Among the Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s various works, The Masque Of The Red Death stands out as one of the best, featuring superior production values (they flew over to England for a tax break and apparently ended up re-using the sets from Beckett), a particularly vile performance by Vincent Price as Prince Prospero, and a story that was more than the standard old dark house with degenerate families story that seemed to permeate these productions like the stench of a corpse moldering in a secret chamber somewhere in the living room walls. It didn’t hurt this movie any either when this midget burned alive a guy in a gorilla suit. That’s money in the bank every time. Read More

The details are almost too terrifying to report: a $25,000 budget, a two week shooting schedule, Tommy Kirk, and a TV movie. That in a nutshell is what we have with Mars Needs Women, a movie that can’t hide the low budget, low star power, and the low wattage script that it suffers from throughout. Read More

Roger Corman’s version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher is a bore that left me with several questions. For instance, do the characters really stand around for the first forty minutes whining about some family destiny that dooms them all to death? Are there really only four actors in this movie not counting the extras in the dream sequence that Corman must have felt compelled to put in so that something remotely interesting could be highlighted in the movie’s trailer? Did Vincent Price really dye his hair blonde for the role of Roderick Usher? Read More

Scientist Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) is puttering about his house doing what most of us violent, superstitious nerd bachelors would do in our downtime after the end of the world: sharpen wooden stakes, load the door up with fresh garlic, and play with his shortwave radio. Remember when you thought Armageddon would be super awesome? Sheesh. What a let down! Read More

With Journey to the Seventh Planet, we are in the far flung past of 2001 where everything is just peachy now that the United Nations runs the world. So now that this socialist paradise has finally been forced upon us, what do they squander all our precious resources on? A manned mission to explore Uranus! Read More

The year is the far flung future of 1973. It’s a bizarre future where people don’t have muttonchop sideburns, drive AMC Gremlins or say stuff like “you dig.” In fact, this future looks like the black and white world of the late 1950s where taking a trip into space meant smoking Lucky Strikes in the rocket, putting shiny goop in your hair and having the lady astronauts clear the dinner table and serve you coffee. (Is this a rocket ship or a Denny’s?) Read More

Having already run through this premise with Charles Laughton in 1933’s Island Of Lost Souls and a bunch of nobodies in 1959’s Blood Creature, I wasn’t too excited at the prospect of sitting through some goof in his ape man make-up running down Moreau’s laws whenever Moreau wandered into his cave with a bullwhip and a chip on his shoulder. Read More

There’s really no way to overstate how feeble Invisible Invaders is. Even genre stalwart John Carradine is smart enough to get blown up in the opening frames, reappear briefly as a zombie (he’s very convincing as a dead guy), then disappear entirely from things. Read More

The first words on the screen were “Presented by R.I. Diculous.” A few more of these “wacky” credits followed confirming my suspicions that I was in for one of those most painful of movie going experiences: the bad movie that tries to be so bad that it’s funny. Read More

Saddled with an idiotic idea that doesn’t even allow for any great scenes of violence or horror (other than a few naked 1970s people), Invasion Of The Bee Girls does at least manage to sprinkle some absurdly funny moments throughout its duration. Read More