Review: 'The Terror'/'The Little Shop of Horrors' Blu-ray

Jack Nicholson is a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army who tracks ghostly Sandra Knight to Boris Karloff’s decrepit castle. 

It took two writers to compose a script that clearly just instructed, “Jack walks down hall and opens door” for pages and pages on end. Roger Corman commissioned that script for no other reason than to get his every penny’s worth from the sets he used for The Raven and take advantage of the three extra days Karloff agreed to make himself available. 

No wonder Corman wanted to keep shooting on the castle sets: they’re magnificent. Consequently, The Terror looks great, and that cast— which also includes Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, and Dorothy Neumann— is impressive too. However, the desperation of this production, with its patchy story further confused by four different directors (including Nicholson, co-screenwriter Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, and Francis Ford Coppola) tacking additional scenes willy nilly onto Corman’s footage, is impossible to ignore. Of that cast, only Neumann rises above the perfunctory to give an enjoyably camp performance as an old witch. 

The Terror is not as bad as its infamous reputation suggests, but the only scene that makes good on its terrifying title is the one in which Haze gets his eyes pecked out by a hawk…well, that is unless you think the image of Sandra Knight with honey on her face is particularly terrifying.

Now, if you want to see a Corman picture without a single perfunctory performance, check out the rightfully celebrated Little Shop of Horrors. The story goes that he shot it in just two days (not including reshoots) in order to beat new film industry rules giving actors more equitable contracts and pay— a sleazy motive, but one that allowed him to make his films on minuscule schedules and budgets. 

Whatever the reality of its production, The Little Shop of Horrors is a brilliant specimen of B-movie making with man-eating Venus flytrap Audrey Junior growing to massive proportions on a diet of local folks. Charles B. Griffith, the writer responsible for some of Corman’s best horror/comedies, whipped up a script rippling with absurd situations and priceless shtick. The movie’s most famous performance is that of young Nicholson as an enthusiastically masochistic dental patient, but Jonathan Haze as Audrey’s keeper/slave, Jackie Joseph as his girlfriend, Mel Welles as his boss, and Corman-fave Dick Miller as a flower-munching customer are just as memorable. Still very funny with some charming craft-shop special effects, The Little Shop of Horrors is wonderfully entertaining and wonderful inspiration for fledgling filmmakers. 

Considering its superiority to The Terror, and the cachet of its musical theater and cinematic remakes, The Little Shop of Horrors really should have been the A-feature of Film Masters' new double-feature Blu-ray set. Maybe they thought a more prominent role for superstar Nicholson and the similar marquee power of Karloff might make The Terror the more marketable movie, but I guess it doesn't matter which movie gets top billing, just as long as they're both included.

Perhaps it was also the superior restoration of The Terror that put it on the cover. This is a film cobbled together from various sources, and the stock footage doesn't look good, but the dedicated shots look fabulous, with natural grain, vibrant color, and unenhanced sharpness. The Little Shop of Horrors looks overly grainy and insufficiently contrasty in comparison, but considering the way it was shot, it actually looks better than it usually does in Film Masters' widescreen presentation.

Both discs include a nice selection of bonuses. On the Terror disc, there's a commentary from film historians Steve Haberman and C. Courtney Joyner (who also supplies a text essay that focuses more on Karloff's past in Poe movies than this set's lackluster feature film), a neat 44-minute visual essay on Corman as filmmaker with a main focus on The Terror, and a trailer. On the Little Shop disc, there's a commentary with Jonathan Haze and writer Justin Humphreys, a 17 minute documentary on Corman's Filmgroup production company, and a trailer. Overall, it's a juicy package, though it's the inclusion of Little Shop of Horrors that makes it essential.

Review: 'The Devil's Partner'/'Creature from the Haunted Sea' Blu-ray

 

In 1958, director Charles R. Rondeau followed up his first feature, The Littlest Hobo, with a low-budget horror/mystery picture in which a strange young man, who apparently can't sweat, drifts into a small town after his grubby Satanist uncle croaks. Soon various animals begin killing the locals while the nephew gets himself a sweet deal working at a gas station. 

