Rock 'n' Roll High School

1979 high school musical

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Thanks to rock 'n' roll, the students at Vince Lombardi High School have no interest in obeying the rules or getting an education. After yet another principal has a nervous breakdown, the school board hires Ms. Togar to clean things up and make the school a place of learning. Her agenda conflicts with student Riff Randell, a big fan of punk rockers The Ramones.

This punksploitative teenage comedy's got less laughs than Fast Times at Ridgemont's High, but at least it's got Clint Howard and The Ramones. The Ramones, by the way, display some terrific acting chops. Dee Dee Ramone was so bad that his lines were reduced to "Alright! The pizza's here!" but I can't imagine he's much worse than Joey Ramone who mumbles unintelligibly during his scenes. They get their chance to perform a ton of songs though, so if you're a fan, this is worth checking out. A couple of the songs work like music videos, especially during their first appearance when they show up in their "tour bus," a convertible in which they sit like only punk rockers could. There's also quite a bit of concert footage, and you've got to love a band with a lead singer who needs subtitles for the lyrics. Despite the solid analogy comparing punk rock haters to Nazis with the calling of Principal Togar's plan the "Final Solution," this is really like cartoon punk, almost like Disney decided to make a punk rock movie. Other than The Ramones, the characters aren't especially memorable, and the humor falls completely flat in this low-budget flick. Roger Corman produced.

The Intruder

1962 drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: William Shatner arrives in a small southern town where school integration has just become the law. People of the town don't like it much, but most have decided that there's not much they can do about it. Until The Shat comes along, that is. He pontificates the crowds into a lather, inciting violent acts and threatening behavior against the blacks.

If this movie was better known (it was the only movie Roger Corman made that lost money according to the dvd box), Shatner's villain is the kind of character that could have ruined his career. Just seeing Captain Kirk admire a burning cross or riding (sans white hood) in a convertible with three Ku-Klux-Klan guys made him despicable enough, but he's so slimy in other scenes that have nothing to do with racism, too. I wish I could type with confidence that the character and the actions he ignites in this dumpy town with these dumpy people are exaggerated, but it's an unfortunate and embarrassing part of our American history. At times, it's almost like a Cliff Notes version of the segregation/integration issue, but it's still a ballsy movie, especially for the early 60s. I imagine that if the same exact movie came out today, and I wouldn't be as impressed, but there's just something cool about a movie coming out at this time where the clear line between the good guys and bad guys pretty much separates the white characters from the black ones respectively. Even the white characters who end up doing right things are flawed enough to make them less than heroic. The score's powerful with its driving horns, and there's an intense denouement that, if not entirely satisfying nevertheless works very well, leaving things as open-ended as they probably were at the time. Good movie.

The Wasp Woman

1959 Roger Corman sci-fi monster movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Janice Starlin, the owner and face of a cosmetics company, worries about declining profits and her waning beauty. Lucky for her, she meets Dr. Zinthrop at exactly the right time. He's discovered a fountain of youth only its not a fountain at all but a "powerful royal jelly" extracted from wasp jism or something. It works on rats, then on cats, and finally on Janice Starlin. Starlin becomes obsessed with her refound beauty. But are there side effects she doesn't know about? Like turning into a wasp woman and biting people? Oh, snap!

This starts really strong with what seems like a poorly-shot documentary on beekeepers. Yeah, this thing hits you with a barrage of cheapness from shot one and doesn't let up. You get one of those wonderful character-wrestling-with-something-stuffed scenes (a cat, in this instance) that I've grown to love, the same art work hanging on walls in two different settings (an office and an apartment), and one of the goofiest monster costumes you'll ever see. There's a lot of pseudo-technical jibber-jabber that confounded. Most confounding, however, were a pair of scenes where I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. In one [SPOILER ALERT], the scientist, right after he's been attacked by a stuffed cat, staggers off a sidewalk and gets struck by a car. Why does getting attacked by a cat make a person forget to look both ways before crossing a street? The other scene is when the scientist is showing off his creation to Susan Cabot's character. He injects a rat, puts it in a cage, and then talks for a while so that the audience can't see the rat. When the camera shows the rat again, it's a little bit smaller. Later, it's even smaller. I couldn't figure out what that meant. Does the royal jelly injection lead to youth or dimunitiveness? There are a handful of scenes that make this kind of fun, but a completely maddening soundtrack that makes it almost painful in chunks. It would also be painful to anybody bothered by poor editing and storytelling, of course. And anybody who, like me, is left with a desire to have a sexual encounter with the wasp woman, a desire you know will lead to numerous sleepless nights. Susan Cabot made for an attractive wasp woman. Still, I wouldn't have been able to control my own royal jelly if Sebastian Cabot had starred as the wasp woman.

