Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (Anchor Bay) profiles Roger Corman, the legendary director and producer who helped launch the careers of some of the greatest actors and filmmakers of the last five decades.

Alex Stapleton’s documentary is an entertaining, zippy tour through his career, framed with behind-the-scenes footage from the production of Dinoshark, one of his SyFy Channel original films, and an affectionate portrait of the most unlikely filmmaking rebel of his time (“I was probably the straightest guy in a pretty wild movement,” he says of his relationship to the counterculture). And if it doesn’t offer anything new to our understanding of Corman, as filmmaker, producer, or person, it nicely encapsulates his legacy and his philosophy and reminds us just how savvy and thoughtful a filmmaker he was and is. Even while making films like Dinoshark.

This is the second theatrical documentary feature about Corman—the first, Hollywood’s Wild Angel,was made almost 35 years ago (which alone gives an idea of the scope of his career)—and it appears to borrow some archival interviews from that film to mix in with new interviews from the likes of Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Pam Grier, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, and a lot of other folks. William Shatner talks about making “The Intruder” (the only Corman film to ever lose money?). Polly Platt tells us that Corman offered her a chance to direct if she wanted to. And Nicholson tears up recalling just how many opportunities that Corman gave him in his formative years.

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Space opera on a budget

When Star Wars became the smash hit of 1977 by turning B-movie adventure into big-budget spectacle, drive-in mogul Roger Corman saw the writing across the stars. The producer and former director had made his share of drive-in science fiction and space adventures, but they had all been cobbled out of spare parts and imaginative art direction, with simple miniatures and animation providing the space ships. Now Hollywood was moving in on his brand of genre filmmaking and action fantasies with budgets he couldn’t match and he needed to raise his game to meet them.

Battle Beyond the Stars was Corman’s answer to the new Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster. The script is from John Sayles, whose screenwriting apprenticeship came from such Corman productions as Piranha and The Lady in Red, with a story credit shared with Anne Dyer, but the concept was from Corman himself: “The Seven Samurai in Space,” with a few hints of Star Wars tossed in around the edges. Richard Thomas, fresh off six seasons of the folksy family TV drama The Waltons, plays the film’s innocent, idealistic hero Shad. He’s Luke Skywalker by way of John-Boy, a farmboy on a peaceful agrarian planet that looks like a counter-culture commune in ancient Greek garb. When the vicious warlord Sador (John Saxon) brings soldiers and his answer to the Death Star to their planet and gives them seven days to surrender, Shad sets out in a talking space ship (in the tradition of referring to vessels in the feminine, this one quite literally has a voluptuous pair of breasts protruding from the bow) to hire a fighting force of mercenaries to defend themselves from the invasion.

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Action Packed Double Feature: Fighting Mad/Moving Violation (Shout! Factory)

Jonathan Demme wrote and directed Fighting Mad (1976), his third feature, for producer Roger Corman but it was actually produced for 20^th Century Fox, which makes the film his studio debut. It’s not his best film by far but this mix of vigilante/revenge movie and eco-conscious stand against corruption makes for an inspired twist on a familiar genre. Peter Fonda is an easy-going Arkansas framer who stands up to the corporate criminal who has his thugs intimidate, harass and murder local landowners who refuse to sell out to his strip-mining concern. They kill his brother (Scott Glenn, gone way too soon from a film that could use his understated strength) and pregnant sister-in-law and murder an inconvenient state judge who gets in the way of their agenda and the drawling sheriff seems to be in the back pocket of the corporation as he backs their rights to plunder the land of local farmer.

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Coppola's debut feature

Dementia 13 and The Terror (Film Chest)

Film Chest launched its line of Blu-ray editions of public domain titles a couple of months ago with versions of The Stranger and Kansas City Confidential. This duo would have been a better launch. Whereas there already existed superior MGM editions of the first two on DVD (they are still better than the Blu-ray editions), this release of Francis Coppola’s Dementia 13 and Roger Corman’s The Terror on Blu-ray+DVD Combo Pack is a definite improvement over the best existing editions I’d seen on the market.

