LET’S GET PHYSICAL: LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on January 12th, 2010)

Roger Corman filmed Last Woman on Earth back-to-back with The Creature from the Haunted Sea.  Since Corman didn’t realize there would be time to fit an additional film into his schedule, he hired screenwriter Robert Towne (who would later go on to write Chinatown) to star.  That way whenever Towne wasn’t acting, he was off writing new scenes.  This patchwork process didn’t do the movie any favors and hampered what could’ve been a decent flick.

 

An embezzler hiding out in Puerto Rico takes his wife and lawyer out scuba diving.  When they return to the island, they are shocked to learn that everyone on Earth has died from some sort of airborne plague.  Since they were breathing air from the scuba tanks underwater, the trio weren’t affected and as a result, they are now the only three people left in the whole world (or in Puerto Rico at least).  Predictably, the lawyer gets horny and tries to steal his client’s wife away from him, which leads to various arguments and fisticuffs.

 

Last Woman on Earth could’ve been a potentially interesting post-apocalyptic love triangle, but Corman couldn’t quite pull it off.  The laborious set-up gets the movie off to a rocky start and the flick never fully recovers.  All the stuff involving the lawyer trying to hump his buddy’s wife is OK from a dramatic viewpoint but ultimately none of the characters are likable enough for you to really give two shits about them.

 

Corman also directed The Little Shop of Horrors, Ski Troop Attack, and The Fall of the House of Usher the same year.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THE TERROR (1963) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on December 12th, 2008)

Since The Terror is public domain and always turns up on television, budget DVD’s and 50 Movie Packs, I’ve probably seen it more times than any other Roger Corman movie.  It isn’t that bad of a flick, although the behind-the-scenes story of the film is a lot more interesting than the movie itself.  Star Boris Karloff was only available to director Corman for two days, so he quickly shot a lot of scenes of him running around sets from The Raven.  He then got his assistants Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and star Jack Nicholson to film linking scenes of what Corman shot and then pieced together the movie in the editing room.  The result is a predictably choppy film, though considering the piecemeal production; it could’ve been a lot worse.

 

Nicholson stars as a French soldier who while walking along the beach sees the ghost/spirit/something of a beautiful woman (Sandra Knight, his real-life wife at the time) and follows her to the castle of Baron Von Leppe (Boris Karloff).  Turns out the chick has an uncanny resemblance to the Baron’s late wife and she, along with the help of a haggard old witch, is trying to drive him to suicide.

 

Nicholson is bland as all get out and is absolutely unconvincing as a soldier.  While the young Nicholson can’t really command the screen like he would later go on to do, he at least steps up his game while acting alongside Karloff.  Old Boris is quite good and his performance is easily the best thing about the movie.  I also got a kick out of seeing Corman regulars Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze turning up in small roles.

 

The script is confusing, and the movie is patchy, but Corman does make the castle seem spooky and the constant shots of waves crashing against the rocky shore during a storm are effective.  (They’d later turn up in many a Corman picture.)  The foggy crypt is also pretty cool looking too.

 

There’s more gore than you’d probably expect from something like this.  There is a juicy scene where a guy gets his eyes pecked out by a falcon, a decent set piece where a body is set on fire after it’s struck by lightning and an excellent face melting scene that totally rocks.  It should also be noted that whereas most of Corman’s movies (especially the Poe pictures) end with a fire, this one ends with a flood.  The Terror is way too uneven to be called a “good” film but if you’re a Corman, Karloff, or Nicholson fan, it will have its own rewards.

AKA:  The Lady of the Shadows.  AKA:  The Castle of Terror.  AKA:  The Haunting. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THE WASP WOMAN (1959) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

Producer/director Roger Corman made this to cash in on the success of The Fly. Susan (Sorority Girl) Cabot stars as an aging skin cream magnate. Sales are slipping and so are her looks, so when a scientist doing eternal youth research with wasps comes to her company, she immediately signs up to try out the serum. The injections do have one small side effect: They turn her into a bug-eyed wasp faced killer in a black body stocking! The good doctor finally destroys her by throwing acid in her face! 

This Corman cheapie benefits from fun special effects and a good performance by Cabot. It’s a lot of fun if you can get past the gratuitous bee keeping opening scene and the running time padding montages that is. Corman stock player Bruno (The Undead) VeSota has a small role as a security guard and Corman himself pops up as a doctor. Corman later remade this in 1996 as part of his Showtime series Roger Corman Presents. 

Cabot in real life was later beaten to death by her dwarf son.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) ****

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on November 4th, 2009)

The Little Shop of Horrors is one of director Roger Corman’s finest hours.  After directing dozens of unintentionally hilarious movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters, this was his first intentionally funny horror film.  It also happens to be a searing indictment of the small-time businessman and the lengths he will go to in order to be successful.

 

Seymour Krelboin (Jonathan Haze) works for his overbearing boss Mushnik (Mel Welles) at his Skid Row flower shop where he pines for the pretty (but dumb as a bag of hammers) Audrey (Jackie Joseph).  Seymour creates a mutant Venus Fly Trap, which he names Audrey Jr. that drinks human blood to live.  The more Audrey Jr. grows, the busier the shop becomes, which makes Mushnik very happy.  As Audrey Jr. gets bigger, so does her appetite, and eventually Seymour takes to killing hobos and hookers in order to feed her.

