Tag Archives: Roger Corman

R.I.P. Roger Corman (1926-2024): Weirdness in Workaholism

We at last have an explanation for the Aurora Borealis illuminating the skies to the north this weekend. That’s the gates of movie heaven opening extra wide to admit one .

Roger CormanTo some movie-goers, he’s a “who?” To anybody who’s dipped a toe in movie culture, he is a giant, almost a mythical legend, some great mountain cyclops of Lovecraftian proportions. Where do you even start with Roger Corman’s legacy? The Little Shop of Horrors? The vintage Poe adaptations with Vincent Price? Easy Rider? The Fantastic Four? The women-in-prison flicks starring Pam Grier and her two D-cup co-stars? The steady churn of grindhouse and drive-in exploitation flicks, premiered and gone nearly as fast as they could be made? Death Race 2000? Or the long, long line of savant-level talented stars who passed through Corman’s production boot-camp to go on to be legends in their own careers?

It’s complicated, because Corman is also remembered as a ruthlessly pragmatic businessman, stingy with paychecks, who benefited from exploiting hungry new talent. He willingly stamped out some horrendous schlock with his name on it. Lest we forget that, we could also start with Dinocroc vs. Supergator or Sharktopus or Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfolds. To be fair, Corman was solely concerned with finding out what the audience wanted to see—and then getting it to them as fast as possible. It might take a cardboard and duct tape set and an afternoon shoot financed from change he found in a pay phone, but Corman got it done.

I try to imagine an alternate universe where Corman never existed, and the first thing I see is half of this website disappearing. It’s not just the movies he produced, directed, or acted in; it’s the big players who owed their start to Corman’s mentoring. Without Corman, you have no Scorsese, no Coppola (and hence, no George Lucas), no Ron Howard, no James Cameron, no Peter Bogdanovich, no Joe Dante— and that’s just the directors!

Reportedly, Roger Corman would not tolerate the expression “” within his presence, insisting he made A-movies on a B-budget (often while standing next to a poster of something like Night of the Cobra Women). But I don’t see him that way. He had a chance to go the big studio route working under 20th Century Fox. He had the chance to go art-house with his own New World Pictures. Roger Corman only felt at home driving his own desk, doing things his way, with a magical, forgotten talent known as a “work ethic.”

A hack. Being a hack has a proud tradition. Many of the literary greats we honor now got their start writing dime-novel pulps. You might use “hack” to describe those who write for money on a hand-to-mouth basis, such as we bloggers, bless us every one. Sure, Corman concerned himself with the art, and in the case of 1962’s The Intruder, he could even treat film as an important medium with something substantial to say. He just happened to care about the bottom line most of all.

The world needs people with such a work ethic. Doubtless, when that person is a producer who will fire you without apology for daring to go one day over schedule, that’s going to rub some people the wrong way. Rest assured, we will still be making fun of his sexploitation quickies and rubber-suit bug-eyed monsters for years yet. But we’re going to miss Roger Corman, more and more with each passing year, as the film industry’s pace-setter is no longer here to keep everyone else on their toes. You’re going to be asking in twenty years: Why does film as a medium feel so lethargic and bloodless now? It will be because Corman was not bringing up the rear, and the rest of the producers got comfortable and lazy.

Here on 366 Weird Movies, of course, we have lopsided standards, and so Corman looms larger to us than many a mainstream box office draw. We want the weird stuff, and he delivered his share of weirdness, mostly by virtue of the fact that when you’re hurling out nine films per year, a few weirdies will make it through the gauntlet the way one mutant green potato chip shows up in every bag. I don’t think Corman ever intentionally discouraged a viewer. But his low margins let him take some insane risks that paid off, and then he could content himself with making movies just for those narrow slices of the audience, like the ones whose greatest wish was to see Pam Grier’s num-nums.

Sure, Corman put out some sloppy work, but he wisely observed that most viewers would barely pay attention at the drive-in anyway. Likewise, his attempts to hop on every trend and produce a knock-off of every Star Wars were mostly pathetic. Again, this was just Corman trying to give the audience what they want, following his money-dowsing wand. Whatever weirdness that came through was a byproduct.

Nevertheless, Roger Corman is the man most remembered for proving the indie film production industry can hold its own. Like a punk rocker encountering a string quartet, he swept away all the pretense of the elite auteurs and set up his gear on stage to give us the fast jams we danced to. In a world of delicate artists wrestling with impenetrable muses and big studios flogging comic franchises for their last dollar, Corman cut clean to the bleached bone of film-making. You get it done under budget and on time, or you walk. Under his discipline, so many other talents discovered that not only could they wing it, but soar to the heavens.