No rational person would include The Devil's Partner on a list of classic horror movies, but it's reasonably well made with an effectively creepy lead performance from Ed Nelson (who most might remember from his regular role on Peyton Place, but those more likely to dig this flick will recall from the "Valley of the Shadow" episode of Twilight Zone), a tight little script, a fair dose of originality, and one genuinely creepily shot scene in which a horse stomps a rummy. 

Roger Corman liked The Devil's Partner well enough to scoop it up for his Filmgroup distribution company and slap it on a double-bill with his own Creature from the Haunted Sea in 1961. Loopier, trashier, and overflowing with anarchic attitude, Haunted Sea is definitely the more memorable picture, with its wacky Cuban counterrevolutionaries and cue-ball-eyed monster made of Brillo pads. However, The Devil's Partner is the picture that leads the Film Masters' new 4K-restored blu-ray double-bill. That's probably because Partner looks way better, nearly flawless, in fact, in a blemish-free presentation with natural grain and no irritating enhancements. Haunted Sea comes from rougher stock, but a restoration-comparison video included as an extra shows just how far the image came from the scratched, blurry 35mm print used for this very pleasing if imperfect restoration. I doubt you'll see the movie looking better, under the circumstances.

Both films are included in both their 16:9 theatrical and 4:3 TV aspect ratios, and both films gained a lot more information at the top and bottom of their respective pictures on the boob tube. Creature from the Haunted Sea also gains a whopping fifteen minutes of extra footage in its TV form. There are also audio commentaries (a silly one by some podcast guys for the main feature and a more impressive roster of Corman, location manager Kinta Zertuche, film historian Tom Weaver, and contemporary B-movie director Larry Blamire for Haunted Sea), two-Corman centric featurettes, and even a couple of booklet essays, making for a very nice package.

Review: 'Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964'

In the late fifties, Hammer Film Productions struck a blow for Gothic horror just when it seemed as though bulb-headed martians and giant bugs had banished vampires, Frankensteins, and spooky cobwebs for good. That was great for UK, birthplace of Gothic horror, but what of the U.S.? Without having even seen Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein or Dracula, all-American Roger Corman came to the stateside rescue with a series of horrors based on stories by America's premiere Gothicist, Edgar Allan Poe. With more than a little help from screenwriters like Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (both veterans of the Twilight Zone writers' room, not incidentally), producer/director Corman managed to inflate Poe's exceedingly short, not-exactly-action-packed tales of mystery and imagination into crowd-pleasing features. The guy who gave the world highly enjoyable but undeniably schlocky fare like A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors suddenly displayed a true artist's eye, with his rainbow palette, brilliant use of foreground set dressing, and zeal for psychedelic dream sequences. With a stock team of iconic actors such as Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Ray Milland, and Hazel Court, Roger Corman had found the formula for iconic, unforgettable, enduring films. 

Farewell, Dick Miller

Dick Miller was one of the best and most prolific character actors of the second half of the twentieth century--a favorite of Roger Corman and Joe Dante who appeared in so many movies it is ridiculous to try listing even the favorites. He rarely got a starring role (Corman's A Bucket of Blood was a rare one), but his mere momentary presence brought any movie to life instantly. His rough mug, gruff but lovable demeanor were, and absurdly long resume earned him a documentary tribute called That Guy Dick Miller in 2014 that is well worth seeking out. 

Daly, Dick Miller died today at the ripe age of 90. His presence in future movies will be missed.

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 5

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 26

Hellraiser (1987- dir. Clive Barker) **

The premise of Clive Barker's adaptation of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, is appropriately skeletal. Some dickhead stumbles into hell, and manages to escape and return to corporeal form by slaughtering the assholes his sister-in-law/sex monkey lures to him using her feminine wiles. Unfortunately, a band of mutant hell monsters miss torturing him so much that they go searching for him in the earthly realm. With its bad acting, leaden dialogue, and over-the-top gore, Hellraiser plays like a pre-teen goth's attempt to freak out his parents. Ooooh! Extreme!

