Culture Shock 10.31.13: Corman's 'Frankenstein Unbound' gets bargain treatment

John Hurt, left, and Nick Brimble in "Frankenstein Unbound."

While he continues to churn out movies as a producer — "Dinocroc vs. Supergator," anyone? — B-movie king Roger Corman hasn't directed a film in more than two decades.

His swan song behind the camera was 1990's "Frankenstein Unbound," based on the novel by Brian Aldiss, who also wrote the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," which became Steven Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence." And given how "A.I." falls apart at the end, it's arguable that Corman delivered the more successful Aldiss adaptation.

Now that Starz/Anchor Bay has reissued "Frankenstein Unbound" on DVD, we can revisit Corman's final (so far) directorial effort.

In the near future, scientist Joe Buchanan (John Hurt of "Alien" and "The Elephant Man") is developing a new kind of ultimate weapon, a death ray that disintegrates armies without causing the indiscriminate destruction of nuclear weapons. It's an improvement, as far as weapons of mass destruction go, but even that thin justification for Buchanan's experiments falls apart when the side effects start.

Buchanan's not-quite-doomsday device inadvertently causes "time slips" to appear and, just as suddenly, disappear. And as the time slips become more frequent, it might be doomsday after all.

That's when Buchanan falls victim to one of the time slips, and he and his computerized car (think KITT from "Knight Rider") travel back to 19th-century Switzerland, where Buchanan encounters the future Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda), Lord Byron (Jason Patric) and their fellow British expats on the shore of Lake Geneva.

More unexpectedly, Buchanan meets Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia of "The Addams Family"), who is very much flesh and blood, as is his creature (Nick Brimble).

Buchanan is lousy at traveling incognito, and Frankenstein quickly realizes Buchanan has scientific knowledge that could be useful to him. Meanwhile, Buchanan pursues Mary Shelley like a starstruck groupie, only to find she reciprocates. Byron preaches free love, she says, but she practices it.

Like all adaptations and semi-adaptations of Shelley's novel, "Frankenstein Unbound" spends a lot of time taking shots at the hubris of scientists and science, which is a shallow reading of Shelley's book. "Frankenstein" is more about the responsibility of creator to creation. If the creature is legitimately angry about his abandonment, then what about humanity and its seemingly absent creator?

These philosophical concerns never vanish entirely. When Brimble's anguished creature demands to know who made Buchanan, Buchanan replies, "I don't know. God, maybe."

"Who is ‘God Maybe?' " the creature then asks, his misunderstanding ironically getting to the heart of the theological question.

With its Gothic setting and psychedelic dream sequences, "Frankenstein Unbound" is almost a continuation of the Poe-inspired horror films Corman made with Vincent Price in the 1960s. But while Corman was able to hide some of his cost-cutting tricks back then, that is impossible here. When "futuristic" sets are decorated with plasma balls from Spencer's Gifts, it shows, and Buchanan's futuristic car is even less convincing.

Fortunately, Corman has Hurt and Julia, two great actors giving their all, and he has a creature whose appearance is both original and menacing.

The DVD isn't much to speak of. Bargain-priced at under $10, you get what you pay for. There are no extras, not even a chapter menu, which should be the bare minimum. The film itself, however, is more than presentable, with sharp, vivid colors that bring out Corman's trippy visual sensibilities.

"Frankenstein Unbound" is far from Corman's best film but even farther from his worst. It's one fans of classic B-movies shouldn't overlook.

Culture Shock 04.05.12: Roger Corman is modern Hollywood's unlikely father

Jack Nicholson hiding behind his hands as he struggles to stay composed is the most emotionally honest sight I've seen in a movie this year.

That moment of truth comes in Alex Stapleton's heartfelt new documentary "Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel."

For the first decade of Nicholson's career, producer/director Roger Corman was the future star's one source of steady work, both as an actor and as a screenwriter. And despite taking a few good-natured jabs at the films they made together — Nicholson says Corman occasionally made a good movie "by mistake," but he wasn't in any of them — Jack clearly has a lot of love and respect for his old mentor.

The rest of Hollywood has rarely felt the same, forcing the soft-spoken Corman to become its most unlikely rebel, forging a successful career that is even more notable for the other careers it launched.

Stapleton's film doesn't make the — admittedly grandiose — comparison, but Corman comes across as a Moses-like figure: He led others to the Promised Land but couldn't enter himself.

"Corman's World" is that story.

When he didn't get the credit he thought was his due for helping bring 20th Century Fox's "The Gunfighter" to the screen — he was an uncredited story editor on the picture, which was a hit for Fox — Corman decided he would produce and direct his own movies. He developed a method that included shooting fast, shooting cheap and avoiding hassles like getting the proper permits.

