Roger Corman

  • X aka X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) What’s interesting in a film like X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is how what was clearly meant as a sensational film can become creaky compared to modern production standards… and yet still have something unnerving to it. A favourite of the pulp sci-fi era and still one of Roger Corman’s better-known productions, this is a Science Fiction tragedy about a scientist inventing a serum to allow him to go beyond the limits of human perceptions, testing it on himself and progressively losing control of his senses. The point here isn’t the classic tale of hubris and conceptual breakthrough (although it goes light on the breakthrough and heavy on the increasing horrors) as much as the episodes along the way, shifting the tale into slightly different subgenres along the way. There’s nothing subtle or even credible here—I was particularly amused at a casino’s inaction when a man wearing wraparound glasses comes by, wins at cards and says something like, “They can’t stop me from playing!”  Well, no, any casino in the real world would have kicked you out a long time ago. Another sequence set at a typically early-1960s party goes through amazing convolutions in order to portray the protagonist’s perspective of everyone appearing naked… without showing anything too risqué. It’s all part of the fun, although I was primed from Stephen King’s Dance Macabre to expect a much more hard-hitting ending. (As King writes, “I have heard rumors—they may or may not be true—that the final line of dialogue was cut from the film as too horrifying. If true, it was the only possible capper for what has already happened. According to the rumor, Milland screams: I can still see!” but I had forgotten that it was King’s hearsay rather than what was in the film.)  There have been numerous attempts to remake the film since its first release, and it’s obvious why: there’s a kernel of a great idea here that could support quite a bit of drama and spectacular special effects, not to mention better episodes of the protagonist seeing beyond human senses. I’m not normally a fan of remakes, but if anyone wants to have another go at X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, then I wish them the best.

  • Forbidden World (1982)

    Forbidden World (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2021) As far as blatant Alien rip-offs go (you know: blue-collar crew stuck in ship/station/planet with a killer alien force), I have seen quite a bit worse than Forbidden World. Playing like a trashier, but more self-consciously entertaining version of the Ridley Scott classic, it features impressively gruesome gore effects, a dizzyingly incoherent storyline, some half-clever ideas and set-pieces, and some terrible editing. In other words: a mixed bag, but a rather bewildering one that keeps our interest. This being a Roger Corman production, there are obvious similarities with that other Alien rip-off Galaxy of Terror, but Forbidden World is just a bit less dour, and not tainted by a few repulsive sequences. Director Allan Holzman has an intention to entertain despite the gloopy creature effects, much gratuitous nudity, suicidally dumb characters and a rather darkly amusing sequence in which the humans attempt to negotiate with the murderous creature. No, Forbidden World is not great art. But I’ve certainly seen much worse, and in its best moments it recalls the glory days of rubbery 1980s horror cinema at its craziest.

  • Dementia 13 (1963)

    Dementia 13 (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) If you’re into that whole “first film by famous filmmakers” thing, then Dementia 13 should be on your must-see list: it’s the directorial debut of writer-director Francis Ford Coppola, and it already shows his cinematic flair. The story itself isn’t anything special — a psychological thriller avowedly made by producer Roger Corman to cash in on the success of Psycho: There’s murder, gothic intrigue, gaslighting and a psycho killer. Where Dementia 13 does rather well, however, is in the execution: Director Coppola is markedly more ambitious than writer Coppola, and far more than producer Corman: Accordingly, his 70-minute potboiler thriller is elevated by atmospheric direction that almost takes the film into classic-horror territory rather than exploitation chiller. There’s no real way around the fact that Dementia 13 remains a cheap horror film, executed on a threadbare budget by someone with more ambition than means. But it’s that ambition that keeps the film intriguing today — you can trace a line from this to the atmosphere of Coppola’s 1992 take on Dracula without hesitation.