Phenomena (1985- dir. Dario Argento) ***

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 19

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974- dir. Brian Clemens) ****

At a time when Hammer was doubling down on its exploitative rep, the studio produced this comparatively light-hearted romp in which a swashbuckler trots across the countryside looking for vampires to stab. Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter may be Hammer’s freshest film of the seventies. James Needs’s editing is very stylish (a pub swordfight is pricelessly executed), and Horst Janson is reasonably appealing as the vamp slayer (though his penchant for violent sex is a gratuitous capitulation to the era’s nastier ethos). Caroline Munro and John Cater as Kronos’s more personable sidekicks are better. It’s too bad this did not lead to the series it was intended to because it would have been great fun to watch this dynamic trio swashbuckle their way through other adventures.

Blair Witch (2016- dir. Adam Wingard) **

Monsterology: Monster Houses

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Welcome home! You’ve had a tough day digging ditches in some inhospitable mound of dirt or hacking away at a keyboard in an even less homey office cubicle. What you need now is to hang up your boots and settle into your lazy boy. Your home is your castle, your one bit of security and privacy in an increasingly insecure and inprivate world. It is so inprivate that we have to make up new words like “inprivate” to indicate how inprivate it is.

But wouldn’t it be a stone drag if you were settling in to relax in your sanctuary and the walls started bulging unnaturally or bleeding even more unnaturally? Wouldn’t it simply ruin your night if that thing you haven’t even finished paying the mortgage on yet sucked your precious little daughter into the electrical system or made you want to pick up an axe and chop up your precious little son?

Monsters come in all shapes, sizes, and smells, but one thing that unites the mass of them from werewolves to robots is that they somehow resemble organic beings. One of the few exceptions is the monstrous house. The fact that it has no arms or legs or teeth makes the monster house highly unusual and really very wrong (though not completely beyond anthropomorphization, as we shall see). The fact that a house is such a mundane thing, a thing intended to protect and comfort, makes it highly insidious, especially when it turns against the children who dwell in it, as it so often does.

First of all, we must distinguish the monster house from the haunted house. In a haunted house, the monster is some form of ghost. It may make the windows rattle or the chairs fall over, but that ghost is the central threat, not the place it chooses to haunt. That would be like blaming Dracula’s castle for the vampire’s poor behavior, which would be unfair to a perfectly fine castle. The nasty things a ghost does can be accomplished by any breathing, visible asshole. Ghosts or other such entities may be responsible for making a monster house monstrous, but a true monster house takes on a life of its own; it is the threat.

The first truly enduring monster house remains the definitive one. Published in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” largely passed over specifics to dwell on off putting descriptions of the title building. The unnamed narrator approaches the house, and it instantly casts its spell on him, bashing him with waves of depression and unease. He has not even interacted with its weird inhabitants before getting a very strong sense that the House of Usher is a bad place. He even emphasizes its inherent monstrousness by trying to describe it in anthropomorphic terms, noting its “vacant and eye-like windows.”

Is it the house that has seemingly poisoned Roderick and Madeline Usher, both of whom suffer from odd maladies such as Roderick’s intense aversion to sound and his sister’s general malaise and tendency to lapse into catatonic states? Is it responsible for the subtextual moral decay of the siblings, whose relationship may not be entirely platonic? As the narrator drifts through the foreboding house, it reacts violently to the presence of one who might uncover its strange and dirty secrets. It begins cracking in disapproval. When the ultimate abomination comes to light—Roderick’s premature burial of catatonic Madeline—the house has a total nervous breakdown. As the short story’s title spoils, the House of Usher falls—quite literally. The building collapses, claiming the poisoned siblings as its victims while the narrator manages to escape the domestic tomb. In a perversion of home security, the house would rather self-destruct than allow its family’s ugly secrets come to life, even if that means wiping out the family in the process.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!

No Halloween season is a true Halloween season without a healthy dose of Vincent Price movies. But wait! Don’t sit down to shudder along with House of Wax or The Abominable Dr. Phibes just yet! To truly appreciate the man and his work, you’ll first want to bolster your Priceducation with these 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!