From outward appearances, Corman is the least likely guerrilla filmmaker ever, yet he became the most successful.

He produced films on his own and, when he needed larger budgets, with American International Pictures, which released Corman's best works.

Corman has never been a darling of critics. Some of his earliest films even he will admit aren't very good. But the Edgar Allan Poe movies he made with Vincent Price stand with the best horror movies of their day, and Martin Scorsese, who got his start directing "Boxcar Bertha" for Corman, holds up the 1967 LSD film "The Trip," starring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper, has a worthy effort.

Corman's reputation today is largely the product of the directors, screenwriters and actors who learned their craft on Corman's sets.

Many in the generation that reinvented the movies in the late '60s and early '70s — Scorsese, Fonda, Hopper, Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola — got their start with Corman.

But Corman himself could never make the leap to mainstream respectability.

His one stab at it was 1962's "The Intruder" — William Shatner's first lead film role. Unfortunately, this blunt look at race relations in the South was too controversial. "The Intruder" became Corman's one flop.

He'd never make that mistake again.

Despite once saying he was "almost" a communist, Corman succeeded as the ultimate movie-making capitalist. His audience — his customers — were always right.

The judgment of the market is the only authority Corman really respects. All other authorities are oppressors to be challenged or at least circumvented.

Today, despite finally receiving an honorary Oscar, Corman still works on the fringes, producing a somewhat lower class of B movies to sell to what used to be called the Sci-Fi Channel.

Meanwhile, the movies that fill the multiplexes are the kind of movies Corman used to make — only with bigger budgets.

It's Corman's world after all.

Culture Shock 11.10.11: New documentary unleashes 'Machete Maidens'

A scene from director Jack Hill's "The Big Bird Cage."

If you want to make a movie today, you might seek out a location where the tax incentives are enticing (Australia, perhaps) or the production costs almost nonexistent (for example, Bulgaria).

During the 1970s, the place to be if you wanted to make a movie on the cheap and without a lot of pesky safety regulations was the Philippines, and "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" — the new documentary from director Mark Hartley — is a 90-minute crash course in the seat-of-your-pants filmmaking that resulted.

Throughout the decade, producers from the West looked east for a place to shoot inexpensive movies, mostly for drive-ins. Chief among them was B-movie king Roger Corman, who had formed New World Pictures and was instilling his penny-pinching ways in a new generation of directors.

When Corman learned he could make movies in the Philippines less expensively than in the U.S., or just about anywhere else, that was all he needed to know. He dispatched director Jack Hill, and Hill returned with "The Big Doll House."

"The Big Doll House" wasn't the first "women in prison" movie, but it was among the first to push the genre's exploitation elements to their limits. It was a huge success back in the U.S., kick-starting a boom in similar movies, like "Women in Cages" and Hill's camp follow-up, "The Big Bird Cage."

All three — recently released together on DVD and Blu-ray as "The Women in Cages Collection" — feature Hill's greatest discovery, and the only real star to emerge from the Philippine film boom, Pam Grier.

In 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, but that did nothing to stop producers and directors from setting up shop in his country. They kept making their exploitation movies, and Marcos was just happy for the money. As director John Landis says, these were sometimes movies about overthrowing fascist dictatorships that were being made in a fascist dictatorship.

Or, as another filmmaker puts it, "Human life was cheap. Film was cheap. It was a great place to make a picture." With a few bribes, you could rent the army's helicopters for a day, provided they weren't busy putting down rebels somewhere.

It's an eclectic cast of characters that populates "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" The Philippines was where actors like Christopher Mitchum and Patrick Wayne — sons of Hollywood royalty — could make their own fortune, or not. It was where 2-foot-9 Weng Weng could be the hero in the bizarre spy spoof of questionable taste, "For Your Height Only."

It was mostly schlock and exploitation, although some of it wildly entertaining, Hill's movies in particular. Yet into this stumbled a film with an undeniable pedigree — "Apocalypse Now."

Martin Sheen may have woken up thinking he was in Saigon, but he was really in the Philippines. Where else was Francis Ford Coppola going to get all of those real military helicopters to set to "The Ride of the Valkyries"?

The Philippines was nearly the death of them both.

As with his earlier documentary, "Not Quite Hollywood," Hartley gives us high-octane history. It's not deep, but it is fun, glossy and well-made pop. If "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" doesn't quite equal "Not Quite Hollywood," that's only because, as wild as the Wild East was, the Philippines in the '70s and early '80s still wasn't as insane as Australia during the same period.