  • The Raven (1963)

    The Raven (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Some movies should come with warnings along the line of “don’t watch this before you watch those other movies.”  If that was applied to The Raven, the prerequisite would probably include movies featuring Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre just so you’d come into it expecting their screen persona. You would probably also want to include at least one of producer/director Roger Corman’s horror films of the period just to give an idea of what audiences were expecting. Finally, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to throw in a later film from Jack Nicholson to show how far he’d go from this film to superstardom, and probably a modern fantasy film just to highlight what happens when a genre becomes fully defined. But let me explain — Roger Corman, at the time, was adapting classical works of horror literature (many of them from Edgar Allan Poe) as pretexts for horror films. Price and Karloff were already horror movie icons, whereas Lorre was a fixture as “creepy guy” in a variety of films. Jack Nicholson was barely beginning his long career, and fantasy as a genre (not just as movie genre) was at least a decade from being codified. But The Raven tried something weirdly different, delivering a fantasy comedy based on Poe’s “The Raven” that allowed Price and Karloff to portray rival sorcerers trying to one-up each other. The poem’s “Lenore” is a traitorous harridan, while Lorre portrays The Raven, occasionally spitting feathers. It’s definitely a comedy, although modern viewers may want to temper their expectations regarding the density and impact of the jokes. Sometimes, The Raven seems to bask simply in how weird it is, without going the extra mile of making itself funny — but then again, I suspect that Corman’s idea of what’s funny wasn’t that of a conventional comedian. From modern lenses, the weirdness of the film also comes from working with unbuilt tropes — picture “wizard” in your head, and you won’t match the film’s vision of “wizard” because it came in ten years before the printed version of The Lord of the Rings and, in turn, the way wizards have been portrayed in fantasy literature since then. Any circa-2021 attempt to retell the same story would be far more overly funny, but would also deal in visual archetypes familiar to audiences from decades of fantasy films all going for the same iconography. Where that leaves The Raven for modern audiences is more akin to interesting experiment… as long as you’re familiar with the prerequisites of the film. Seeing Karloff and Price in a lighter register than usual is fun, but the film stops well short of hilarious. If you’ve seen the prerequisites, though, go ahead and have fun — The Raven is meant to be playful all the way to its closing lines: Nevermore!

  • Stripped to Kill (1987)

    Stripped to Kill (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) It makes perfect sense that Roger Corman’s name is listed as executive producer to Stripped to Kill: After all, there hasn’t been a single exploitation angle that Corman hasn’t liked, and setting a crime thriller inside a strip club seems like a perfect idea. (Strip-club culture would later explode into the mainstream, but it was still something transgressive in 1987.) The plot summary is simple, silly but clever, as a policewoman infiltrates a strip club to catch a serial killer. There’s quite a bit of nudity (most of it dull) and a number of serial killings (also dull), hitting most of the essential high points of a sexploitation film. Alas, there isn’t much here to care about: the serial killer’s identity is crazy in the kind of over-the-top way that 1980s slashers settled into, and there isn’t much to the lead performances by Kay Lenz and Greg Evigan. Katt Shea’s direction (in her first film) is fine—as much of Stripped to Kill can be summarized as such. It’s gory but not overly so, filled with nudity but not crossing the line into harder material, and with a story just good enough to keep going but not to leave any lasting impression. In other words, it could have been much worse and isn’t—not high praise, but sufficient for a film that was designed to titillate more than anything else.

  • Targets (1968)

    Targets (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Aside from the content of the film itself, there’s a wistful quality in Targets that comes from seeing the beginning of a career and the end of another—this being Peter Bogdanovich’s first film, and Boris Karloff’s last starring role. The production history of the film has its quirks—it came from Roger Corman being owed two days of work by Karloff, and instructing then-young writer-director Bogdanovich to make a low-budget movie around this constraint. Taking advantage of the social turmoil of the time, Bogdanovich ended up building a clever twin-strand plot featuring an aging horror film actor and a young Vietnam veteran going on a murderous rampage. The intention is obviously to confront old horror and new monsters, and the ending does finally bring everything together. Targets can feel surprisingly modern at times—the idea of a random person just shooting people off the highway still unnerves, and the gritty handheld style of the film does echo far newer films. The result is worth a look, although it can feel like a drag at times—by shooting around Karloff’s schedule, Bogdanovich was inspired by creative constraints but wasn’t quite able to tie everything up in a completely seamless way. Still, Targets makes an interesting argument at the dawn of New Hollywood, and benefits from having an old-school star in the lead role.

  • Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

    Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) If I’ve understood Creature from the Haunted Sea’s production history correctly, it was born from the mercenary mind of legendary producer/director Roger Corman when he found himself fin Puerto Rico with leftover film stock, tax credits, actors, a crew and time to spare after shooting two other movies on location. A screenwriter was given three days to adapt an existing script in Corman’s files into a comedy making use of available scenery and props, and the film itself was shot in five days. Considering this, it’s a minor miracle that Creature from the Haunted Sea, at a bare 75 minutes, has survived all the way to 2020, let alone that it still gets a few laughs. The story has something to do with a less-than-competent American spy tagging along a criminal and his hoodlums as they exfiltrate a Cuban general and plot to steal his gold, notwithstanding the local sea monster. But let’s not be too complimentary: From the very first few moments, it’s obvious that this “comedy” is going to be more incompetent than actually funny. All of the characteristics of an ultra-low-budget production are obvious from the first minutes, from the awkward dialogue, staging, acting, scenery or editing. It just gets worse afterward, with narrative and tonal zig-zags all over the place as the comedy runs out of steam and the film tries to be serious for a moment. It all falls apart quickly, and the only thing fit to help viewers make it all the way to the end is a bizarre mixture of bad-movie howlers and some genuinely funny lines and moments. You can see how, given a few more weeks, this could have become a decently entertaining comedy—but in the state it’s in, this spy/monster spoof barely makes sense: The funniest lines (and some of them do get a laugh) come from the narration, which I suspect was put together in post-production with a bit more time to polish. It’s far more entertaining than you’d suppose (the film earned a rare lowest-of-the-low “7” raking from French-Canadian reviewing authority MediaFilm), but half of it is for the wrong reason: threadbare production values, bad acting and barely coherent plotting distract rather than add to the zany concepts and a dozen funny lines.

  • Boxcar Bertha (1972)

    Boxcar Bertha (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) In many ways, Boxcar Bertha isn’t particularly remarkable: As a better-than-average production from the Roger Corman filmmaking school, it heavily draws upon Bonnie and Clyde for inspiration at it shows a depression-era couple turning to crime in between love scenes. But here’s the thing: It’s Martin Scorsese’s second feature film, his first professional feature one after his quasi-student film Who’s That Knocking at My Door. As such, it’s practically mandatory viewing for fans. But it also shows what a good director can do with familiar material: While most movies produced by Corman had trouble even settling for capable B-movie status (“crank them out fast and cheap” seem to have been his American International Pictures’ unofficial motto), Boxcar Bertha does manage to become a decent genre picture. Despite a blunt script and low production values, it’s handled with some skill and meditative intent, reflecting Scorsese’s approach to the material and destiny to execute superior genre pictures. Barbara Hershey and David Carradine also do quite well in the lead roles. I’m not sure contemporary audiences will appreciate the film as much at the 1970s one did—after all, there’s practically a 1970s “violent couple picaresque journey” subgenre by now-famous directors in between Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, arguably Beatty), Sugarland Express (Spielberg), Badlands (Malick), and Boxcar Bertha fits right into what was then New Hollywood’s most salacious appeal. Decades and a few more Natural Born Killers later, it’s not as new or invigorating as it once was. Instead, we’re left with something far different: the movies as juvenilia, interesting not as much for what they were, but what they foretold.