1. That Vincent Price was a gourmet chef and cookbook author is well known among fans, but they might not be aware that culinary interests ran deep in his bloodline. His grandfather, Vincent C. Price, invented baking powder and pioneered cornstarch as a baking ingredient, and his father, Vincent Leonard Price, was the president of the National Candy Company.

2. Vincent Price’s first wife, Edith Barrett, didn’t become as synonymous with horror as her husband did, but she did star in the creepy classic I Walked with a Zombie.

3. Price’s daughter Victoria is a serious writer who wrote scripts about Richard Widmark and her dad’s old friend Roddy McDowall for A&E’s Biography series and an extensive and refreshingly objective biography about her dad. She also had a brief role as a reporter in Price’s final film, Edward Scissorhands.

4. As a young man from an unquestioningly conservative St. Louis family, Price expressed sympathy with this burgeoning Nazi party. However, he underwent a major liberal awakening upon moving to Hollywood where he became active in such causes as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Ironically, Joseph McCarthy targeted Price as a possible communist in the fifties, citing Price’s anti-Nazi inclinations as proof that he was some sort of dangerous radical. McCarthy was one loony piece of work.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 265

The Date: June 21

The Movie: Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

What Is It?: Roger excelled at making weird movies, so it’s no small thing to say that Attack of the Crab Monsters is one of his weirdest. Nuclear radiation from the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests not only makes crabs grow to requisite 1950s sci-fi proportions but also makes them absorb the brains of dead people, thereby acquiring intelligence, telepathic communication skills, the ability to cause landslides, and bizarre human-like faces. What makes this weirder than, say, The Little Shop of Horrors or Creature from the Haunted Sea is the seriousness with which it’s all played.

Why Today?: Today is the first day of that crabby cancer star sign.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 226

The Date: May 13

The Movie: Dementia 13 (1963)

What Is It?: Francis Ford Coppola delivers his assigned Psycho rip off to Roger Corman and kick starts his own career as a writer-director. More fun than The Godfather, though that’s probably true of every movie with Patrick Magee.

Why Today?: Today is Friday the 13^th. You thought I might assign Friday the 13^th today? Nah. I like you too much to expect you to watch that crap. Watch this crap instead!

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 188

The Date: April 5

The Movie: Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

What Is It?: Roger Corman’s funniest movie was shot in about two minutes for the cost of a donut…and that’s 1960 donut prices, which means the donut dealer actually paid you to buy his donuts! Corman made the most of his teensy shooting schedule and budget with an outrageous yet endearing tale of a boy’s love of a girl and a houseplant’s love of eating people.

Why Today?: On this day in 1926,  Roger Corman is born. May he never die.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 111

The Date: January 19

The Movie: Masque of the Red Death (1964)

What Is It?: Roger Corman hits his horror peak with this lavish adaptation of two Poe tales (“Hop Frog” is the other). Corman receives A-list support from screenwriter Charles Beaumont, cinematographer Nic Roeg, and stars Jane Asher, Hazel Court, Patrick Magee, Skip Martin, and Mr. Vincent Price.

Why Today?: On this day in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 53

The Date: November 22

The Movie: Death Race 2000 (1975)

What Is It?: Paul Bartel’s brilliant cult movie lampoons the media and public’s thirst for blood with a competition in which a colorful crew of wacky racers score points for each pedestrian they mow down.

Why Today?: Today is Go for a Ride Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 44

The Date: November 13

The Movie: The Intruder (1962)

What Is It?: Roger Corman, the so-called “King of the B-Movies,” makes a “message film” infinitely more fearless than any other such picture of its era. William Shatner is chilling as a despicable shit stirrer who travels south to incite a violent backlash against school integration.

Why Today?: On this day in 1956, the Supreme Court outlaws segregated buses in Alabama.

