Category: Movie Discussions
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Last Woman on Earth (1960)
We all know about the big Hollywood names that started their careers with Roger Corman; however, we hear mostly about the actors and directors. Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown, 1975) also got his start with Corman by writing Last Woman on Earth (1960.) I’ll be darned if his screenplay doesn’t make this low-LOW budget…
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The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
It’s impossible to know how much I would have liked The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) had I never seen its musical counterpart from 26 years later, Little Shop of Horrors (1986.) While it’s surprising that I watched the former for the first time only recently, I couldn’t keep myself from hearing the songs from…
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Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)
This week’s review of Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) is an unintentional continuation from last week’s review of Beast from Haunted Cave (1959.) You may recall this introduction from Jeff Rovin’s The Fabulous Fantasy Films: In addition to Universal, Roger Corman, Dean of the Poe films, made his mark on the man-monster genre. His…
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Beast from the Haunted Cave (1959)
In addition to Universal, Roger Corman, Dean of the Poe films, made his mark on the man-monster genre. His contributions were mostly in terms of science fiction: Day the World Ended (1956), with its atom-spawned mutants, and Night of the Blood Beast (1958), an astronaut turned into a crusty tendrilled being by an outer space…
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Fade to Black (1980)
There I was, a still-young monster kid in the process of graduating from Famous Monsters of Filmland to Fangoria, from Universal and Hammer to Michael Myers and Jason. In the pages of Fangoria, I read this about an upcoming movie: Fade to Black: Irwin Yablans, the man who made film history when he asked John…
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Robot Monster (1953)
Robot Monster (1953) is one of those supposedly awful sci-fi movies that I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch. However, when Amok Time Toys advertised a 13” deluxe vinyl figure of the titular creature (technically called “Ro-Man”), I realized how darned fun it might unexpectedly be. I mean, the gorilla body with a…
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Beyond the Door (1974)
Calling Beyond the Door (1974) an Italian rip-off of The Exorcist (1973) isn’t quite fair. On one hand, that’s exactly what it is; but, on the other, it covers more original ground than I expected it would. Besides, if you believe the argument that The Exorcist isn’t really a horror film at all, then Beyond…
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Messiah of Evil (1973)
In a 1984 interview in People Weekly, timed for the release of Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, writer Gloria Katz said of her and Willard Huyck’s 1973 horror film, Messiah of Evil… It was a real bowwow. In the same interview, Huyck defending it, saying… It appeared on a marquee in a Woody…
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The Undying Monster (1942)
It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to believe Twentieth Century-Fox was eager to capitalize on the success of Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941) when it made The Undying Monster a year later. Then again, that might not be the case, because it was not promoted as one. As Jeff Rovin writes in The…
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The Werewolf of Washington (1973)
In The Monster Times #32 (April 1974), R. Allen Leider says The Werewolf of Washington (1973) was filmed in a “semi-documentary” style. I’m not sure that’s what i’d call it, but the first third or fourth of the movie is full of short shots that fade to black before starting a new one. At first,…
Classic Horrors Club 