Bucket of Blood

1959 delightful beatnik black comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Walter Paisley, an awkward loser, longs to be artsy-fartsy like the beatnik clientele of the Yellow Door Cafe where he works as a busboy. He buys himself some clay, sculpts a gray blob, and stabs his cat. When he's able to turn that feline tragedy into his first artistic masterpiece, he becomes a sensation around the Yellow Door, and the patrons begin to demand more.

More twisted fun from Roger Corman, this one, with its accidental kittycide and grotesque sculptures, also works as a biting satire of the art world. The production's cheap and, I'm guessing, quick, but they made the most of their limited time and monies. The beatnik stuff really dates this, but almost in a good way. I really liked the cool beatnik poet character Maxwell Brock (played by Julian Burton who was in The Masque of Red Death with Vincent Price), over-the-top and every bit of pretentious as he reads poems about ringing rubber bells and beating cotton gongs or saying profound things like "Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art." Paisley's sculptures, any which would look great in my living room, are really cool. I'd describe them, but it'd spoil things. Bucket of Blood is well-paced thriller and purposely funny, some of the darkest funny you might ever see. And the fact that it accidentally has something to say about creation and the art world along the way makes it even more worth the time. Oh, and ironically, I'm not sure there's any blood in this movie at all. And I don't remember seeing a bucket either.

Gas-s-s-s or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It

1971 hippie fest

Rating: 11/20 (Mark: 13/20; Amy: 12/20)

Plot: A bunch of (probably smelly) people fight for survival after a poisonous gas kills everybody over the age of 25.

An anarchic mess of a movie with a psychedelic clash of ideas, like acid-baked concert poster mash-ups, and a sloppy soundtrack, Gas-s-s-s is one of those movies that I really wanted to like but couldn't. It's packed with ideas and all kinds of things to look at. But like a lot of movies like this (I type that knowing that there really aren't a lot of movies like this), it actually suffers from having way too many ideas and things to look at. The humor's goofily dated, and there's just not anything for the typical viewer (and I consider myself 100% typical) to grasp on to. It was like I'd been put on a roller coaster that was falling apart and told that I couldn't hold on to the rail thing or I'd have to start the ride over again. The guy next to me liked the ride a little more than I did, but at least I didn't drink and vomit up an extra-large cherry Slushie and something called a "jumbo dog" like the guy behind me. This is a product of the rebellious early-70s, probably more interesting as a counter-culture relic than as a cult classic. It's probably a must for Roger Corman or Bud Cort fans though. Speaking of the latter--as I continue in my quest to see every Roger Corman movie (bet you didn't even know that was even a quest!), I continue to be amazed by the guy's versatility. And even if his movies aren't always good, they are almost always interesting and worth watching. Gas-s-s-s is, too, but its potential is unfortunately wasted by a half-assed pseudo-absurdist script and no-budget aesthetics. It's also a movie I'll never discuss with anybody because a) nobody has seen it and b) I don't want to try pronouncing the title. Gas-s-s-s. I'm afraid I'd accidentally put an extra couple s's in there.

Teenage Caveman

1958 Corman clunker

Rating: 5/20

Plot: A twenty-something-year-old teenage caveman with a stylish haircut breaks his tribes rules by venturing beyond the river, meeting dangerous creatures and putting his people at risk. Oh, snap!

Teenage Caveman is a crappy movie, made with a budget of ten dollars and fourteen cents and a director who apparently had a time frame of four and a half days. Most people, I reckon, are going to be offended because Robert Vaughn as the "teenage" caveman has better hair than them. I didn't realize cavemen used hair products. Corman makes an attempt to give this some depth. There's all this talk about the three gifts to man that had me scratching my head, and there's a pretty nifty twist ending that, if you decide to see this, I might have ruined for you just by telling you there's a twist ending. There's also a classic Corman monster, one that rivals the muppet from Creature from the Haunted Sea. Heck, given the amount of footage that seems lifted straight from other crappy movies, Corman might actually have used the same monster. This probably isn't a B-movie I'd recommend to B-movie aficionados.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

1963 science fiction horror film

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A scientist experiments with eye drops that temporarily give the owner of the eyeballs x-ray vision. Of course, there are some negative consequences. Otherwise, there wouldn't even be a movie.