Francis Coppola (before adding the Ford) shot Dementia 13 (1963), his first “official” feature, for Roger Corman in Ireland on $20,000 seed money, using finagled locations and underpaid actors (William Campbell, Luana Anders, Bart Patton, Mary Mitchell) to flesh out a Psycho knock-off about a of an axe-murderer in an Irish castle (he reportedly wrote the script in three nights!). It’s a bit murky, to be sure, but in the best Corman tradition Coppola creates some stunning images from limited resources. He goes his mentor one better with a few shocking, startling moments of axe-wielding violence using jagged cuts and the darkness to suggest what he can’t show. Patrick Magee brings a little class to a couple of scenes, but the rest of the film (at least between the padding) is carried by shock and B-movie ingenuity.

The previous DVD edition from Roan, until now the best version out there, was fine but grainy and full screen. This widescreen edition, while a little soft  is cleaner, steadier and stronger overall, with more impressive B&W contrast. And the 16×9 image simply looks more accurate than the TV-print style of the previous full screen presentation.

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Dinoshark (Anchor Bay)

Corman does SyFy

Before Roger Corman pushed the SyFy Channel sea monster splicing sweepstakes into pure absurdity with Sharktopus and Dinocroc vs. Supergator, he produced this much more mundane breed of killer shark. Starring Eric Balfour (the star of Skyline – I’m sure which production that speaks less of) is the shaggy, free-spirit hero here, a scuba diver on hard times who moves into a friend’s boat on the coast of Mexico just as a prehistoric shark (preserved in arctic ice and set free by global warming) moves into the local waters to snack on vacationers. Balfour and co-star Iva Hasperger do have a decent rapport and the score is actually kind of fun, with Mexican guitar riffs worked into suspense themes and a few sly quotes of John Williams’ Jaws theme periodically snuck in. But the mayhem is never wildly inventive enough to distract from the dull script and general familiarity of it all. This is one film that could use a jolt of high camp.

Directed by visual effects veteran turned prehistoric monster movie specialist Kevin O’Neill (his other director credit is Dinocroc – see a pattern emerging?), it lacks the wit, weird twists and goofy stunt casting of Corman’s better SyFy originals. Dinoshark can leap through the air like a dolphin at a water park and grabs humans out of the air (even paragliding and flying in helicopters), but that’s about as outrageous as it gets. And the race to save a team of teenage water polo players, followed by the shark’s migration to the playground of Puerto Vallarta’s beaches, is cribbed right out of the original Piranha, a seventies Corman production. Give the man his Green credentials: he recycles everything.

On DVD and Blu-ray, with commentary by producers Roger and Julie Corman with director Kevin O’Neill.

Read about Mongolian Death Worm at MSN Videodrone

Half-shark. Half octopus. All killer. Total nonsense.

“You just unleashed an eight-legged, man-eating shark on the world!”
“A minor setback.”

Absurdly-titled, cheaply produced and executed with tongue firmly in cheek (because it’s just too hard to take it seriously), this made-for-cable film is another in the “Roger Corman Presents” line of B-movie creature features made for the SyFy Channel. Eric Roberts is the token name actor on hard times recruited to give the film a pose of legitimacy and he hams it up with a half smirk that at least suggests he’s having a good time.

“Sharktopus” opens on the title creature (tag line: “Half-shark. Half octopus. All killer.”) already sluicing through the waters off the California coast, a genetic hybrid designed for the Defense Department in a hush-hush program by modern mad scientist Nathan Sands (Roberts), head honcho of the knowingly-titled Bluewater. Trouble begins when it slips off its electronic collar and goes on a killing spree, thanks to a little genetic tinkering to up the aggressiveness of the ridiculous creature. While his brainy scientist daughter (Sara Malakul Lane, a sexy Thailand celebrity in a pair of librarian glasses) teams up with a frat-boy of a mercenary (Kerem Bursin) to subdue the creature (“But don’t kill it,” demands Nathan), a journalist rushes to scoop the rest of the media world with an exclusive and lots of bystanders get manhandled, torn asunder and bitten in half, all within the bounds of Saturday night TV boundaries. Roger Corman, the man known as the King of the Bs, has successfully remade himself into the most popular producer of PG-rated creature features for the SyFy Channel.