CAPSULE: GALAXY OF TERROR (1981)

aka Mindwarp: An Infinity of Terror

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 DIRECTED BY: Bruce D. Clark

FEATURING: Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston, Robert Englund, , Taaffe O’Connell, , , Bernard Behrens

PLOT: On a mission to investigate the disappearance of a lost spaceship, the crew of the Quest confronts an alien monster that hunts them by preying upon their worst fears.

Still from Galaxy of Terror (1981)

COMMENTS: No one ever accused Roger Corman of failing to capitalize upon someone else’s success. Having seen Alien reap box office gold, he and his mercenary studio New World Pictures quickly put together a film based upon a simple principle: an alien hunts a space crew one by one. Of course, what Corman and his cohorts never seemed to consider (or, more likely, could not be bothered to care) was that Alien was much more than merely a slasher film transplanted into outer space. The earlier film used foreboding and patience in a way that its imitator couldn’t even contemplate. Where Alien carefully developed the complex interpersonal relationships of the crew of the Nostromo, Galaxy of Terror just spits out one-line motivations and outsized character tics and hopes that will generate some empathy. We’ve got the blueprint here, but the only parts that carried over were the alien and the dead crew.

Galaxy of Terror is cheap. After all, it’s a Roger Corman production. But amazingly, it doesn’t look cheap, and a great deal of credit goes to the production designer, a promising young fellow by the name of James Cameron. (He also served as second-unit director and took on other behind-the-scenes roles.) The spaceship milieu is rich and convincing – the set is allegedly supplemented with spray-painted McDonald’s containers – while a walk through the chambers of an alien pyramid is vividly unfamiliar. The visual style readily evokes Cameron’s future endeavors, such as The Terminator and Aliens, and it’s entertaining to see him deploying his talents early on.

The story is considerably less accomplished. That notion of an enemy that can exploit your worst nightmares is intriguing (and would later be explored extensively by co-star Englund), but is only haphazardly pursued here, usually by a character announcing their worst fear and promptly being confronted with it in the next scene. Moran is claustrophobic, but her particularly grim fate is sealed less by confined spaces than by the vicious tentacles that attack her. Haig’s demise at the hands of his own crystal throwing stars is one of the film’s most effective pieces of visual horror, but makes little sense when you realize his weakness isn’t fear, but faith. In most cases, one has to assume that what the victims fear most is a large-clawed, bloodsucking monster, because that’s what most consistently does them in.

Which leads us to the film’s most notorious sequence, in which Continue reading CAPSULE: GALAXY OF TERROR (1981)

CAPSULE: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Allan Arkush

FEATURING: P. J. Soles, Dey Young, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, The Ramones

PLOT: Riff Randell battles the punk-hating administration at her high school by invoking the musical powers of her favorite band, The Ramones.

Still from Rock 'n Roll High School (1979)

COMMENTS: The Ramones were icons of minimalism. Progenitors of punk, they pioneered a sound that was somehow both retro and revolutionary, delivering two-chord, two-minute landmarks that had none of the feel of craft and all of the sensation of having been spewed out of the most primal reaches of the band members’ autonomic nervous systems. Everything about them was reduced to its bare essentials: a basic guitar-bass-drum setup, fronted by a flat, nasal vocal that was tuneful while making no pretensions to being musical, presented by a group that spoke to punk’s fierce independence with a façade of careful uniformity, from the matching leather jackets and torn jeans to the identical messy face-obscuring Kate Jackson hairstyles, and even extending to their manufactured noms de théâtre. Everything about them was carefully engineered to celebrate everybody by being nobody.

So the notion that the Ramones would be the centerpiece of a bubbly teenager’s every waking moment is a little dissonant. And that they would somehow come to have an entire feature film devoted to them—one with a substantial cult following—is nothing short of bizarre. It’s the domain of old people to complain that the kids are making idols out of empty shells, but the emptiness of the Ramones is part of their very essence. They’re almost antithetical to the idea of teenybop worship. To watch P J. Soles’ Riff Randell—a veritable firehose of giddy hyperactivity—go gaga for this quartet of empty t-shirts is to plunge headlong through the looking glass. Try to imagine a Disney Channel original movie where a precocious 12-year old learns self-confidence through the power of her favorite band, and that band turns out to be GWAR. (Note to Disney: Please greenlight this. I will absolutely write the script for you.)