Pretty typical sci-fi B-flick stuff but with some of that Roger Corman magic, a bit of visual flair and some wild ideas. This couldn't be more obvious thematically, but I can forgive that because the movie's fun, from the opening shot of a disembodied eyeball to the final chilling shot of the titular (come on!) character hanging with some religious folk. Ray Milland is good in the lead role. I really liked the costume he wore when he started working for a carnival, a colorful get-up that includes a scarf with an eye drawn on it worn over his actual eyes. I recognized Harold J. Stone who I recently saw as a detective in The Wrong Man. The biggest surprise, however, is seeing Don Rickles as a carnival barker. When you make over three hundred movies, you're bound to develop a good eye, and Corman shows off his in a few scenes of this movie, one with an injured girl and a well-placed scarf and another with Rickles looking through a window. The weirdo effects used to give the audience Dr. Xaviar's perspective looks a little dopey and don't make complete sense, but it's effective in giving his story a different flavor. I also like an effect where the camera zoomed through Milland's head after he used the eye drops for the first time. This has a good score, especially the song at the opening, and that ending really is pretty shocking. My wife was in the room and had to turn her head.

Creature from the Haunted Sea

1961 monster and gangster comedy (I guess)

Rating: 5/20

Plot: "The most astounding adventure ever afflicted upon man." At least that's what the narrator told me. American gangster Renzo, for reasons that I never completely understood, finds himself on a boat with his posse and a handful of Cubans and the Cuban National Treasury. He decides to unload the Cubans one-by-one and blame it on a sea creature that, according to legend, roams the waters. He doesn't realize that a very real muppet is roaming the waters and helping him in his task.

Another Corman picture, one in which Roger really takes the piss. There was no way they worked on this for more than a week, probably while they were still writing the script. I knew I was in for something goofy while watching the animated credits during which a ridiculously harmlesss sea thing runs comically across the screen. But I still didn't realize this was even a comedy until it just got to the point where it was too ludicrous not to be one. The gangsters meet the Cubans in a rainforest after they drive to the destination in a convertible, a limo, and a Volkswagon bus. For about five minutes, I couldn't figure out what was going on because I couldn't understand what anybody was saying thanks to bad sound and thick accents. I did catch a character say, "Do you understand?" which made me answer back "No, not at all." I really need to stop talking to the movies I watch. Then some things happen and a Volkswagon bug comes along and there's a chase scene through the jungle that makes that chase scene in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull look like high art. I was still clueless, but then they ended up on the boat and everything calmed down a little bit. I had to pause the movie to take a breath. Dopiness abounds in this one. Nothing about the plot really makes that much sense. You have a CIA agent (also the narrator) working undercover with the gangsters, but he never seems to be invited to their meetings. He listens at the door, narrates that he can't understand anything that they're saying, and then is seen listening at the door anyway for several subsequent scenes anyway. He also says, "But my real name is XK150," at one point which is interesting because I almost named one of my children that. Another enlightening bit of narration: "It was dusk; I could tell because the sun was going down." None of the other characters make sense either. Renzo is pretty much a low-budget Bogart, something like a Humphrey clone that went horribly wrong and was discarded in a dumpster outside the laboratory but Corman came along and decided to use him anyway. Speaking of Bogie, there's a gang member called Happy Jack Manahan who is supposed to perpetually smile because of muscle spasms from too many Bogart pictures. I don't even know what that means, but I do know the character doesn't even smile that much in the movie. The most nonsensical character, and the character who represented the moment when Corman's tongue actually penetrated his cheek and wiggled freely in the air, was a guy whose dialogue was mostly animal imitations including "the mating call of the Himalayan Yak." The characters forget each other's names, run into each other, and butcher their lines, all things that would make an ordinary director yell "Cut!" But Corman is no ordinary director! The excellent Fred Katz (Little Shop of Horrors) provides some interesting music that at times clashes with what you see on the screen. And I haven't even talked about the frightening monster yet!



Hell yeah! I would have expected this thing to steal my cookies rather than feel in danger because of it, and I don't know how the actors kept from laughing. Maybe that's why most of the creature's appearances involved it sneaking up on the characters so that they wouldn't see him and start laughing. There were some great underwater scenes with this thing, a lot of them blocked by large fish that would swim in front of the camera. 5/20 might be a little high for this film; however, it is a comedy that made me laugh. Maybe my grade is even a little harsh. Regardless, this deepens my appreciation for the great Roger Corman.