Review 'A Bucket of Blood' Blu-ray

Because of their chintzy budgets and on-the-fly productions, early Roger Corman efforts like Attack of the Crab Monsters came off more like parodies than the director probably intended them to be. With A Bucket of Blood, Corman and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith embraced the goofiness and transformed what could have been a serious low-budget horror about an artist who incorporates corpses into his work into the first great Corman/Griffith horror comedy. With the wonderfully sympathetic Dick Miller as Walter Paisley, a nebbish who aspires to be as much of an “artist” as the pretentious beatniks who frequent the coffee bar where he waits tables, A Bucket of Blood isn’t as outrageous as The Little Shop of Horrors, the film in which the Corman/Griffith magic fully blossomed (a-hem), but it is amusing and sometimes fairly horrifying. Its plot could have been ripped right from the pages of The Vault of Horror (in fact, it shares quite a few similarities to “Easel Kill Ya” from The Vault), and its cartoonish approach to dialogue, characterization, and design also has the feel of a live-action E.C. comic without the color. 

The Film Detective’s new blu-ray presents that comic aesthetic quite well. Like so many of Corman’s early films, A Bucket of Blood is in the public domain and has been subjected to a lot of lousy home video releases. The Film Detective should be commended for going to the original 35mm source, especially in light of all the ninth-generation crap out there. Appearances of tiny white specks are fairly regular, but they aren’t especially intrusive and there are no major scratches to speak of. No edge enhancement has been applied to sharpen the naturally soft look. The film looks its best when there are strong blacks on screen to contrast the more washed-out whites. The mono audio is clear, which is especially complimentary to the cool jazz score, though there is a constant buzzing undercurrent noticeable during the music-less passages. There are no bonuses, but considering that A Bucket of Blood probably wasn’t high on any other home video company’s to-do lists, it’s groovy that it has received an HD release at all.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 25

The Date: October 25

The Movie: A Bucket of Blood (1959)

What Is It?: Roger Corman’s classic horror-comedy finds wannabe beatnik Dick Miller going to deadly lengths to create his critic-pleasing art pieces. I wonder if Charles B. Griffith spent a week reading EC Comics before penning this mini-classic.

Why Today?: Today is Artist’s Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 7

The Date: October 7

The Movie: House of Usher (1960)

What Is It?: Roger Corman’s first Poe adaptation has all the classic elements in place: Vincent Price, Gothic overload, gorgeous color, lavish sets, and a Richard Matheson script. It's a bit meandering, but the apocalyptic climax is a big pay off.

Why Today?: On this day in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe dies.

Review: 'Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics'

Narrowing a century of horror cinema down to 72 essential films is a goal doomed to fail. Genre fans tend to be bloody-minded in more ways than one. We are a tough breed to please, and Michael Mallory really stuck his hand into the monster’s mouth with his new book Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics. I can’t say that his selections totally defeated my own bloody mindedness, but I can say that most of them fit the bill. While I’d never argue that movies such as The Last House on the Left, Friday the 13^th, or Saw are good, I will admit that they are essential by representing major facets and turning points in horror history. Some of his choices are more confounding. Since this book covers so few films, I can’t understand how some of these made the cut (Polanksi’s beautifully shot but dull and embarrassingly unfunny horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers; a film called Waxworks that I have not seen but does not really seem to qualify as horror based on Mallory’s write-up; The Beast with Five Fingers) while others— such as The Black Cat, The Innocents, and Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a shockingly ahead-of-its-time film that Mallory criticizes for being more dated and less grim than the silent version starring John Barrymore!) weren’t even in the running. Mallory’s extended “Fifty Additional Horror Films Worth Seeing” list doesn’t even sweep up the debris and contains a number of notorious stinkers (Roger Corman’s The Terror, Son of Dracula, Count Yorga).

Of course, this is the kind of reaction we serious horror freaks are supposed to have, and I’m sure there were more than a few outraged reactions to my own 150 Essential Horror Movies series from a few years back. I tried to make my list worth reading by writing what I hoped were insightful readings of the films and their places in horror history. This is also what Mallory did to make his cases, and although photos receive pride of place in his coffee table book (and those images do make this a very appealingly grotesque volume), his text is the real essential elements because of its insights and its trivia, although I’d keep a wide birth when reading his spoiler-sprinkled summaries of films you’ve never seen. I was actually surprised that I’d never seen a handful of these (Waxworks, Mill of the Stone Woman, Mark of the Wolfman), so his book even fulfilled the purpose that all books and lists of this sort should: convincing recommendations.