But for the purposes of the Roger Corman film factory, the Ramones hardly matter. They’re answer to a Mad Lib wherein [INSERT NAME OF BAND] inspires kids to overthrow those dullard grownups. (It’s telling that Corman’s original suggestion was center the film around disco music, an idea that would have been truly transgressive if it had been filmed two years earlier and dared to address the politics of race and sexual orientation endemic to the genre.) Rock ‘n’ Roll High School has one goal, and it’s to tell the kids how much cooler they are than those stick-in-the-mud adults. And if we have to put our thumb on the scale to make the old people especially dorky and uncool, well hey, that’s just Roger Corman being a smart businessman.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the kind of movie that Rock ‘n’ Continue reading CAPSULE: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

CAPSULE: DEATH RACE 2050 (2017)

DIRECTED BY: G. J. Echternkamp

FEATURING: Manu Bennett, Marci Miller, Yancy Butler,

PLOT: In a dystopian future, drivers compete in a cross-country race where the competitors score points for speed and vehicular homicide.

Still from Death Race 2050 (2017)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Aside from being the fifth film to bear the Death Race marque, the 2050 incarnation is a pretty straightforward race picture, with some absurd gore and strident satire glommed on for extra measure.

COMMENTS: The title card identifies this movie properly as Roger Corman’s Death Race 2050, and when you get to be 90 years old and won an Oscar just for the sheer volume of your output, then you’re damned right you get to throw your name up there. But now that he’s put himself front and center, it’s important to remember that a lot of Roger Corman movies are bad. When we think of filmmakers like , James Cameron, or Ron Howard getting their start in Corman’s low-budget film factory, the context is that they are all talented filmmakers who overcame humble origins. Death Race 2050 does not manage to outshine its pedigree, whether that be the Corman exploitation mill, the shadow of the original Death Race 2000, or the many films from which it liberally borrows. In that sense, it’s a fitting addition to the Corman canon.

Allegedly, Corman instigated the idea after a journalist suggested that his original Death Race had much in common with The Hunger Games. Evidently, he opted to solidify the connection by carrying over as many elements of The Hunger Games as he could legitimately steal, from the bread-and-circuses atmosphere to the preening chief executive to the destitute-man’s Stanley Tucci who emcees the whole affair. But it owes just as much to the rock-stupid future depicted in Idiocracy, to say nothing of the original film, whose beats are carefully replicated here.

Ostensibly the tale of a fallen America’s favorite bloodsport, Death Race 2050 pits five cars against each other in a race across a country that is largely free of people, presumably because they all remain indoors to enjoy the race from their squalid-yet-VR-enabled homes. Given how many of the remaining citizens wind up dead at the hands of the racers, it’s hard to tell whether reality TV is the ultimate killer, or the only thing keeping our descendants alive.

As for the racers themselves, one is a robot car susceptible to brain damage, while two are stereotypes (a black nationalist rap star whose hit song consists almost entirely of the poetic lyrics, “Death Death Kill Kill”, and a fundamentalist Christian televangelist who proudly builds her pulpit on terrorism). That leaves two for our primary showdown: Jed Perfectus, the probably-gay prima donna with a chip on his shoulder who struts around practically naked (he has a spectacular chin, but beyond that is not exactly a flawless specimen), and Frankenstein, the world-weary champion who is pretty much annoyed with everyone. Overseeing all of this is Malcolm McDowell, honing his accumulated phoning-it-in skills with a barely-trying American accent and a floppy hairdo that might remind viewers of another arrogant leader who cons the public and suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.

The writers want to have fun with the rampant commercialism that has destroyed the country (the best such joke is this wonderful location card: “Washington, D.C. [formerly Dubai]”), but the humor is paper-thin. For every joke that carries a little weight if you stop to think about it (i.e. the aerosol cheese that’s also a mood stabilizer), twice as many are simplistic (the new American flag replaces the stars with dollar signs), depraved (a passenger literally has sex with the robot car), or low-hanging (fans drink paint-can-sized beverages labeled “Zoda!”). The film is aware of its limitations (a conversation between two women takes place in “The Bechdel Lounge”) but helpless to overcome them. Characters switch sides just because, abandon long-held beliefs just because, and generally do whatever is required to get them to the next jokey part of the country.

But you’re not really watching Death Race 2050 for its Thurberian wit, so who cares as long as there’s some thrills in this Death Race? Which turns out to be an even bigger problem: no one believes for a minute that these cars are going faster than 30 mph, even fewer will imagine that these actors got anywhere near the steering wheel, and most of the carnage consists of bloody entrails being hurled at windshields. When you aim to combine satire and action, and don’t really score on either count, you’re setting yourselves up for disappointment.

Death Race 2050 wants to be a few different movies, but doesn’t really score at any one of them. As a result, it’s never actively bad, but not particularly good, which makes it very disposable as entertainment. Fortunately, there are four other Death Race films you can try.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Death Race 2050 is grating and insane … Even more than the original, this flick is a garish cartoon and as such, it will likely isolate audiences looking for the humorless thrills of the previous Death Race series or those just looking for a straight action flick. No, this incarnation of Death Race feels like a smutty app from Hell, rather than a conventional genre film.” — Chris Alexander, ComingSoon.net