LET’S GET PHYSICAL: ATLAS (1961) *

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As published in my book, Revenge of the Video Vacuum)

Roger Corman is probably the thriftiest person in Hollywood.  That didn’t stop him from dipping deep enough into his pockets to film this sword and sandal “epic” on location in Greece though.  Despite the location work (which gets cropped out anyway, thanks to the shitty DVD transfer), Atlas is one of Corman’s weakest efforts.

Proximates (Frank Wolff) is a tyrant who stops sieging a small town long enough to talk a truce with the town elder.  He says that too many people have already died and suggests both sides send their best warrior to fight mano y mano to settle the dispute.  Proximates agrees, but asks for ten days to find the best fighter.  He goes to Mount Olympus where he discovers Atlas (Michael Forest), an accomplished wrestler.  Atlas agrees to fight and easily bests the town’s warrior.  After the victory, Proximates goes around bossing everyone around while his soldiers have their way with the local women.  Eventually, Atlas has enough of Proximates’ shit and leads a rebellion to overthrow him.

I usually have a low tolerance for these sword and sandal flicks from the ‘50s and ‘60s anyway, but Atlas was much worse than most of the genre’s usual offerings.  It’s a total snoozer from start to finish, and the pacing is pretty much nonexistent.  Just when you think the movie can’t get any duller, along comes one of the most boring courtroom scenes ever filmed to completely take the wind out of its sails.

It also doesn’t help that Atlas himself is a complete joke.  He spends most of his time standing around, and doesn’t do anything remotely heroic until about the last reel.  Some hero.

The battle sequences are lame too.  There are a lot of scenes of people standing and waving swords around that are just pathetic.  Apparently Corman hired 500 extras for the battle scenes, but only 50 showed up.  Even if the extras did show up, I’m not sure it would’ve added much to the movie because of Corman’s haphazard staging of the “action”.

Wolff is pretty awful as the villainous Proximates.  He minces about for 80 minutes and never once seems threatening at all.  I will give him credit for turning the Ham Meter up to Shatner Level, but for the most part, he’s thoroughly irritating.  He does get one funny exchange with a guard though:  

Guard:  “You wanted to see me?”

Proximates:  “No!  I wanted to see your great aunt Helen from Lesbos!”

I did have fun spotting Corman regular Dick Miller as a glorified extra, and even Corman himself in a bit part dressed as a centurion, but that’s about where the fun ended.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SKI TROOP ATTACK (1960) **

FORMAT:  DVD

Roger Corman passed away a while back and I never got around to doing a proper tribute to him.  If anyone typified the Video Vacuum ideology of quantity over quality, it was Corman.  When I was working my way through this ten-movie bargain bin collection of Corman films, I decided this would be the ideal place to acknowledge his passing.  Of the films on the set, Ski Troop Attack was the only one in the mix I hadn’t seen before.  As it turned out, it wasn’t exactly the best one to work as a tribute as it’s kind of an atypical Corman picture.  (It’s a war movie done on a shoestring budget.)  I mean, I know he was one of the thriftiest men on the planet, but with Ski Troop Attack, he tosses in enough stock footage to make Ed Wood’s head spin. 

American troops are behind enemy lines in Germany.  The green Lt. Factor (Michael Forest) butts heads with the mouthy Sgt. Potter (Frank Wolff), who despite his lower rank, has more experience in the field.  He also has an itchy trigger finger, which could sabotage their supposedly stealth mission.  As the outfit presses on to their final objective of blowing up an enemy bridge, tensions mount.  Will they ever put aside their differences and work together as a team?  What do you think?

Corman was working with an obviously low budget, and while he tries to give it a bigger feel of an A-List war picture, he isn’t quite able to pull it off.  Scenes of soldiers on skis shooting enemies sort of play like a precursor to the climax of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but on a much smaller scale.  They’re not bad or anything, but they’re too few of them to make it all worthwhile.  Most of the time though, the action just resembles a bunch of kids playing soldier in the woods on a snow day. 

If I’m being completely honest, Corman’s war movies are typically the least interesting.  Other than the overuse of stock footage, there’s not much here that’s all that amusing.  The drama is strictly second rate, and the action is a mixed bag at best.  It is fun seeing Corman playing a German ski soldier though. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SWAMP DIAMONDS (1956) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

This was one of director Roger Corman’s first films. While it’s not one of his best, this female filled crime melodrama is worth a look if only for a great hateful performance by Beverly Garland. A policewoman (Carol Matthews) infiltrates an all-girl gang serving time in prison. She gains their trust and organizes an escape in exchange for a cut on some diamonds that are stashed in a swamp. Mike “Touch” Connors plays a hapless guy that gets kidnapped by the gang and provides the meager sexual tension. The beginning is hopelessly filled with stock footage of Mardi Gras to pad the already brisk running time, and the ending is wrapped up way too conveniently, but Garland is a hoot at chewing up the scenery. She starred the next year in Corman’s The Gunslinger. Marie (Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy) Windsor and Jonathan (The Little Shop of Horrors) Haze co-star.

AKA: Swamp Women. AKA: Cruel Swamp.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SHE GODS OF SHARK REEF (1958) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 18th, 2007)

Roger Corman directed this island adventure movie in color! The plot has two fugitive brothers Chris (Bill Cord) and Lee (Don Durant) escaping justice by stealing a boat and heading out to the open sea. There’s a bad storm and they end up shipwrecked on an island that’s populated by nothing but beautiful women. The native girls dance around a lot and worship the plethora of sharks that inhabit the sea surrounding the island. Chris falls in love with one of the maidens who happens to get picked to be the next sacrifice to the sharks. When Chris saves her from getting turned into Shark Chow, he upsets the gods as well as the mean old biddy that runs the tribe. Lee and Chris escape the island with his gal in tow, but Lee gets greedy and steals the women’s satchel of precious pearls and is promptly eaten by a shark.

The way Corman tries to match the action to the stock footage in the final scene is pretty hilarious. While most of the movie is stagnant, it actually features some decent underwater photography and makes great use of the gorgeous tropical locations, despite the visible boom mikes. Corman filmed this (in Hawaii) at the same time with Naked Paradise and it played on a double bill with Corman’s Night of the Blood Beast. There’s also a woefully bad theme song, “Nearer My Love to You” that’s good for some laughs too.

AKA: Shark Reef.

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.