B-movie master gets his due with ‘The Roger Corman Collection’

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Roger Corman makes cheesy films, and he’s made a lot of them. As the producer of more than 375 movies and director of 55, one could say that Corman has kept the B-movie alive for more than 50 years, churning out low-budget exploitation movies—horror flicks, monster movies, action thrillers and lurid countercultural tales.

Corman, who is still producing movies, also deserves credit for hiring some of Hollywood’s most important directors and actors at the earliest stages of their careers. He offered opportunities to Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard and James Cameron behind the camera, and Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Robert De Niro in front of it.

A DVD box set released this week, “The Roger Corman Collection” (four discs, MGM Home Entertainment, $39.98, rated R or unrated), contains eight of the films Corman produced and directed for American Independent Pictures. None of them received an Oscar nomination, but most are either a lot of fun (sometimes in a macabre way) or of a certain historical interest.

Because he operated so cheaply—shooting entire movies in days and weeks rather than months—Corman was able to respond much more quickly than the major Hollywood studios to new developments in the American cultural scene.

As is evident from this box set, Corman was one of the first filmmakers to focus on the beats, bikers, hippies, hallucinogenic drugs and the counterculture. He also was able to capitalize on someone else’s hit movie by making a much less expensive knockoff.

Here’s a quick look at the films in “The Roger Corman Collection,” in chronological order.

“A Bucket of Blood” (1959): A canny combination of comedy and horror that would have been right at home on “The Twilight Zone” (if TV in the 1950s had allowed this much gore), Corman sets his movie among beat poets and artists. An unsuccessful sculptor who works as a busboy in a beat coffeehouse, Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), is ignored by the hipsters and hep cats until he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and decides to cover up the corpse with clay. When his “Dead Cat” becomes the rage of the bohemian art world, can more ambitious “sculpture” be in Walter’s future?

“The Premature Burial” (1962): One of seven movies Corman made that were based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, this stars Ray Milland as a medical student whose greatest fear is being buried alive.

“X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes” (1963): Milland stars again for Corman, this time in a tale with a little of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in it, as well as a resemblance to movies like “The Incredible Shrinking Man” in which scientific experiments go wrong. Milland plays a scientist investigating human vision. When he loses his research funding, he tests the drug on himself and gains extraordinary powers before things take an unexpected turn.

“The Young Racers” (1963): Corman has always liked to make movies about fast cars and motorcycles (“The Wild Angels,” “Eat My Dust,” “Grand Theft Auto,” et al.), and this film, shot in Europe on the Grand Prix circuit, was one of his first.

“The Wild Angels” (1966): This is the film that established the counterculture credentials of both Corman and his star Peter Fonda, who plays a Southern California Hells Angels leader. (By the time of the 1969 Altamont concert fiasco, the Angels didn’t look so cool to the counterculture anymore.) Another child of a Hollywood icon, Nancy Sinatra, played Fonda’s main squeeze.

The movie made a lot of money—according to J. Hoberman’s “The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties,” it took in more than $5 million during the summer of 1966, having cost only $350,000 to make. In many ways, one can see Fonda’s path-breaking 1969 movie “Easy Rider” as the direct result of his work for Corman in this film and “The Trip.”

“The Trip” (1967): One of the essential 1960s films to look at the popularity of psychedelic drugs, this stars Peter Fonda as a young man who takes his first LSD trip under the tutelage of Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper. Nicholson, who had appeared in eight Corman movies, wrote the screenplay. The movie itself is full of groovy colors, far-out designs, distorted images, tinted lenses and kaleidoscopic views.

Made for $400,000, “The Trip” took in more than $4 million within a year of its release, according to Corman biographer Beverly Gray.

“Bloody Mama” (1970): Following the huge success of Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” Corman made this Depression-era film about the Ma Barker Gang. As with many of his films, there’s plenty of gratuitous violence and nudity to appeal to drive-in and “grindhouse” movie audiences.

Shelley Winters delivers an over-the-top performance as the ruthless gang leader who has plenty of love for her four boys (including De Niro as the drug-addled Lloyd Barker) and a unique perspective on robbing banks. For Ma, “It was God’s will: If he didn’t want us to have that money, he wouldn’t have left it for us in that bank.”

“Gas-s-s-s!” (1970): With a subtitle adapted from the still-raging Vietnam War and “Dr. Strangelove”—“Or It Became Necessary To Destroy the World in Order To Save It,” Corman creates an America in which a deadly gas developed by the Pentagon accidentally kills off everyone in the world over age 25. What’s left is a struggle, set in the Southwest, between peaceful hippies (including Talia Coppola, Ben Vereen and Cindy Williams) and fascistic football players. With Country Joe & The Fish contributing the music, it’s one of Corman’s most anti-establishment films.

“The Roger Corman Collection” DVD set contains few bonus features, but it does include an audio commentary by Corman on “The Trip” and an interview with the director-producer about “The Premature Burial.”

Two other Corman films will be released next week by Buena Vista Home Entertainment: “The Intruder,” from 1962, a movie about racism and school desegregation starring William Shatner, which Corman produced and directed; and “Eat My Dust,” from 1976, which Corman produced and Ron Howard stars in as a teenager who steals a race car. (As part of their deal, Corman then let Howard direct his first movie, the Corman-produced “Grand Theft Auto,” in 1977.)

Finally, we need to mention another DVD released this week—“Alligator”—that’s not by Corman but fits in easily with his, ahem, oeuvre (Lionsgate, $14.98, rated R). The 1980 monster movie takes off from the urban legend that in the 1950s and `60s, pet baby alligators were flushed down toilets and then grew large and dangerous in the sewers of American cities.

“Alligator” was written by John Sayles, who went on to become one of America’s leading independent filmmakers (“Brother From Another Planet,” “Eight Men Out,” “Lone Star”) but got his start writing screenplays for Corman’s New World Pictures, beginning in 1978 with “Piranha.” Like “Piranha,” “Alligator”—made two years later by director Lewis Teague—was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”

Sayles acknowledges the debt to Spielberg’s film in an interview included with the DVD. And the film uses the “Jaws” technique of initially showing potential victims from the beast’s point of view and telegraphing an impending attack with similar foreboding music.

Starring Robert Forster as a police detective who first suspects that a giant gator is on the loose, “Alligator” is, to Sayles, “a fish-out-of-water story—the bayou alligator comes to the city.”

Yes, it could have been a Roger Corman film.