 

The Little Shop of Horrors is famous for a lot of reasons.  First, it was shot in two days, which is pretty amazing.  Secondly, it kinda gained a second life after the 1986 musical remake.  Thirdly, it’s a public domain movie, so everybody’s probably seen it.  And perhaps the best reason is because it features Jack Nicholson in one of his greatest roles.  His performance as Wilbur Force, the masochistic dental patient has to be seen to be believed.  With his hair parted down the middle, he reads Pain Magazine and says shit like, “No Novocain!  It dulls the senses!”  He’s almost as nuts here as he was in The Shining.

 

This flick is chockfull of bizarre little bits and entertaining black humor.  The Dragnet style cops are hilarious and some of their banter will leave you in stitches.  The scenes of Seymour feeding Audrey Jr. disembodied hands and feet while the plant screams “FEEEEED MEEEEE!” are also pretty great.  And not only does the movie features a man-eating plant, but also a plant-eating man played by the always awesome Dick Miller.  (“I’ve got to get home; my wife’s making gardenias for dinner!”)  The Little Shop of Horrors is rife with weird touches like this that makes it so much fun.

 

Incredibly, Corman also managed to churn out Ski Troop Attack, Fall of the House of Usher, and Last Woman on Earth the same year.

 

Audrey Sr. gets the best line of the movie when she says, “I’m so hungry; I could eat a hearse!”

 

The Little Shop of Horrors is Number 3 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 1960 which places it just below The Magnificent Seven and right above Peeping Tom.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 17th, 2007)

In this fun horror/comedy from director Roger Corman, Dick Miller plays his best role as Walter Paisley, a meager busboy in a hep cat bohemian nightclub who someday dreams of being a famous beatnik artist. He tries sculpting but is no good at it until he accidentally kills his cat and decides to sculpt over its carcass. When his “Dead Cat” sculpture is an unexpected hit, he soon has to turn to murder to find willing “subjects”. Miller gives a great performance and Corman balances the chills and the chuckles nicely. It would make a good double feature with Corman’s better known Little Shop of Horrors (also with Miller) which came out the following year. Co-starring a young Bert Convy as a victim. Remade in 1995 with Anthony Michael Hall.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:  

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

Director Roger Corman directed this back-to-back-to-back with The Battle of Blood Island and Last Woman on Earth. It has a lot in common with his classic Little Shop of Horrors:  It was filmed in a few days, it was written by Charles B. Griffith, and it has cartoony opening credits. It’s nowhere near as good as Shop, but it has its moments.

A bumbling spy stows away on a gangster’s boat who kills off his passengers and tries to blame it on the local legendary sea monster. Unfortunately for him, there really IS a monster on the loose! One of the crew members makes (obviously dubbed in) and the other, “Edward Wain” is actually future Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert (Chinatown) Towne. The tone is really out of whack and wildly uneven but Corman completists will wanna check it out.

Best line: “It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down.”

Watch fast for Corman using a telephone.

WANTED MAN (2024) **

Dolph Lundgren plays a disgraced cop who gets caught on camera beating up a Mexican suspect.  As sort of a half-assed PR stunt, he is sent to Mexico to pick up two hookers.  And by “pick up two hookers”, I mean “Extradite them as they are potential eyewitnesses to a drug deal gone wrong that resulted in several deaths, including some undercover cops”, and not like, “pick them up, pick them up”.  That wouldn’t be much of a PR stunt, if you ask me. 

Anyway, while transporting the witnesses they are ambushed and one of the women is shot and killed.  Together, Dolph and the other survivor go into hiding and try not to get killed by the crooked cops who are on their trail. 

Dolph gets to play his age a little bit in this one.  He walks with a noticeable limp and characters comment that he needs ankle surgery, but I have a suspicion he really did need ankle surgery, and they just wrote his injury into the script.  There’s even a subplot where he gets shot and spends much of the second act in bed healing up and watching telenovelas. 

When you’re someone as prolific as Dolph is, you have to make sure there are slight variations on the usual fare to keep your films from feeling interchangeable.  In this one, he plays a racist, although to be fair his character is more of the “drunk uncle” variety than a “card carrying member of the KKK”.  Five years from now when I’m trying to remember the recent Dolph films I’ve seen, I’ll remember this one by saying, “Oh, right that was the racist Dolph one.”  (Alternatively, I may think of it as the one where he spends a third of the movie in bed.)  I’m not saying Wanted Man is entirely forgettable, but I’m not sure just how long it will be seared into my brain.  Granted, I appreciate the attempt to mirror real world events, such as racism in the police force and all, but it feels more like an attempt by the screenwriters to give his character a unique backstory rather than be a genuine look at race and society. 

Dolph also directed the film.  He does a competent job for the most part.  It’s thoroughly middle of the road by Dolph standards, but die-hard fans like me probably won’t care.  Middle of the road is where us fans tend to be most of the time. 

Kelsey Grammer and Michael Pare also turn up playing Dolph’s drinking buddies.

This summer I was a guest on Matt’s Direct to Video Connoisseur Podcast and we discussed the film in depth.  You can check out our entire chat here: DTVC Podcast 168, "Wanted Man" by DTVC Podcast (spotify.com)