Celebrating Corman

A special all-Roger Corman issue

Author

Chance Shirley
May 15, 2024

A black-and-white photo of Roger Corman. He’s pointing with both hands, apparently directing some on-set action.

The world lost an honest-to-goodness giant of the film industry last week when Roger Corman passed away at the age of 98.

I’m struggling to think of a figure who looms larger in the world of genre cinema than Corman. He’s been affectionately called “the king of the B’s” (as in “B” movies) and “the pope of pop cinema,” and those titles are well-earned. Much of Corman’s early work consisted of science fiction and horror movies. He knew that younger audiences of the 1950s and 1960s had a big appetite for genre movies, and he felt that the major studios of the era weren’t supplying enough horror and sci-fi flicks. So Corman stepped up. His early work as a director includes movies like The Beast With a Million Eyes, Day the World Ended, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and The Undead.

Of course, the major studios eventually caught up with Corman. These days, it seems like most big-budget movies are science fiction and fantasy movies, or at least sci-fi/fantasy adjacent. When Jaws, arguably the first modern blockbuster movie, took the world by storm, someone commented that Jaws was just a Roger Corman movie with a bigger budget. Corman took that as a compliment and proceeded to produce his own killer-fish movie, the Joe Dante-directed Piranha.

Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers, Innerspace) is one of many successful filmmakers who got his start working for Corman. Dante’s first film for Corman, Hollywood Boulevard (co-directed with Allan Arkush), is a spoof about a “B” movie production company called Miracle Pictures (“If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle”). Dante has said the shenanigans that take place in Boulevard aren’t too far removed from what went on behind the scenes of actual Corman productions.

Jaws wasn’t the only big movie that Corman hitched his wagon to. He had a hand in a couple of Star Wars-inspired space operas. Corman’s distribution company, New World Pictures, brought Starcrash to American audiences. And Corman executive produced the Seven Samurai-in-space flick Battle Beyond the Stars.

Corman produced a couple of Alien-inspired outer space horror movies in the early 1980s — Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World.

There were several undersea sci-fi movies released in 1989. James Cameron’s The Abyss was the biggest and most prestigious. DeepStar Six and Leviathan also came out in 1989. Roger Corman not only executive produced Lords of the Deep, he also has an acting cameo in it.

(James Cameron did some of his early film work for Corman, including special effects for Battle Beyond the Stars and production design for Galaxy of Terror. Cameron’s directorial debut, Piranha II: The Spawning, actually isn’t a Corman movie, even though it’s a sequel to the Corman’s Piranha. But Corman sold the sequel rights to the guys who produced Cameron’s flick.)

Roger Corman produced Death Race 2000 and released it via his New World Pictures distribution company. It’s funny and violent and one of the all-time great “B” movies. Set in a decadent and dystopian future, it plays a little like a proto-Hunger Games with race cars.

Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) also got his start with Roger Corman. Bogdanovich’s first feature for Corman, Targets, includes a late-career performance by the great Boris Karloff.

Speaking of Karloff, he starred with a young Jack Nicholson in The Terror. Corman directed the main footage for The Terror in just two days, and several other directors filmed additional footage later on. You can watch the movie on Tubi, and it’s worth checking out the movie’s Wikipedia page for details on its on-and-off production.

Corman has said that of all the movies he made, he lost money on only one, The Intruder. But he was proud of the film all the same. It stars William Shatner and takes a hard look at institutional racism in the American South of the 1960s. It’s streaming on the Roku Channel under the title Shame.

Starting in 1960, Corman made a series of popular movies based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Raven.

The Haunted Palace was billed as another Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, but it was actually based on a novella by a different old-school horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft.

The great character actor Dick Miller stars in the Corman-directed A Bucket of Blood, a horror/comedy about a demented artist.

Joseph Cotten starred in two of the arguably greatest films of all time — Citizen Kane and The Third Man. He also stars in Lady Frankenstein, a European production picked up by Corman’s New World Pictures.

X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes is sort of an inverse Invisible Man. Instead of a movie about a mad scientist who everyone can see through, this one is about a mad scientist who can see through everybody else.

According to IMDB, Roger Corman closed out his career with 493 producer credits to his name. So the above list of films barely scratches the surface. Instead of going on and on with movies Corman made, I’ll close out with a couple of documentaries about the man himself.

Finally, there’s a documentary about Corman’s never-released-yet-still-infamous Fantastic Four movie. Corman is just one of many interviewees in this one, but it’s an interesting look at one of the more obscure corners of superhero cinema.

OK, just one more thing. Here’s a link of questionable legality in case you want to watch a bootleg copy of that never-officially-released Roger Corman Fantastic Four.

Did I leave out any of your favorite Corman flicks? If so, let me know, and I’ll do my best to include them in a future issue of the newsletter.