Those tax incentives you get in Australia nowadays are just no substitute for driving too fast, setting people on fire and blowing things up in the Outback.

"Machete Maidens Unleashed!" is new on DVD from Dark Sky Films.

Culture Shock 07.07.11: John-Boy Walton goes back to space

Of all the B-grade sci-fi movies that tried to ride the "Star Wars" wave in the late '70s and early '80s, probably none is more fondly remembered than "Battle Beyond the Stars," or, as we called it back in the day, "John-Boy in Space."

The nickname comes from its star, Richard Thomas, whose career-defining role as John-Boy Walton on CBS's "The Waltons" will follow him to his grave.

When he left "The Waltons," Thomas put a lot of distance between himself and Walton's Mountain. We're talking light years.

Now "Battle Beyond the Stars" is back — re-released for its 30th anniversary on Blu-ray and DVD — and loaded with bonus features befitting a film many Generation Xers grew up with thanks to frequent afternoon showings on HBO.

First unleashed by Roger Corman's New World Pictures in 1980, "Battle Beyond the Stars" helped launch several successful movie careers.

James Cameron worked on the film's special effects, while James Horner provided the musical score. Since then, Cameron and Horner have teamed up for "Aliens," "Titanic" and "Avatar."

"Battle" also helped launch other low-budget sci-fi films that reused its special effects.

Corman was a fan of recycling long before recycling was cool. So, it's fitting that the story of "Battle Beyond the Stars" is just as recycled. Basically, it's a remake of Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai," which had already been remade as "The Magnificent Seven."

And since Corman was looking to cash in on the success George Lucas had with "Star Wars," it's also only appropriate that Corman turn to Kurosawa, because that's exactly what Lucas did when he drew inspiration from Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress."

Lastly, in case you haven't had enough of the whole recycling theme yet, there's Robert Vaughn. He played one of the seven hired guns in "The Magnificent Seven," and he plays one again in "Battle Beyond the Stars," where he is joined by the likes of a space valkyrie portrayed by Sybil Danning ("Chained Heat") and a space cowboy played by George Peppard, who was between gigs in "Banacek" and "The A-Team."

Cowboy is the lone Earth man of the bunch, which is why he eats hot dogs and actually is named "Cowboy." (I hear he's also a gangster of love, but that's another story.)

Facing off against John-Boy and his magnificent seven is the evil Sador, played by John Saxon ("A Nightmare on Elm Street"). Sador, whose hobbies include extreme body modification, threatens to destroy John-Boy's peaceful world for reasons that only make sense to psychopaths who roam the galaxy randomly blowing up planets for no good reason.

Blowing up a planet is one thing if it obstructs your view of Venus, but otherwise it's just overkill.

Sarcasm aside, "Battle Beyond the Stars" is more than a B-movie with a formulaic plot.

The cast members all seem to be having a blast, and even with world-class scenery chewers like Vaughn around, supporting players threaten to steal the show. Morgan Woodward, under heavy makeup as the reptilian mercenary Cayman of the Lambda Zone, is one of the real stars here.

And the special effects, while dated, still hold up, which is something you can't say about most Corman-produced sci-fi movies.

(Actually, I can't think of another Corman film you can say that about.)

Give that Cameron guy some credit. He may be a bit nutty when it comes to 3-D, but he knew how to build a model spaceship that looks like it has huge breasts on its hull.

No kidding. It does. See for yourself.

Culture Shock 10.14.10: Corman's Poe films continue to haunt audiences

With films like "It Conquered the World," "Gunslinger" and "Teenage Caveman" to his credit, Roger Corman established himself in the 1950s as a reliable director of low-budget movies aimed at drive-in audiences.

But by 1960, he was ready for something more ambitious.

In his memoir "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime," Corman writes that he was ready to make "bigger, better movies on longer schedules and to direct more experienced actors from better scripts. The chance to do all of those things came in the visually and thematically rich gothic horror genre."

Gothic horror ruled the cinema in the 1930s and '40s, when Universal Studios and its imitators released films like "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" and made unlikely stars of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. But gothic horror fell from favor in the '50s, when horror movies shifted toward atom-age monsters and extraterrestrial invaders.

But in 1958, Britain's Hammer Films found success with "Horror of Dracula," starring Christopher Lee as Bram Stoker's bloodthirsty count. "Horror of Dracula" revived the gothic horror film and drenched it in vibrant, Technicolor blood.

After 10 years of bug-eyed monsters, audiences seemed ready for the movies Corman wanted to make.

