Boris Karloff – Blood and Porridge

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024

Cultural Alasdair-isation

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023). This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992. Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector. But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out. So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel. A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s. It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow. The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do. McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films. I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too. For me, it’s his most engaging work so far. However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Firstly, it has many good performances. Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago. I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands. Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character. They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly. But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined. Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her. Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her. While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella. Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96^th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength. Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque. One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies. I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though. Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments. Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence. They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature. Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long. And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband. At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella. He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist. Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him. Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part. (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film. As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it. One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end. This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller. She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional. She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice. What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication. Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

© Bloomsbury Press

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’. However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland. Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one. And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names. This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England. When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19^th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on. When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation. Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

© Estate of Alasdair Gray / From Scottish Poetry Library

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things. I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’. Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out. (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision. Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie. Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all. How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it? It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia. Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book. That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.

© Bloomsbury Press

May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

The jolly films of Roger (Part 2)

© American International Pictures

Following on from my last blog-post, in which I paid tribute to the prolific, indefatigable and – it has to be said – thrifty filmmaker Roger Corman who died on May 9th, here’s a round-up of my favourite films that Corman directed.

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Character actor Dick Miller worked regularly with Roger Corman. His biggest role for him was in a movie that’s also Corman’s best work of the 1950s, the horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood. Miller plays a would-be avant-garde sculptor called Walter Paisley who’s increasingly frustrated at his lack of talent. This isn’t helped by the fact that, to make ends meet, he has to work as a busboy at the local Beatnik café, which is full of pretentious tossers going on about what creative geniuses they are. “Be a nose! Be a nose!” the hapless Paisley cries as he tries and fails to fashion a recognisable human visage out of a lump of clay. After accidentally killing his landlady’s cat and then killing an undercover cop who’s trying to implicate him in some drug-dealing at the café (Paisley memorably cleaves his head with a skillet), he hits on a way of producing perfectly proportioned statues: committing murder and coating the bodies in clay. Frankly, the resulting corpse-statues look hideous, but that doesn’t stop the Beatniks at the café proclaiming Paisley an artistic genius.

Their lack of taste in sculpture mirrors their lack of taste in poetry. At the beginning we hear Beatnik bard Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton) delivering an epic, and epicly bad, poem called Life is a Bum, which goes: “Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art… The Artist is, all others are not… Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, Jerk? Dead, dead, dead! They were not born before they were born, they were not born… Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive, alive, alive! They were born…!”

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

The Raven (1963)

As a kid, I loved this movie, the fifth of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American International Pictures. The tale of a trio of feuding magicians played by Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, it’s more fantasy than horror – but spiced with delightfully ghoulish moments, such as when a torturer checks the temperature of a red-hot poker by pressing it into his own arm, or when Price opens a little casket and is discombobulated to find it full of human eyeballs. (“I’d rather not say,” he croaks when Lorre asks him what’s inside.) It’s like a version of Walt Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) for morbid children.

Needless to say, the film’s connection with Edgar Allan Poe is extremely loose. In fact, it’s only Karloff turning Lorre into a raven twice during the film that allows Corman to tack the title of Poe’s most famous poem onto it and have Price recite the poem mellifluously during its opening scene. Meanwhile, in the role of Lorre’s son, we get a 26-year-old and amusingly wooden Jack Nicholson.

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

A non-gothic movie Corman made whilst in the middle of his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the usual visual spectrum perceptible to humans.

I wrote about this movie last year in a post about its scriptwriter, Ray Russell. “Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distance edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.”

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Corman’s majestic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, scripted by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell (with a second Poe story, Hop Frog, stitched into the plot for good measure) and beautifully shot by the great Nicolas Roeg, showcases Vincent Price at his sumptuously evil best. He’s Prince Prospero, who’s holed up in his castle with an entourage of loathsome aristocrats while a plague, the Red Death, decimates the countryside outside. Price and friends happily live a life of decadence, fuelled by drink, drugs, sex and diabolism – rather like Boris Johnson and his lackeys and minions partying at No 10, Downing Street, during Covid-19 and breaking all their own lockdown restrictions – while refusing to help the neighbourhood’s terrified peasants. However, when they decide to enliven their social calendar with a fancy-dress masque, the masque is gate-crashed by a mysterious, Ingmar Bergman-esque figure swathed in a red robe. Guess who that is.

