Jun 07 2009
The Roger Corman Collection (Review)
THE ROGER CORMAN COLLECTION
Roger Corman is considered to be the king of B-movies. He’s produced over 300 movies, many of them on low budgets, and made bank on most of them. The Roger Corman Collection is comprised of eight films he did double duty on by being both a producer and a director. Now don’t be confused by the title. This is NOT the best of Roger Corman’s work. It doesn’t include The Pit and the Pendulum or Death Race 2000. This box is more or less a collection of Corman’s more cult films, some of which have been out of print for years. It’s also an eye opening experience as it features some of the early and later works of such celebrities as Peter Fonda and Shelly Winters.
Gas-s-s-s plays like a Mad Max for hippies. Some sort of gas is released on the world that kills everyone over the age of 25. This leads to a bunch of crazy hippie kids going on a road trip to find utopia which leads them to discovering different people and societies born of the new anarchy. The biggest problem with the movie is the gags that range from painfully obvious social satire to just downright bad jokes. At one point a girl says she’ll eat till she explodes and she actually does explode. Some of the gags are kind of clever, but there is nothing here that actually made me laugh. Unless of course you count the laughter of how bad the jokes were.
The Trip is just that; a drug trip. Peter Fonda does some LSD and we get to witness everything he sees. His visions are quite visually stunning with some interesting camera work and effects. The acting is okay with a good cast including Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper, but the story is very disjointed which I guess was the intent of the film to make it feel like a real drug trip. It’s an interesting exercise in special effects and editing, but don’t be expecting more than that. Otherwise your head will explode at trying to comprehend the ending. It should be worth noting that the film was written by Jack Nicholson.
The Young Riders combines character drama with stockcar racing in an uneven fashion. Two rivals face off against each other in both racing and love. This is certainly Corman’s safest films as the characters are likable and the story holds together. However, that’s also the biggest flaw of the movie; it’s too safe. The characters are too likable to point of being boring and the story is too safe that it is incredibly slow considering it’s an 81 minute movie. The best thing the movie has going for it are the racing scenes which are very well-shot. I’m talking Grand Prix good. But unlike Grand Prix, The Young Riders doesn’t feature nearly as much racing.
The Wild Angels could be seen as the lesser remake of Easy Rider considering they both star Peter Fonda as a biker punk, except for the fact that this movie was made three years prior. The Hells Angels break one of their own out of the hospital and later hold a funeral in his honor in which they trash a church. While not as great as Easy Rider, it’s a pretty good movie for what it is. And what it is happens to be an exploitation movie with some bizarre acting by Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Dianne Ladd and Bruce Dern. In other words, it’s a bad movie, but an entertaining bad movie.
Bloody Mama is one big star-studded mess of a movie. Shelley Winters plays Ma Barker, the mother of a couple of rednecks boys, one played by Robert DeNiro. They tour the country robbing, raping, and murdering during the Great Depression. It’s hard to enjoy this movie because the characters are so darn unlikable especially in a scene where they rape and drown a girl. The film isn’t a total loss as there are some classics cars of the depression era, an interesting scene with a victim questioning one of the Barker boys, and the final shootout is pretty well-shot. It’s just too bad everything else in the film is hard to watch.
A Bucket of Blood shines as the best movie of the set considering it’s the earliest (1959), the shortest (61 minutes), and the only black and white movie in the collection. Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is a nervous, social wreck of a busboy working in a Bohemian café. Desperate to be an accepted artist, he becomes popular when he starts murdering people and covering them in clay to be passed off as sculptures. A very effective dark comedy with some good acting, hilarious writing and twice as hilarious dated beatnik slang which only makes the film better. It’s kind of like House of Wax meets Color Me Blood Red.
The Premature Burial is one of Corman’s better productions from his series of films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. A painter/medical student called Guy (Ray Milland) becomes obsessed with being buried alive that he builds a special tomb. It’s well-shot, beautifully lit, incredibly well-acted, the sets are impressive, and it feels like a genuine classic horror film. In comparison to the other Edgar Allen Poe films Corman made (The Raven and The House of Usher) this is certainly the weakest considering it doesn’t star Vincent Price, but the film is still quite good with a great performance by Ray Milland.
X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes has cheesy Twilight Zone episode written all over it. Dr. Xavier (Ray Milland) stumbles upon a chemical giving him X-ray vision as well as causing progressive insanity. It’s very cheesy in how he goes about using his power to see naked people, become a freak show attraction, become a psychic healer, and cheat at blackjack. However, the film keeps your attention and the special effects aren’t half bad. Not to mention there is a fantastic cameo by Don Rickles in the role of a scam artist. It’s still a B-movie, but it’s an extremely well-made B-movie.
The bulk of the extras focus on The Trip. Corman shares lots of insight in the Tune in, Trip out featurette about why he made The Trip even going so far as to sharing his acid trip visions. This is balanced by Bruce Dern’s insights about how he didn’t buy into the drug culture. Corman’s audio commentary track for The Trip helps explain just what the heck is going on in the film. In some odd, crazy way, his analysis of filming a drug trip actually makes some sense. The featurette ‘Psychedelic Film Effects’ is an interview with the special effects artist Allen Daviav on the making of the various lighting and editing techniques used in The Trip. Very fascinating stuff considering how much work and knowledge of photography it took to make those effects. X: The Man with the X-Ray eyes also features an audio commentary, though not quite as insightful as The Trip. There is also an interview with Roger Corman on the making of The Premature Burial. Again, this is a very interesting listen proving that Corman knows his stuff when it comes to directing.
Overall, this is strictly a movie geek only set as these eight films are definitely not for everyone. I’d only recommend picking it up if you’re really into exploitation and B-movies or if you’ve just got to own every Roger Corman film.
