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…

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…

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…

In Horrors from Screen to Scream, Ed Naha calls Dinosaurus! (1960) an: Amusing romp for the small fry… It’s been a long time since I’ve been considered a “small fry,” but the movie was plenty amusing for me. Somehow I was able to overlook its flaws and watch it through the eyes of a child,…

How many times have you watched a movie that’s really good, and then… it’s ruined by a horrible-looking creature? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one that’s not that good, and then… it’s rescued by a great-looking creature. Such is the case with Destination Inner Space, during which I was about to doze until…

Thanks to Derek M. Koch and Monster Kid Radio’s Social Distance Saturday, I discovered a real gem from 1964, La jena di Londra (The Hyena of London.) Not only had I never heard of it, I could not find a single mention of it in any of my film reference books. It sounds like I…

Inspiration comes from the strangest places and, oftentimes, when under pressure. To think that had Arch Hall’s movie, The Choppers (1961), not needed a second feature to go with it for a distribution deal, and had Richard Kiel not turned down Hall’s idea for that second feature, Eegah! might never have been made! It was…

Its title, Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory, does the movie no service, other than to place butts in car seats at the drive-in when it was released in 1961 (on a double bill with Corridors of Blood.) As David Del Valle notes in his commentary with actor Curt Lowens on the recent Severin Blu-ray release,…

Since I take every chance I can to defend the appearance of the bird that’s as big as a battleship in The Giant Claw (1957), it would be hypocritical of me to criticize the kaiju, Guilala, in The X from Outer Space (1967). Therefore, let me just get it out of the way. The appearance…

The way that The Vampire & the Ballerina (1960) begins, you’d think we were going to experience a standard vampire tale. Brigida, a pretty young farm girl, is pursued by a shadowy figure as she returns from fetching water. A caped figure overcomes her and some men later find her lying in the woods, “the…