Review: 'Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told' Blu-ray

Earlier this year I reviewed Christopher Workman and Troy Howarth’s Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s. I gave the horror movie guide a deserved good write up, but I privately took issue with one statement the authors made: “While the 1930s do not represent the birth of the horror genre, the decade does represent the genre at its most formative. Not until the 1970s would it see another such year…”

I disagree. Just look at what happened to the genre in the 1960s. That’s the decade horror really had an impact throughout the globe, producing enduring classics in France (Eyes without a Face), Russia (Viy), Japan (where do I start?), Italy (ditto), and the UK (double-ditto). It’s when horror got truly gory (Eyes without a Face in the art houses and Herschell Gordon Lewis’s movies in the grind houses), when the devil came home (Rosemary’s Baby), when Romero reinvented the zombie once and for all, and when the small screen finally made room for monsters (“The Munsters”, “The Addams Family”).

The sixties was also when the horror film became truly self-referential and ironic, largely thanks to Roger Corman. The producer is famous for turning out big star directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. All those guys went on to distinguished careers with work barely traceable back to Corman’s rubber-suited monsters and kooky campiness.

One of Corman’s first collaborators, Jack Hill, was a different story. He too was successful, but exploitative fare like Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Switchblade Sisters was much more in keeping with Corman’s wild sensibility. So was Hill’s first movie, though drive-in dwellers would have to wait four years to see Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told, because financing delays kept it from being released closer to its 1964 production. When the movie finally surfaced in ’68, cheap-o horror fans had to have been impressed by the flick. They had to have! That crazy premise (the inbred Merrye clan regress as they get older, behaving more and more like children…and more and more like psycho killers!)! That totally far-out, totally committed cast (special nods to Jill Banner, Beverly Washburn, and Sid Haig as the Merrye kids and Lon Chaney, Jr., giving what may be his best and most moving performance as their adoring caregiver)! Hill’s witty, gross, offensive script that never stops winking at us! Alfred Taylor’s atmospheric photography, which casts an artful shadow over the whole production! Spider Baby may have even bested Corman classics like A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, and for a cheapy cult flick many of its fans label “bad” (it isn’t), the movie has certainly had legs (eight of them, I’m sure), influencing filmmakers like Joe Dante and Rob Zombie and spawning a stage musical version.

A true cult classic with charms every cult movie fan does not necessarily recognize, Spider Baby was a prime candidate for British cult home video distribution company, Arrow Films, which has developed quite the cult following of its own. Indeed, Arrow released a region B edition of Hill’s movie as a blu-ray/DVD combo in 2013. Earlier this year, Arrow launched a U.S. branch, and wisely selected Spider Baby as one of its first stateside titles. This excited me because I’ve been waiting for the right title to introduce me to Arrow, and I can think of few righter than Spider Baby.

I am not disappointed, although reasonable expectations are still required. Keep in mind that this is a low-budget movie shot in twelve days that hasn’t exactly been preserved as if it was Citizen Kane. Crispness is inconsistent. There are some bad elements here and there (you won’t miss the blurry, unstable shots of a character tied to a chair). The sound is fairly tinny. But one cannot really expect this movie to look or sound any better considering how it was made and how it has been preserved. Overall, the picture looks really good and natural, and Taylor’s images remain bold and atmospheric.

Spider Baby also delivers in the extras area, several of which have been carried over from Dark Sky’s 2009 DVD. There’s a nice half-hour documentary that trots out most of the surviving major players, including Hill, Taylor, Washburn, and Haig (as we’re sadly reminded, Jill Banner died in a car crash in 1982, and obviously, old-timers Chaney and Mantan Moreland have been gone for decades). Carol Ohmart is the only notable no-show. Hill and Haig contribute an audio commentary, and there are additional featurettes on the Merrye House and Ronald Stein, who composed the memorable score, including the fun theme song “sung” by Lon Chaney; a stills gallery; an alternate opening credits sequence with the original title Cannibal Orgy; and an extended version of the scene in which all the outsiders arrive at Merrye House.