So, Corman convinced his producers at American International Pictures, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, to give him larger budgets that would allow him to shoot on color film and construct more elaborate sets.

The resulting films became classics of the horror genre and, along with Hammer's films, defined cinematic horror for the next decade.

From 1960 to 1964, Corman directed eight movies based, more or less, on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Corman had read Poe as a youth, and Poe's poems and stories had the virtue of being in the public domain, meaning Corman didn't have to pay for them.

With Vincent Price as his leading man and a team of skilled writers and technicians behind the camera, Corman made what would become known as his "Poe cycle." The series started with "House of Usher" in 1960 and continued with "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1961), "The Premature Burial" (1962), "Tales of Terror" (1962), "The Raven" (1963), "The Haunted Palace" (1963), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964) and "The Tomb of Ligeia" (1964).

Technically, however, "The Haunted Palace" is a Poe film in name only. It's based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft, making it, as far as I can tell, the first film based on Lovecraft's stories.

Three of Corman's Poe films will screen this month at Decatur's Princess Theatre Center for the Performing Arts as part of this year's Big Read program focusing on Poe's works. First up is "The Raven" on Friday night at 7. It will be followed by "House of Usher" on Monday and "The Pit and the Pendulum" on Oct. 22. Tickets are $5.

Price starred in all but one of Corman's Poe movies; the exception is "The Premature Burial" with Ray Miland. By 1960, Price already had established himself as a bankable horror-movie star in "House of Wax" and William Castle's "The House on Haunted Hill." Before that, he was a charismatic villain in the 1949 film noir "The Bribe." But the Poe films are what cemented Price's reputation as a horror icon — the Lugosi or Karloff of his generation.

Working alongside Price in the Poe movies were veterans like Karloff and Peter Lorre and newcomers like Jack Nicholson.

Meanwhile, the screenwriters who adapted Poe's tales were top notch. Richard Matheson ("I Am Legend") and Charles Beaumont, both "Twilight Zone" veterans, wrote seven of the films, while future Oscar winner Robert Towne ("Chinatown") scripted "The Tomb of Ligeia."

Corman's Poe films are undeniably B movies, but they're also classics. And as fast and loose as they play with Poe's words, they're still worthy and lasting tributes to America's master of the macabre.

Culture Shock 08.05.10: Roger Corman built legacy of B-movies, A-list moviemakers

Before the Academy Awards and the billions in box-office earnings — long before he became the "king of the world" — James Cameron was a lowly squire.

Actress Dey Young recalls Cameron as the guy who brought her coffee on the set of 1979's "Rock 'n' Roll High School."

Others tell stories about Cameron as an inventive, young special-effects technician who worked magic on the 1981 low-budget sci-fi flick "Galaxy of Terror."

But besides Cameron, "Rock 'n' Roll High School" and "Galaxy of Terror" have two other things in common. Both are Roger Corman productions, and Shout! Factory recently released both on DVD and Blu-ray as part of its new "Roger Corman's Cult Classics" collection.

As big a year as Cameron has had with that whole "Avatar" thing, the past 12 months have also been pretty busy for Corman, who is enjoying something of a resurgence at age 84.

Last year, Corman received an honorary Oscar in recognition of his contributions to the movie industry. This year, he has unleashed "Dinoshark" and "Dinocroc vs. Supergator" on unsuspecting SyFy channel viewers. And a third movie, "Sharktopus," is still yet to come. The preview trailer for "Sharktopus" is already an Internet sensation because, let's face it, everybody wants to see a genetically engineered shark/octopus hybrid run amok and threaten to eat Julia Roberts' older brother Eric.

I mean, who wouldn't want to see that?

Yes, improbable as it may seem, the man responsible for "Sharktopus" has an Academy Award on his mantle. And that lone fact pretty well sums up the amazing and unlikely career of one of Hollywood's most successful moviemakers.

How successful, you ask? Well, Corman titled his 1990 memoir "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime."

Never losing a dime, however, wasn't always easy. Corman re-released "Galaxy of Terror" multiple times under multiple titles until it turned a profit.

He also had other tricks up his sleeve. For instance, before striking the sets for "Galaxy of Terror," Corman put a second sci-fi movie into production just so he could get more use out of the same sets. The result was "Forbidden World," also just released on DVD.

Between them, "Galaxy of Terror" and "Forbidden World" are a crash course in the Corman formula. "Galaxy of Terror" is an "Alien" rip-off featuring the B-movie equivalent of an all-star cast and special effects that look like they should have cost more than they did. "Forbidden World," meanwhile, has an even smaller budget but makes up for that by upping the amount of exploitation, mostly in the form of a cheesy alien monster and gratuitous nudity.