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Big Bad Mama / Big Bad Mama II Double Feature (Shout! Factory)
Crazy Mama / The Lady In Red Double Feature (Shout! Factory)

One of the less recognized genres that director/producer/indie-exploitation movie mogul Roger Corman adopted as a minor specialty was the depression-era gangster movie. As a director he turned out Machine Gun Kelly (1958), The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) and (most importantly for the purposes of this piece) Bloody Mama (1970), his perversely Oedipal take on the Ma Barker story with Shelley Winters as the machine gun mama leading her sons through a bank-robbing spree and keeping them a little too close for comfort on their days off.

Angie Dickinson in the driver's seat of "Big Bad Mama"

Jump ahead a few years and Corman, now retired from directing to run his own independent studio, turns back to the period gangster thriller with a femme-centric twist (which proved so effective in Boxcar Bertha, the 1972 feature he produced for AIP and with an up-and-coming young filmmaker at the helm taking first shot at directing a real Hollywood film: Martin Scorsese). Bloody Mama and Boxcar Bertha are the two godmothers of the four films featured in a pair of double features from Shout! Factory, including three that carried on the legacy of Corman’s gangster Mamas: all previously available but newly remastered for posterity presented at good prices.

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Galaxy of Terror / Forbidden World (Shout! Factory)

I love to see classic movies debut on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously. Even when they are low-budget exploitation drive-in movies? Hell, especially when they are low-budget exploitation drive-in movies.

Okay, that’s a little oversold, but yeah, I like seeing Blu-ray editions of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Death Race 2000. The point of Blu-ray is not to see flawless images. It’s about getting the most accurate representation of the original film experience that you can get at home. These editions deliver just that, complete with all the flaws that opening night audiences saw intact. What we see is likely a better presentation than those theatrical runs, thanks to home theater sound and perfect projection (no slopping reel changes or out of focus images for us), but they preserve the texture of those prints and remind us that imperfect production quality often has its own charms. They look handmade by real people, not manufactured digitally and scrubbed clear of individuality.

The all-star crew: Robert Englund, Zalman King, Edward Albert, Ray Waltson and Erin Moran

Thus I celebrate the minor cinematic glories and the major exploitation movie pleasures Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World, a double feature of Alien knock-offs produced by Roger Corman and his New World Studios in the early eighties, as they make their respective DVD and Blu-ray debuts from Shout! Factory, a label whose dedication to the strange and wonderful (and sometimes simply kitschy) cultural artifacts of the recent past is something else. Not because they are great films (they aren’t, even by the most generous stretch of the imagination) but because they are entertaining pieces from a distinctive period of B-movie filmmaking, as weirdly fun and perversely creative in their own exploitative way as kindred films from the forties and fifties and sixties.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll High School: 30th Anniversary Special Edition (Shout! Factory)

If Rock ‘n’ Roll High School isn’t the greatest rock and rebellion film of all time, it is certainly in the running, a pure, cheerfully juvenile blast of blitzkrieg guitar rock, Looney Tunes sight gags, teenage hormones and rebellion against authority because it’s there. They aren’t exactly rebels without a cause, it’s just that their cause is music and fun and the celebration of power punk rockers The Ramones, who in this universe play the rock anthems of the day. At the risk of dating myself, when I discovered the film playing in heavy rotation on HBO, I was in the high school that alternative music culture forgot and had no idea who the Ramones were (or even what punk music really was) but responded to the four-square rock anthems in three chords and double time the way I responded to Chuck Berry: the essence of the rock and roll. That’s what director Allan Arkush responded to as well. Various stories tell of producer Roger Corman’s bright idea to do a “Disco High School” movie (Arkush talked him out of that one) and of his preference to hire Cheap Trick as the featured band (too expensive, it turned out). And who knows, the stories may be true, or just more Corman musings that were never destined to actually go anywhere but make for great copy. What is definitely true is that Arkush wanted to try his hand at a rock and roll movie, an American A Hard Day’s Night with a B-movie budget, a California culture setting and an anything goes comic sensibility. It turned out that the Ramones were on the same page.