© Alta Vista Productions / Anglo-Amalgamated / Warner Pathé

Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Made the same year as Masque, Corman’s Ligeia has Price in a more sympathetic role, playing a haunted and reclusive man who tries to put his troubles behind him and find happiness with a new wife (Elizabeth Shepherd). Unfortunately, his former wife, though dead, is still around in spirit form and won’t leave him in peace. Tomb of Ligeia has a slightly over-the-top ending, but the build-up to it, involving black cats, flag-stoned passageways, cobwebs, candlelight, hypnosis, Egyptology and some spectacular monasterial ruins filmed at Castle Acre Priory near Swaffham in England’s County Suffolk, is spookily wonderful.

The Wild Angels (1966)

“Just what is it that you want to do…?” “Well, we wanna be free, we wanna to be free to do what we wanna do. 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!”

Scottish alternative rock / dance band Primal Scream immortalised this exchange from Corman’s The Wild Angels, between Frank Maxwell’s preacher and Peter Fonda’s Hells Angel, by sampling it on their 1990 dancefloor hit Loaded. Though to be fair, the American grunge band Mudhoney got there first when they sampled it on their song In and Out of Grace two years earlier. It’s also recited at the climax of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s underrated sci-fi / horror satire from 2013, during the face-off between Simon Pegg and a supercilious alien intelligence voiced by Bill Nighy.

In addition to Fonda, The Wild Angels features Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd – supposedly Dern and Ladd’s daughter Laura was conceived during filming, so Laura Dern is something else we have Roger Corman to thank for – and the baby-faced Michael J. Pollard shortly before he played W.C. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The script, officially written by long-term Corman associate Charles B. Griffith and unofficially rewritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is minimalist. While there’s stuff about Fonda’s Hells Angels chapter pursuing a stolen bike, and about Dern’s character being shot by the cops and having to be rescued from a hospital, it’s mainly a frame for scenes in which the Angels offend Middle America. Corman did his research by throwing parties with free beer and marijuana for real Hells Angels. He had Griffith attend them and make notes while those Angels recounted their wild (and no doubt exaggerated) tales of life on the road.

© American International Pictures

At least Griffith and Bogdanovich don’t pull their punches. In the script, the Angels come across as pretty assholey, particularly with their love for Nazi symbols and memorabilia. This causes a confrontation between them and a World-War-II veteran (Dick Miller again) early in the movie. When Dern’s character dies and they organise a funeral for him – predictably, the church service degenerates into an orgy – the coffin is draped in a Nazi flag. The real Hells Angels, some of whom had appeared in the film, were so annoyed by Corman’s portrayal of them that they threatened to both kill him and sue him (presumably not in that order). If that wasn’t enough, Corman had Frank ‘Dodgy Connections’ Sinatra breathing down his neck, concerned about daughter Nancy’s safety among the Angels on the set. Actually, the story of an exploitation director making a biker movie who unwittingly antagonises the Hells Angels and the Mafia sounds like it would make a good exploitation movie.

The Trip (1967)

Corman, Fonda and Dern were united for this movie, scripted by one Jack Nicholson. Yes, it’s about a trip, a hallucinogenic one, experienced by a TV commercial director played by Fonda, wearing a sensible red V-necked sweater. He takes LSD as a reaction to the break-up of his marriage and the trip initially happens at the home of, and under the watchful eye of, a friend played by Dern, wearing a sensible eggshell-blue polo-neck and fawn jacket. These scenes were filmed in the house of Albert Lee, leader of the rock band Love. The cost-conscious Corman was surely pleased to discover that Lee’s house had so much psychedelic décor already it hardly needed to be dressed up for the film. However, when Fonda hallucinates that he’s killed Dern – he hasn’t – he panics and flees down to Sunset Strip. Then things really get groovy.

Seen today, The Trip is inevitably something of a museum piece and the low budget means some of its fantasy scenes are ropey. Bits where Fonda, now wearing a baggy white shirt like a romantic poet, is pursued by medieval, cloaked-and-cowled figures on horseback through what is obviously modern-day California are particularly cringey. But there are enough genuinely weird things – Fonda having a question-and-answer session with Dennis Hopper on a carousel, Fonda making love to a lady under some heavily patterned lighting that makes them look like psychedelically-coloured chameleons, Fonda having a panic attack inside Dern’s wardrobe – to make it memorable. And if you enjoy a good 1960s-movie psych-out sequence, the one where the heavily-tripping Fonda blunders into a night club during a live rock performance is awesome.