Since the 1950s, Corman has produced or directed more than 300 movies. Combined, I'm guessing those movies cost less to make than Cameron spent on "Avatar" alone. But if there is one thing Corman knows how to do, it's make a movie on a limited budget.

It might not always be a good movie. But it will probably be an entertaining movie, at least in its own way. And an entire generation of filmmakers, including Cameron, rose to prominence after learning their craft from Corman.

Corman helped launch the careers of actors like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, as well as directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Jonathan Demme.

Working for Corman is the ultimate internship for aspiring filmmakers. You learn everything you can, then you are ready to take on anything Hollywood might throw at you.

And in the process, you might make a movie like "Galaxy of Terror" or "Piranha" or "Death Race 2000" — the movies discriminating fans of drive-in, low-budget and exploitation cinema buy on Blu-ray nearly 40 years later.

Culture Shock 06.17.10: 'Atlas Shrugged' film is not what anyone expected

The saying in Hollywood is no one sets out to make a bad movie. But sometimes, that's exactly what happens.

Take "Atlas Shrugged," the long-awaited film adaptation of Ayn Rand's best-selling, 1,300-page novel, first published in 1957. Rand's fans have waited 50 years for the book's leap to the big screen, and plans for a movie version have circulated for three decades.

Now the movie is finally happening, but it's likely to leave even Rand's most ardent admirers shrugging.

The adaptation that started production this week is like nothing anyone had expected, or wanted. Instead of a star-studded epic befitting a novel of "Atlas Shrugged's" size and scope, this "Atlas" looks like it'll be something you might one day stumble upon on Lifetime Movie Network, late at night, when no one else is watching.

Paul Johansson, best known for his role in The CW's "One Tree Hill," is both directing and playing the pivotal role of John Galt, who leads a "strike of the mind" against the twin forces of big government and the unproductive businessmen who run to the government in search of bailouts and subsidies.

You could say the story is topical.

I don't know about you, but when I think of Rand's personification of the heroic ideal, I don't think of "One Tree Hill's" Dan Scott. Actually, I never think of "One Tree Hill," period.

Starring opposite Johansson is Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart, around whom most of "Atlas" revolves.

Schilling's resume is thin. She is fresh from playing the lead on NBC's critically panned — and canceled — medical drama "Mercy." But according to the Internet Movie Database, her only previous role was in the 2007 film "Dark Matter."

Helping round out the cast of virtual unknowns is Grant Bowler ("Ugly Betty") as steel magnate Hank Rearden.

Not to slight any of these actors, but we are talking about a project that has, over the years, drawn interest from A-list talent like Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and, most recently, Charlize Theron.

Proposals to adapt "Atlas Shrugged" for the screen have ranged from film adaptations, sometimes breaking the novel into multiple movies, to a TV miniseries. Suggested budgets have gone as high as $40 million, no doubt with the hope that top talent would take pay cuts in exchange for coveted roles.

Instead, we're getting a rush job with a no-name cast, a budget of just $5 million and the promise — or is it a threat? — that at least one more movie will pick up the story where "Atlas Shrugged Part One" leaves off.

How did it come to this?

John Aglialoro, CEO of exercise equipment manufacturer Cybex International, paid $1 million for the movie rights to "Atlas" in 1992. Yet, despite years of false hopes and false starts, he failed to get the movie going, and his time was running out. If "Atlas" had not gone into production this week, Aglialoro's option would have run out.

So, Aglialoro is pressing on with what he has, which isn't much. That's why his "Atlas Shrugged" looks like more of a scheme to hold onto the film rights than a proper movie.

This wouldn't be the first time someone has rushed a low-budget movie into production just to retain the right to make a better version later on.

In the early 1990s, a German company held the rights to make a movie based on Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. With their option running out, the German producers brought in American B-movie king Roger Corman to make a quickie FF movie so they could keep their option alive.

With a reported budget of $1.4 million — would that even cover the catering on most films? — and featuring a no-star cast, Corman's "The Fantastic Four" became the stuff of legend. It was never commercially released, and it exists today only as bootleg DVDs you can sometimes find at comic book conventions. It's the "Star Wars Holiday Special" of superhero movies.

Eventually, 20th Century Fox would release two big-budget Fantastic Four movies. But they aren't particularly good, either, come to think of it.

Will this B-grade "Atlas Shrugged" movie ever see daylight, or is it destined to follow Corman's FF into obscurity? Who knows?

Who is John Galt, anyway?