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.

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.