© American International Pictures

Bloody Mama (1970)

Like The Wild Angels, this Corman movie isn’t so much a story as a series of outrages, with reprobates lurching from one confrontation to another. Unlike The Wild Angels, the characters in Bloody Mama are based, very loosely, on historical figures – Depression-era America’s notorious Barker-Karpis Gang, supposedly led by matriarch Kate ‘Ma’ Barker. Many have argued that Ma Barker’s reputation as a criminal mastermind was invented by the media and by J. Edgar Hoover, keen to justify the FBI killing an old woman when they finally caught up with her and shot her. As the fictionalised Ma Barker, lording it over her four gormless gangster sons, Shelley Winters gives a scenery-chomping performance that dominates the film and blinds you to its various budgetary and exploitative shortcomings. God-fearing, gun-toting, racist, incestuous and psychotic, she seems a monstrous metaphor for America itself. This is underlined when she herds her sons around the piano to sing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Among the sons, Don Stroud gets most to do as Ma’s eldest, Herman. He’s a hulking thug to begin with but, in some unexpected character development, gradually forms a mind of his own. Film buffs, though, will be more excited by the presence of a young Robert De Niro, playing well-medicated son Lloyd. At one point he gets high on glue, causing an uncomprehending Winters to exclaim, “When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly!”

Incidentally, Bloody Mama was such a money spinner for American International Pictures that they demanded another Depression-era gangster movie. Corman, though, was willing only to produce the follow-up, Boxcar Bertha (1972), and a young lad called Martin Scorsese got the directing gig.

When I first started writing this tribute to Roger Corman, I was going to title it THE MAN WHO ROGERED HOLLYWOOD, though I soon decided that sounded disrespectful. But Corman literally did roger Hollywood. Without his opportunities and tutelage, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Nicholson, etc., might never have got to where they did, and many landmark movies during the last half-century of Hollywood’s history – from the Godfather movies to the Scorsese-De Niro collaborations, from the Terminator and Avatar series to a host of classic films including Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1989), Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1993) and Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential (1997) – might not have seen the light of day. And many of his own movies, cheap though they were, were a great deal of fun. No wonder Quentin Tarantino loved him.

Not bad for the guy who directed It Conquered the World (1956) and produced Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010).

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

May 18, 2024May 23, 2024

The jolly films of Roger (Part 1)

From instagram.com / Roger Corman

Roger Corman, who passed away on May 9^th at the venerable age of 98, wasn’t so much a filmmaker as a movie factory. IMDb credits him with 491 producing credits, and that’s not counting the two movies being produced by him and categorised as ‘upcoming’ at the time of his death: the generic-sounding Crime City and the definitely Cormanesque-sounding Little Shop of Halloween Horrors.

Even during lockdown in 2020, when most folk his age were lying low because they knew contracting Covid-19 was likely a death sentence for them, Corman was so desperate for something celluloid-related to do that, according to the Hollywood Reporter, he “launched a self-named Quarantine Film Festival to judge short films made while filmmakers shelter in their homes.”

Corman was famous for things besides his work ethic and prolificness. Firstly, there was the legendary thrift and speed with which he made his films. For instance, in his 1955 Western Apache Woman, actor Dick Miller – at the start of a long association with Corman – played two characters in the same scene, an Apache and the settler who shoots him. While figuring out how to film the fiery – and potentially costly – finale of 1960’s House of Usher, Corman heard there was a barn about to be demolished in Orange County. He got permission to do the demolition himself, burned it to the ground, had cameramen film it and used the burning-barn footage to represent the burning mansion at the movie’s climax. And the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors, long before it became an Alan Menken musical and was remade by Hollywood in 1986, was shot in two days. Supposedly, Corman did it in response to a bet that he couldn’t make a film in two days.

Secondly, as a producer, he gave a lot of aspiring, up-and-coming talent a chance to get behind or in front of the camera and show the world what they could do, whilst learning the mechanics of filmmaking on the job. The young filmmakers who graduated from the Corman School of Moviemaking make a pretty awesome list: Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, Curtis Hanson, Monte Hellman, Ron Howard, Gale Anne Hurd, Jonathan Kaplan, John Sayles and Robert Towne. A few others, like Paul Bartel and Jack Hill, never quite escaped the ‘exploitation filmmaker’ tag, but made some fascinating movies nonetheless, while Allan Arkush became a prestigious, Emmy-nominated TV director. Meanwhile actors whose careers received invaluable leg-ups from Corman included Charles Bronson, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Pam Grier, Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Nicholson, Talia Shire and, yup, Sylvester Stallone. Even Sandra Bullock was aided on her way to fame by a role in the 1993 Corman-produced jungle-epic Fire on the Amazon.