The two major extras unique to Arrow’s blu-ray are “The Host”, a Jack Hill student short boasting Sid Haig’s film debut, and a 2012 panel discussion featuring Jack Hill, Beverly Washburn, and Quinn Redeker (Uncle Peter). “The Host” is a 1960 western based on James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. It has atmosphere and a star-quality star, but the addition of a cheesy synthesizer score clashes with the period mood. For those looking for that old Jack Hill touch of schlock, there’s a little gore and the truly ridiculous impersonations of Mexicans that Haig’s costars perpetrate. The panel takes a while to get started, so we only spend 23 minutes of its half-hour with the director and actors (though the MC’s extended description of other programs running at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences FILM-TO-FILM festival made me wish I could travel back to 2012). Then we get to heartfelt remembrances of Banner and Chaney from Washburn, quite a bit of capering and one provocative comment about The Beatles’ fondness for Banner from Redeker, and some background on the film from Hill that touches on the stage musical version and Hill's own unproduced sequel. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that that one might still happen...

Review: 'St. Valentine’s Day Massacre' Blu-ray

An insulting amount of the commentary on the honorary Oscar Roger Corman received in 2009 focused on how he launched the careers of directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, and others of their ilk and basically dismissed the man’s own directorial work. Despite that naked gold guy on his mantel, Roger Corman is still considered a B-movie hack by a lot of critics, which is total bollocks. Even when working on super low-budget, abridged-schedule stuff like Little Shop of Horrors he made original and fun work. When he was more artistically invested in his projects, he could make truly audacious, genuinely inventive pictures, such as The Masque of the Red Death and his rarely seen masterpiece The Intruder, a film that dealt with racism in such a head-on way for its time that Corman would have deserved that Oscar even if it he’d never done anything else.

When the independent-minded Corman got the odd opportunity to make St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for a major studio in 1967, he got to work with a bigger budget, schedule, and cast than ever before. Though all the frivolous spending that went down at Twentieth Century Fox repelled him, Corman still made the most of the opportunity. He directed big stars Jason Robards (as Al Capone), George Segal (Peter Gusenberg), and Ralph Meeker (Bugs Moran); shot on sets originally used for such huge productions as The Sound of Music and Hello, Dolly; and commanded a camera that swoops around those sets like a bird of prey. Before shooting the climactic scene, he had his actors study photographs of the actual gangland massacre to mimic the positions of the actual corpses. That’s a pretty keen attention to detail for a “B-movie hack” (incidentally, I recently read a great interview with Corman in which he takes issue with that designation for purely semantic reasons; a B-movie, he reminds us, is not any old trashy flick but a lower-budget supporting feature specific to the 1930s and ’40s).

Although Corman’s visuals are top notch in St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the film is not without its issues. There is no attempt to empathize with the assortment of hoods, as there was in the same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, so it’s difficult to care about what happens to these creeps. Beloved voice-over artist Paul Frees’s narration distances the viewer further, introducing each of the film’s many, many characters by stating the time and date of his death. This makes everyone’s actions seem mechanical, a bunch of rats scurrying through a simplistic maze on the way to their inevitable dooms. This could have been done with effective grimness, but Robards and Segal give such over-the-top performances that it’s hard to feel the gravity of what they do or what is done to them (and keep an eye and ear out for Jack Nicholson, who delivers his one and only line in a silly voice). The closest the film comes to a sympathetic character is Bruce Dern’s mechanic, a loving dad who gets off-handedly swept up in the violence, but only has about three minutes of screen time.

A bit cold and nihilistic, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is still a beautiful looking picture, and Twilight Time’s new blu-ray presents it splendidly. Colors are gloriously vivid (there are a couple of sequences that are a bit pink but it’s likely this was an aesthetic decision in line with Corman’s use of colors in Red Death), and I noticed no significant blemishes. Extras are slight but neat. There’s a new three-and-a-half-minute interview with Corman created specifically for this release and five minutes of vintage Fox Movietone newsreel footage about the arrest and prosecution of Capone. The picture quality of some of these clips is really strong. As always, there are also Julie Kirgo’s illuminating liner notes and an isolated score track. Get it on Screen Archives.com here.