American International Pictures

An American International Pictures western directed by Edward L. Cahn, the prolific B-movie workhorse who also made It! The Terror from Beyond Space. John Agar plays a young cowboy tracking the gunman who killed his twin brother, teaming up with a hard-drinking ex-convict gunfighter (Mike Connors, still billing himself as "Touch" Connors) and an Indian woman called Yellow Hawk. Marla English, AIP's resident noir-vixen of the mid-fifties, plays the saloon girl caught between them. Shot fast and cheap like everything on the AIP slate, but the vengeance plot has a grim little edge to it. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Western

An early Roger Corman quickie shot in Hawaii for American International Pictures. Two brothers on the run after a robbery — wanted man Chris (Bill Cord) and his younger brother Jim (Don Durant) — are shipwrecked on a remote island colony of pearl-diving women, whose queenly keeper (Lisa Montell) answers to a shark god with a taste for human sacrifice. Barely over an hour long, it's a shaggy tropical pulp adventure typical of Corman's late-50s output. The film is in the public domain.

Adventure · Drama

Seymour works in a failing flower shop on Skid Row and raises a strange plant he found after a total eclipse. The plant will only drink human blood, and as it grows it demands more, so Seymour feeds it the people who get in his way. Roger Corman shot the film in two days and a night on leftover sets from another production, and it became a surprise hit that ran for years in midnight screenings. The script by Charles B. Griffith is full of oddball characters and black comedy, and a young Jack Nicholson has a small, memorable part as a masochistic dental patient. The film later inspired the off-Broadway musical and the 1986 film adaptation. The original entered the public domain due to a missing copyright notice.

Comedy · Horror

Walter Paisley is a awkward busboy at a Bohemian coffeehouse who longs to be accepted by the beatnik artists and poets who hang out there. When he accidentally kills his landlady's cat, he covers the body in clay and passes it off as a sculpture, and the café's crowd hails him as a genius. Pressured to produce more work, he graduates from dead cats to dead people. Roger Corman shot the film in five days on a $50,000 budget using leftover sets, and Charles B. Griffith's script turns the pretensions of the art world into a sharp black comedy. Dick Miller, a character actor who spent decades in small parts, gets a rare lead and carries it. The film is a companion piece to The Little Shop of Horrors, made the next year by the same team. It entered the public domain due to a missing copyright notice.

Comedy · Horror

People begin disappearing in a backwoods swamp, and a game warden and a local doctor discover that giant, slug-like leeches are responsible. The creatures drag their victims down into the water and keep them alive to feed on slowly. Produced by Gene Corman for American International Pictures and released on a double bill with A Bucket of Blood, Attack of the Giant Leeches is a tight little creature feature that gets its mileage out of the swamp atmosphere and the underwater scenes of the leeches at work. The monsters are men in rubber suits, which is part of the charm. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal of its copyright.

Horror · Sci-Fi

Francis Ford Coppola's feature directorial debut, produced by Roger Corman with leftover money from another shoot. A woman conceals her husband's death and travels to his family's Irish castle to secure a share of the inheritance, only to find the household haunted by the drowning of a young daughter years before. Then an ax-wielding killer begins picking off members of the family. Coppola shot the film in Ireland on a tiny budget, and Corman later added a prologue by Monte Hellman to pad the runtime. The result is a rough but atmospheric black-and-white horror picture that hints at the talent Coppola would soon develop. It entered the public domain and has circulated widely on budget labels ever since.

Horror · Mystery

An early Roger Corman quickie shot in Hawaii for American International Pictures. Two brothers on the run after a robbery — wanted man Chris (Bill Cord) and his younger brother Jim (Don Durant) — are shipwrecked on a remote island colony of pearl-diving women, whose queenly keeper (Lisa Montell) answers to a shark god with a taste for human sacrifice. Barely over an hour long, it's a shaggy tropical pulp adventure typical of Corman's late-50s output. The film is in the public domain.

Adventure · Drama

Vincent Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, the apparent sole survivor of a plague that has turned the rest of humanity into vampire-like creatures. By day he hunts them and stakes them; by night he barricades himself inside his home while they swarm outside, calling his name. The film is the first adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, which later inspired The Omega Man and the Will Smith version. Matheson worked on the screenplay but was unhappy with it and took a pseudonym. Shot in Rome on a low budget, it leans on Price's weary, haunted performance to carry the isolation. The film entered the public domain in the 1980s and is widely considered the most faithful of the novel's adaptations.

Horror · Sci-Fi

Seymour works in a failing flower shop on Skid Row and raises a strange plant he found after a total eclipse. The plant will only drink human blood, and as it grows it demands more, so Seymour feeds it the people who get in his way. Roger Corman shot the film in two days and a night on leftover sets from another production, and it became a surprise hit that ran for years in midnight screenings. The script by Charles B. Griffith is full of oddball characters and black comedy, and a young Jack Nicholson has a small, memorable part as a masochistic dental patient. The film later inspired the off-Broadway musical and the 1986 film adaptation. The original entered the public domain due to a missing copyright notice.

Comedy · Horror

A newlywed woman moves into her husband's estate, the home he shared with his first wife, who drowned on the grounds. Soon she begins seeing a skull that rolls toward her and hearing screams no one else can hear, and she starts to wonder whether she is losing her mind or whether the dead wife is reaching out from the grave. The Screaming Skull is a low-budget black-and-white horror film that builds its scares from atmosphere and suggestion rather than effects. The opening famously warns the audience that the film is so frightening the producers will pay for a burial coffin if anyone dies of fright while watching. It entered the public domain and later found a second life through Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Horror · Mystery

A young officer in Napoleon's army, separated from his regiment, follows a mysterious woman to the castle of an elderly baron and uncovers a story of murder, guilt, and a witch's curse. The Terror is famous less for its plot than for how it was made. Roger Corman shot Boris Karloff's scenes in a few days using leftover sets from The Raven, then sent a string of directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, and Jack Hill, to film the rest around them. Jack Nicholson, then a young actor on Corman's payroll, plays the lead. The film fell into the public domain because it was released without a copyright notice. It is a rambling, atmospheric curiosity that captures a group of future major filmmakers at the very start of their careers.

Horror