I’m sure this was due to economics as much as altruism. He could pay his young, unknown and inexperienced directors, writers, actors and technicians less. When Ron Howard worked for him, and they had a row about Corman’s stinginess, Howard was assured: “Ron, if you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.” (And no doubt he’d have a chance of being remembered not just for playing Richie Cunningham in the 1974-84 sitcom Happy Days.) But the lessons Corman’s alumni learned about making films on tight budgets and schedules were invaluable for their later, more prestigious careers and they’ve generally been grateful for the breaks he gave them. Scorsese, for example, has spoken about how Corman taught him the importance of preparation when you’re shooting on a budget and the wisdom of getting the most difficult scenes filmed at the start of the schedule – which in Scorsese’s case, with the 1972 Corman-produced gangster movie Boxcar Bertha, were the ones involving a train.

The fuss made over Corman’s many protegees obscures an important fact, that as a director himself – he had 56 directing credits – he could be pretty good. The movies he directed can be divided into three phases. First came the ultra-low-budget ones, mostly Westerns and science-fiction flicks, that he churned out in the late 1950s. If you’re to believe IMDb, he managed to make nine of these in 1957 alone. Many you’d struggle to appraise as ‘good’… But when you compare them with the cheap schlock being made by other exploitation filmmakers at the time, they definitely have a spark that elevates them above the herd. One thing about late-1950s, micro-budget, black-and-white sci-fi movies that strikes you now when you view them on YouTube is how dreary most of them seem – but dreariness isn’t a charge you could level at, say, Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956), though you could level a lot else at it.

At the beginning of the 1960s, he convinced his regular studio, American International Pictures, to tackle something different: a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, made in colour and with larger budgets than usual (which doesn’t mean their budgets were large by anyone else’s standards). These kicked off in 1960 with House of Usher and continued with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963) – actually based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, with the title borrowed from a Poe poem – The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Tomb of Ligeia (1964). All but one feature the impeccable horror-icon Vincent Price as their leading man and they’re enlivened too by appearances from an older generation of horror-film actors: Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. And let’s not forget Barbara Steele, the queen of 1960s Italian horror cinema, who pops up in Pit. Corman’s Poe films are atmospheric, brooding – several of them have Price mourning a dead (but actually not-so-dead) wife – at times gorgeous and generally a lot of fun. They had a big impact on peculiar children like me, who caught them on late-night TV in the 1970s.

Finally, in the late 1960s, Corman became involved in movies about the youth cultures of time – Hells Angels in The Wild Angels (1966) and hippiedom in 1967’s The Trip – and gangster films like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) and Bloody Mama (1970), possibly inspired by the success of a wee film called Bonnie and Clyde (1967) around the same time. Worn out by directing, Corman concentrated on producing from the early 1970s onwards. Apart from some uncredited directing on 1978’s Deathsport and 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars, he returned to the director’s chair only once, in 1990, for an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s novel Frankenstein Unbound (1973). Aldiss also wrote the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969) which was developed into Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), making him perhaps the only writer who could boast of having his work filmed by both the famously low-budget Corman and the famously high-budget Spielberg.

Thereafter, Corman formed a series of movie production and distribution companies – New World Productions, Millennium (which was quickly renamed New Horizons Pictures) and Concorde Pictures. Going through all the movies that came off their conveyor belts, and had Corman’s name in their ‘producer’ credits, would be an exhausting and probably impossible task. But there are certain ones I’m fond of.

Firstly, I like Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), about a futuristic car race where the goal is not to finish first but to rack up as many points as possible by running down as many pedestrians as possible. A young Sylvester Stallone plays the villain, a driver so evil he mows down his own road crew for some extra points. Bartel followed this with another movie about car chases and car crashes, the more family-friendly Carquake (1976). I loved this as a kid – the fact that I saw it on a double bill with The Giant Spider Invasion (1976) probably made it seem, comparatively, so good. Among its oddball pleasures are cameos by Stallone and Martin Scorsese playing a pair of KFC-chomping Mafiosi.

I’m also a fan of Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) and Rock n’ Roll High School (1979) directed by Allan Arkush with some contributions from Dante. The latter film starred the excellent P.J. Soles, shortly after she’d appeared in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and the legendary punk-rock band the Ramones. Apparently, Corman had wanted the movie to be about disco music, until Arkush and Dante persuaded him that having the Ramones in it was more likely to piss off the teenaged audience’s parents.

