Press Book Collection - Tales of Terror (1962)

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Press Book Collection - The Haunted Palace (1963)

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Press Book Collection - The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

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Day the World Ended (1955)

Dir: ROGER CORMAN
Country: USA

Day the World Ended was Roger Corman’s third official film as a director and his first major foray into the realm of science-fiction. Corman has quite rightly become a cult hero, the messiah of low budget guerrilla filmmaking. But I’m under no illusion that his greatest contribution to cinema came as a producer. There is an easy temptation to be overly generous towards Corman’s 1950’s productions because of the esteem that enthusiasts of genre cinema hold him in. This is often the same attitude taken toward AIP, the production company to which Corman had an intimate relationship. Whereas most directors would be pilloried for amateurishness, Corman’s brand of amateur filmmaking is celebrated. But in the case of Day the World Ended the incompetence of the novice filmmaker is not alleviated by an intelligent screenplay, nor is it saved by an enthusiastic tone - the film is actually incredibly ponderous and suffers from a solemnity that becomes quite irritating at times. I understand that the end of the world is a serious matter, but Lou Rusoff’s screenplay makes no effort to lighten a leaden tone. One would imagine that working within such a sombre and ominous framework the film would be afforded the philosophical and metaphysical insights of serious drama. Instead it opts for the sensational and ultimately comes across as a stupid and empty rip off of Arch Oboler’s far superior Five (1951).

Roger Corman Poster Gallery

After the positive reception and popularity of my Amicus Productions and Stanley Kubrick poster galleries I’ve decided to make this a regular feature of The Celluloid Highway. So every Friday or Saturday I will offer up some visual stimulation for those who enjoy the odd break from reading reviews. This week I bring you the films of producer/director Roger Corman. Corman emerged at a time in the 1950’s when the vertically integrated foundations of Hollywood were beginning to crack and the major studios monopolisation and domination was beginning to fragment and weaken. A number of independent producers sprung up who were able to use their limited budgets and enthusiasm for genre product in order to capitalise on the rise of the affluent middle class teenage market. Corman’s difference was his innate ability to shoot his films with astonishing speed, as one film rapidly followed another onto the drive-ins screens. In the 50’s Corman produced westerns, science-fiction, historical adventures, and contemporary tales of rock n roll juvenilia. In the 1960’s he shifted his attentions to the horror film and under the auspices of American International Pictures directed a number of films based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, often featuring Vincent Price in the lead. During the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s Corman’s output as a director was greatly reduced as he concentrated on production and distribution. Although his work as a distributor is incredibly important, this gallery concentrates entirely on Corman’s work as a director. I hope you enjoy it, as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

Swamp Women aka Cruel Swamp (1953)

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Not of This Earth (1957)

Dir: ROGER CORMAN
Country: USA

Not of this Earth (1957) is one of director/producer Roger Corman’s earliest science-fiction efforts, and one of his best. It followed on the heels of Day the World Ended (1955) and It Conquered the World (1956) and directly preceded one of his more notoriously enjoyable titles Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). These films possess charm chiefly through the obvious enthusiasm for the material, but in terms of filmmaking were never able to escape their poverty row production values. Not of This Earth is slightly different, and feels like a much more professional production. The performances are of particular note and Corman composes some finely structured sequences of suspense. But the major difference is in the tone and atmosphere of the piece. This film perhaps more than any illustrated the manner in which the horror film had been absorbed into science fiction in the 1950’s. The writers Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote a number of other Corman films such as A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and The Wild Angels (1966)) and Mark Hanna offer up an interesting interpretation of vampirism for a post war America paranoid about nuclear annihilation.

Tales of Terror (1962)

Dir: ROGER CORMAN
Country: USA

aka:
Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Terror

It seems only appropriate after stretching the Edgar Allan Poe short stories The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Premature Burial to feature length that Roger Corman for his fourth trip into Poe’s feverish universe should choose the form of the anthology film. By this point the Poe team under the auspices of Corman and production company American International Pictures was familiar and tight nit. Richard Matheson was on hand to contribute his third screenplay to the series, and Floyd Crosby completed a Poe quartet in the department of cinematography, maintaining a lighting scheme that gave the Poe films a uniformity in their visual style. In front of the camera Vincent Price contributes four performances to the anthology, appearing in each segment, and using his silken tones as the narrator. Like any anthology the results are patchy and uneven, with some segments clearly better than others. But Corman and his collaborators once again achieve a delicate and hallucinatory climate of gothic phantasmagoria and hysterical melodrama.

The Haunted Palace (1963)

Dir: ROGER CORMAN
Country: USA

aka:
Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace

In the 1960’s Roger Corman in conjunction with American International Pictures was creating his own brand of gothic horror. These films which were largely based on the short stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe offered more psychological depth than the rival productions of England’s Hammer. Corman opted for a more delicate and finely balanced visual palette which mirrored the dreamy and hallucinatory nature of his films. Hammer’s merits lay in the externalised opulence of their production design and art direction. An evocative visual landscape which ultimately distanced the viewer from the horror on screen. Corman however was just as interested in interior landscapes and in the interaction between emotional depth and visual style. For this reason Corman’s Poe films seem to have an intellectual dimension which was rarely reached by any of his contemporaries.