Roger Corman

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

A horror-comedy directed by Roger Corman, written by Charles B. Griffith. American agent XK150, using the alias Sparks Moran (Robert Towne, billed as Edward Wain), infiltrates a gang led by Renzo Capetto (Antony Carbone), who is transporting a Cuban general and a fortune in treasury gold out of Cuba. Capetto invents a sea monster to cover his murders, but a real creature from the haunted sea surfaces to complicate matters. Corman, exhausted by monster movie formulas, famously ended the film with the creature killing the entire cast and picking its teeth with their bones. Filmed in Puerto Rico in 1959, the film was released by The Filmgroup on a double bill with Devil's Partner. Robert Towne would go on to win an Academy Award for writing Chinatown (1974). The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Comedy

A 1960 American science fiction film produced and directed by Roger Corman. Shady businessman Harold Gern (Antony Carbone), his wife Evelyn (Betsy Jones-Moreland), and his lawyer Martin Joyce (Robert Towne, in his screenwriting debut, credited as Edward Wain) are scuba diving off Puerto Rico when a mysterious temporary absence of oxygen kills everyone on the island — and possibly the world. When they surface, they find themselves the sole survivors of an unexplained apocalypse. As the three adjust to their new existence, the tension of being the last people on Earth — with only one woman — drives the two men into a deadly rivalry. Shot in Puerto Rico on a low budget, the film features an early screenplay by Robert Towne, who later won an Oscar for Chinatown (1974).

Sci-Fi · Drama

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

The first feature directed by Roger Corman. Undercover police officer Lee Hampton (Carole Mathews) infiltrates a women's prison, befriends a trio of convicts led by the hard-boiled Josie Nardo (Marie Windsor), and engineers their escape — all part of a plan to recover a cache of stolen diamonds hidden deep in the Louisiana swamps. Beverly Garland, Mike "Touch" Connors, and Corman regulars Jonathan Haze and Ed Nelson round out the cast of this swampy girls-behind-bars crime picture, shot on location in Louisiana. Also released as "Swamp Diamonds" and "Cruel Swamp," it is in the public domain.

Crime · Thriller

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 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

The head of a cosmetics company, worried that her aging face is hurting sales, agrees to injections of an experimental wasp-enzyme serum from a discredited scientist. The treatment restores her youth, but the side effects turn her, at intervals, into a murderous wasp-like creature. Roger Corman directed The Wasp Woman quickly and cheaply, recycling the theme of beauty obsession and scientific hubris he had used in earlier films. Susan Cabot plays the lead with a brittle intensity that lifts the material above its budget. The film is in the public domain and has circulated widely on budget home video.

Horror · Sci-Fi

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

A horror-comedy directed by Roger Corman, written by Charles B. Griffith. American agent XK150, using the alias Sparks Moran (Robert Towne, billed as Edward Wain), infiltrates a gang led by Renzo Capetto (Antony Carbone), who is transporting a Cuban general and a fortune in treasury gold out of Cuba. Capetto invents a sea monster to cover his murders, but a real creature from the haunted sea surfaces to complicate matters. Corman, exhausted by monster movie formulas, famously ended the film with the creature killing the entire cast and picking its teeth with their bones. Filmed in Puerto Rico in 1959, the film was released by The Filmgroup on a double bill with Devil's Partner. Robert Towne would go on to win an Academy Award for writing Chinatown (1974). The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Comedy

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

A 1955 American crime drama produced by Roger Corman and co-directed by John Ireland and Edward Sampson. Ireland stars as Frank Webster, a man framed for murder who breaks out of jail and takes a rich woman's Jaguar at gunpoint, with the woman, Connie Adair (Dorothy Malone), still inside. As she tries to escape numerous times, the two soon develop feelings for each other and enter a road race that ends in Mexico. Made on a budget of just $50,000, the film was one of Corman's early productions and was distributed by American Releasing Corporation, the precursor to American International Pictures. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama · Action

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

The head of a cosmetics company, worried that her aging face is hurting sales, agrees to injections of an experimental wasp-enzyme serum from a discredited scientist. The treatment restores her youth, but the side effects turn her, at intervals, into a murderous wasp-like creature. Roger Corman directed The Wasp Woman quickly and cheaply, recycling the theme of beauty obsession and scientific hubris he had used in earlier films. Susan Cabot plays the lead with a brittle intensity that lifts the material above its budget. The film is in the public domain and has circulated widely on budget home video.

Horror · Sci-Fi