  • Galaxy of Terror (1981)

    Galaxy of Terror (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2019) It will probably cause physical pain to at least one cinephile if I keep comparing Galaxy of Terror to Solyaris, but how else to talk about a science-fiction film in which the alien presence literalizes thoughts out of the characters’ minds? Of course, Galaxy of Terror is an avowed SF/horror hybrid coming from Roger Corman’s low-end exploitation production company: the seemingly clever premise is really a way to string along unconnected scary scenes without much thought regarding consistency or plausibility. It’s not playing fancy or playing nice—the film’s most infamous sequence has an alien worm raping a female character, and the film’s Wikipedia entry spends almost as many words talking about that scene than detailing the plot. One of Galaxy of Terror’s few claims to a place in cinematic history is that James Cameron served as production designer and second-unit director on the film. (He didn’t direct the worm scene — Corman did.)  How you feel about the result will depend, again, on what you compare it to.   It’s more interesting than most of the slasher-horror movies of the moment, but it also feels like a terrible imitation of Alien. It does showcase Corman’s low-budget high-imagination ethos, but that’s not much of a recommendation. Ultimately, Galaxy of Terror is not likely to appeal to Science Fiction fans as much as to horror fans, given that so much of the plot is focused on the terrors rather than the galaxy.

  • Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

    Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2018) I wasn’t expecting much from Pit and the Pendulum: horror movies of the early 1960s can be undistinguishable from one another, especially given how many of them were made with small budgets and indifferent actors. But from the first few minutes, there’s something remarkable about the film’s use of colour (in an early-sixties horror film!), its confidence in using a flashback structure and, of course, in Vincent Price’s performance. Director/Producer Roger Corman became a legend for a reason, and Pit and the Pendulum remains surprisingly effective. Great sets help, as does the unusually stylish flashback cinematography. The titular pendulum and pit set is also quite good. This being said, my favourite moment in the film is the stinger at the very end, which takes barely a second to remind us that something horrible is still happening to one of the antagonists—and will keep happening for a while. It’s an amazingly good jump-conclusion to a decent horror film.

  • Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

    Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2017) I’m usually a forgiving audience for older movies—I’m getting into the mindset of forgiving the limitations of the time, and it certainly helps that what has survived until now is usually what deserves to be seen again. But even this patience has its limits, and I could feel it being tested during Little Shop of Horrors, an ultra-low-budget Roger Corman effort that seems memorable more for outrageousness than quality. Reportedly shot over two days for a paltry five-figure budget, Little Shop of Horrors makes up for its limited means through high invention: What if it was a comedy about a carnivorous plant? Of course, comedy is subjective and black comedy even more so—to me, Little Shop of Horror is more grating and mean-spirited than anything else. It is, I’ll concede, memorable: In addition to the ludicrous premise, Jack Nicholson shows up in a manic Jim Carreyesque performance as a masochistic dental client. Still, even at a running time of merely 72 minutes, the film is more of an ordeal than I had expected. Much of its contemporary popularity can be explained by how it’s in the public domain, and was later adapted as a musical and then another bigger-budget movie. As itself, though, Little Shop of Horrors is not as much fun as it could be.

  • Sharktopus (2010)

    Sharktopus (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, July 2011) There seems to be an almost unexplainable appetite among young viewers for cheap trashy monster features, and Sharktopus seems determined to exploit this fascination without shame.  Playing up the camp elements of such stories, Sharktopus mashes a shark and an octopus (well, maybe a squid) and sets in in the middle of an intensely familiar monster-movie plot.  Someone gets eaten every few minutes while the plucky adventurers go hunting for the rogue creature.  Revelling in cheap special effects, Sharktopus doesn’t rise far above its “SyFy Pictures” straight-to-cable-TV pedigree: it only looks good when compared to some of the worst abominations coming out of SciFi/Syfy.  The acting is over-the-top, the script barely shows signs of sentience, the cinematography struggles to capture the lush tropical location… and yet, Sharktopus isn’t a complete waste of time, largely because it doesn’t really take itself seriously.  It’s not a comedy, but the nature of its set-pieces is ridiculous enough to suspect that someone is clearly having some fun behind the camera.  The actors have their own charm (Eric Roberts understands that he’s there to bark, whereas Sara Malakul Lane does have, to quote another character, that “sexy librarian thing going on”) and the forward narrative rhythm of the film isn’t too bad.  Sharktopus may be trash, but it’s engaging in its own way.  For producer Roger Corman, already a legend of B-movies, this is practically second nature: deliver an exploitation movie, make it fun, make it fast and don’t worry too much about respectability.