I enjoyed Corman’s 1980 rip-off of Star Wars (1978), the aforementioned Battle Beyond the Stars, ostensibly directed by Jimmy T. Murakami (and co-written by John Sayles). Its crew included a young James Cameron, working as a modelmaker, special effects technician and art director. Supposedly, Cameron impressed Corman by designing for the film a spaceship called Nell (controlled by a female-voiced computer) whose twin engines were, frankly, shaped like breasts. Cameron also worked on Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror (1981), a cash-in on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which I like simply for its eclectic cast – Ray Walston; Sid Haig; Zalman King, future director of ‘erotic’ movies like Wild Orchid (1990) and Delta of Venus (1994); Grace Zabriskie, who played Sarah Palmer in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017); Erin Moran, who played Ron Howard’s little sister in Happy Days; and Freddy Kreuger himself, Robert Englund.

And I’m somewhat fascinated – I don’t know why – by Adam Simon’s Carnosaur (1993), which was based on Harry Adam Knight’s 1984 novel of the same name. Knight’s Carnosaur had featured the idea of cloned dinosaurs running amok in the modern world years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990). When it was announced that Steven Spielberg would turn Crichton’s book into a film, Corman cannily adapted Knight’s book to the screen and released it the same year as Spielberg’s blockbuster. I imagine Knight found it galling that while Spielberg filmed Crichton’s novel with state-of-the-art animatronic and computer-generated effects, Corman’s low-budget effects for Carnosaur involved a man wearing a dinosaur-suit. Also, cheekily, Corman cast Diane Ladd (who’d been in The Wild Angels) in Carnosaur while her daughter Laura Dern was starring in Jurassic Park.

Later, more giant monsters would feature in Corman’s association with the Syfy channel. He supplied it with a succession of less-than-epic, self-explanatorily titled monster movies like Dinocroc (2004), Supergator (2007), the inevitable Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010), Dinoshark (2010), Sharktopus (2010) and Piranhaconda (2012). Actually, as Wikipedia notes, “Supergator was turned down by the Syfy channel, but Corman made it anyway.” I’ve watched a couple of these on Britain’s Horror Channel and, well, what can I say? There are probably worse ways to reduce your brain to an inert, insentient pulp. But not many.

However, my favourite films among Corman’s output are definitely ones that he directed himself. I’ll talk about them in my next blog post. Stay tuned…

December 17, 2021December 18, 2021

Jim Mountfield keeps it in the family

A new short story of mine, Problem Family, is now available to read online at Horla Magazine. As it’s a horror story, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

The main inspiration for Problem Family was a real-life incident that happened to me in Colombo a couple of years ago, when I was living in a different apartment building from the one I live in today. An extremely noisy family lived in an apartment on the floor below mine. For some reason – the building’s acoustics, the way the stairwell was positioned – the noise they generated seemed to flow straight up to my front door. Indeed, it sometimes seemed like the loud melodramas they were enacting were taking place right on the other side of my door. One evening, I heard adult male and female voices screaming at each other and became convinced that, if this went on for much longer, the woman was going to be assaulted. So, reluctantly, I ventured downstairs, ostensibly to tell them to shut up, but really to find out if I needed to report something to the police. Thankfully, the situation proved to be non-violent – and at my appearance, the pair of them did shut up.

Also, in part and completely differently, Problem Family was inspired by the famous 1927 sci-fi / horror story The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. This is an account what happens after a meteorite strikes a remote area of Massachusetts. A nearby farming family begin to succumb to what initially seems to be a weird, creeping, expanding poison but is actually a grotesque alien lifeform exuding an indescribable colour – it was ‘only by analogy that they called it a colour at all’. The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times, starting with a rather duff version starring Boris Karloff and directed by Daniel Haller in 1965, and most recently in 2019 with a phantasmagorical version courtesy of director Richard Stanley. The 2019 film is slightly too reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), but benefits from a striking colour palette – it’s difficult to depict unknown alien colours on celluloid, so Stanley settles for making everything a garish purple – and from Nicholas Cage in the lead role, doing the sort of acting things that only Nicholas Cage is capable of doing.

You can also hear The Colour Out of Space being read aloud on this video from the BBC’s ‘interactive culture magazine’ Collective. Brilliantly, the reader is none other than the late, great Mark E. Smith, vocalist with and guiding light of abrasive post-punk / alternative rock band the Fall. The sound of Smith’s thick Mancunian accent and the Massachusetts accents of Lovecraft’s characters battling for supremacy is something else. I have to say, though, that the bit at the beginning where Smith sticks out and wiggles his tongue is as terrifying as anything in the story itself.

Fittingly for a magazine that takes its name from The Horla, the classic 1887 story by Guy De Maupassant, Horla describes itself as ‘the home of intelligent horror’. Its main page, which gives access to a bevy of cracking stories, can be reached here. Meanwhile, Problem Family itself can, for now, be read here.