or The 400 Blows right out of the box, aspiring filmmakers everywhere would be burying their dreams under a stepping stone in the back yard as we speak.

Microreview [film]: Corman's World

The Meat

"Roger will just say exploitation pictures don't need plots. They need sensational things like girls shooting Filipinos out of trees. That works."

I wonder, do people still look down their nose at Roger Corman? For a long time, I'm sure they did, what with his making movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters, Ski Troop Attack, and Teenage Cave Man. But I would think that having launched the careers of Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, and Peter Fonda, crafting arguably the most perfect expression of Vincent Price's horror legacy, and giving Boris Karloff a worthy send-off in a handful of films in the 1960s, Corman has earned the respect of fans across the entire spectrum of film-fandom.

But just in case he hasn't won somebody over yet, we have Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, which is a full-tilt, unapologetic celebration of the man's work. From his early black-and-white sci-fi D-movies, through his late-50s/early-60s heyday as a producer/director, the radical shift in aesthetics, storytelling, and subject matter he helped spark and reinforce in the late-60s through the 1970s, and even up to his recent work for SyFy, this documentary hits all of the important points and does a nice job of putting everything in a larger context -- either in strictly Hollywood terms, or in broader social terms, where appropriate. It may not break any new ground in terms of how it presents the information (it's a very traditional, talking-heads-and-movie-clips approach), but there's a vibrancy and joy to the entire affair that more than makes up for any stylistic shortcomings.

What is perhaps the most appealing about this documentary, though, is the time spent with Roger Corman, himself. As he suggests (and is said about him) in the trailer, Roger may be a quiet, funny, erudite man of exceptional personal taste, but he has a roiling, tumultuous subconscious that has resulted in 60 years of notoriously un-classy movies. Roger's success means that, somewhere, and no matter how faint, there may be hope for Hollywood yet.

The Math

Objective Quality: 7/10

Bonuses: +1, for the scene where Jack Nicholson breaks down in tears talking about what Roger means to him; +1, for the fantastic array of interviewees.

Penalties: -1, for playing so safe in a documentary about such a subversive and non-traditional filmmaker (but this is a quibble).

Cult Movie Coefficient: 8/10. (for Corman fans like myself -- I'd go 7/10 if you're less enthusiastic about him)

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]