Do ya wanna dance? Riff and the Ramones rock the halls

Thirty years later, the Ramones are part of my playlist and the film remains as energetic, endearing and fun as ever, not so much a dated artifact from my g-g-g-generation as a timeless slice of teenage kicks and a cartoon of youthquake rebellion against the killjoys of authority. While the seminal New York power punk band provides the beat, P.J. Soles powers the film as Riff Randell, rock and roller and aspiring songwriter who just wants to spread the gospel of rock music. Mary Woronov is her arch nemesis Miss Togar, the new high school principal whose controlling personality and authoritarian streak makes Nurse Ratched look soft and sweet. Where Soles literally dances her way through the film, swinging and swaying done the halls and barely able to keep still in class, Woronov is a drill sergeant in a skirt and a pinched expression who sends her toadying team of storm trooper hall monitors (imagine Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan in these roles) to tell on anyone who dares have any fun under her watch.

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Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels took the outlaw culture of the biker movie into nervy, nihilistic territory. Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda) presides over a chapter of Hell’s Angles, a gang of disaffected drop-outs and scruffy road rats who live to ride in packs and parade their colors (black leather, mostly, adorned with swastikas and Iron Crosses) as a show of defiance to the establishment.

The film branded Fonda as a counterculture icon, but his lanky aloofness and arrogant disdain for the establishment masks an alienated, empty soul flailing at every authority figure just to provoke some sort of sensation. Nancy Sinatra’s thigh-boots were made for straddling a chopper and she is all hipster attitude as Blues’ chick, Mike. Sinatra is a wooden actress, but there’s a nervousness and fear of abandonment behind her vague expression which puts Fonda’s cool posturing into perspective.

Real members of the Venice chapter of Hell’s Angels fill out the gang and provide the stunt riding, which helps give the film its rough and ready character, but it’s the anarchy of this gang and the chaos they leave in their wake that makes it so memorable.

They are truly rebels without a cause, a tribal gang that we watch devolve into primitive savagery in the wake of the death of their beloved brother, the Loser (Bruce Dern in a swaggering performance of breezy disobedience). It’s not malevolence that makes them dangerous, but apathy and amorality. They just don’t care who gets hurt in their search for the next thrill.

“We wanna be free!,” demands Blues in a rambling eulogy turned incoherent (anti-)statement of purpose. “We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! And we wanna get loaded! And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party.”

The empty eulogy becomes an epigraph for a defiant anti-establishment rebellion fallen into decadence and anarchy and Heavenly Blues proceeds to preside over the desecration of a church and the systematic trampling of every boundary of decency that Corman could push past censors in 1966. The Wild Angels becomes a portrait of emptiness and hostility, a social revolution spiraling into narcissism and self-destruction.

Director/producer Roger Corman was more than a B-movie legend. From 1955 to the late ’60s, he was America’s most prolific low-budget director, and he grew more ambitious and more inventive throughout the decade. The eight features in this box set, on four two-sided flipper discs in four thinpak cases, collect many of his best films, two of them making their DVD debut here. The most notable is Bloody Mama (1970), his wickedly weird twist on the “Bonnie and Clyde” outlaw gangster picture, with Shelley Winters as Ma Barker, who loves her demented sons so much she sometimes sleeps with them. Don Stroud and Robert De Niro are two of Ma Barker’s boys, and Bruce Dern, Pat Hingle and Diane Varsi co-star. Previously released but even more essential are Corman’s notorious biker classic The Wild Angels (1966) and the quintessential 1960s head film The Trip (1967), written by Jack Nicholson and starring Fonda as a burned-out TV director who drops acid under the protective watch of Dern and Dennis Hopper. The trippiest film of the bunch is Corman’s hippy apocalypse Gas-s-s-s (1970), a groovy satirical road movie set in a future where everyone over 25 is killed by an experimental weapon, and a group of peace-loving hippies goes looking for utopia amidst the fashionable fascists that have taken root. It was his last film for his longtime studio home, AIP, because it (along with “The Trip” and “Bloody Mama” before it) was re-edited behind his back.

The DVD pictured above is actually out of print, but you can still get it on a biker double feature with Hell’s Belles and in the 5-disc, 10-film Roger Corman Collectionbox set, an odd collection that includes Corman’s other great counter-culture classics The Trip and Gas-s-s, his perverse take on the Ma Barker story Bloody Mama, and his great black comedy A Bucket of Blood.

I reviewed the box set for MSN.

Read the entire review here.