The Velvet Vampire (1971)

The Velvet Vampire was made for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in 1971. It was directed by Stephanie Rothman.

This was a time when filmmakers in many different countries were totally redefining the vampire movie. The period between 1969 and 1974 saw the release of Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness, José Larraz’s Vampyres, Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire, Michio Yamamoto’s The Vampire Doll and Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire. Huge chunks of traditional vampire lore were discarded. These were vampire movies in contemporary settings and these were vampires for the 70s.

The Velvet Vampire was very much part of this trend.

Lee Ritter (Michael Blodgett) and his wife Susan Ritter (Sherry Miles) meet the glamorous but strange Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) at an art gallery. Lee is clearly besotted. Diane invites the couple to her house in the desert.

The Ritters’ car breaks down so they’re stuck at Diane’s house for several days. Diane seduces Lee. Susan has disturbing dreams.

Susan isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but she knows when another woman is trying to steal her man.

For more than a century there have been strange unexplained disappearances in the area. Lee and Susan should be more worried by this than they are. There are clues that there is something odd about Diane but they don’t connect the dots.

This is not likely to end well for the young couple.

The acting is generally terrible. Celeste Yarnall can’t act but she does look like a spooky mysterious sexy lady vampire and she gives off the right sinister seductive but creepy vibes.

Anyone seeing The Velvet Vampire at the time (or today) who was unfamiliar with European horror would have seen it as revolutionary and groundbreaking. Anyone actually familiar with European horror would have noticed that every single groundbreaking element in The Velvet Vampire is found in Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (made a year earlier) apart from from a few ideas that are found in Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire (also made a year earlier). And a few ideas that appeared in Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness.

Vampires who love the sun, vampires who enjoy lazing by the swimming pool, a vampire movie that eschews darkness and gothic trappings in favour of bright sunshine, vampirism as a blood disease. Even the symbolism - the scene with the rattlesnake is reminiscent of the scene with the scorpion in Vampyros Lesbos. And Franco and Rollin had already made vampire movies with dream imagery.

The best thing about this movie is that Diane is not an exiled European noblewoman - she’s an all-American girl. In some scenes, with her hat and boots, she looks a bit like a vampire cowgirl.

Finding good locations is crucial in low-budget filmmaking and in this case the locations are good. Not just the mansion in the desert but the abandoned mine and the ghost town. They could however have been used with a bit more flair and imagination.

The dream sequence with the bed and the mirror in the middle of desert achieves a nicely subtle surreal feel. It’s definitely the high point of the movie.

There’s a reason that Stephanie Rothman did not go on to a glittering career as a director. She was a terrible director. She fails to achieve the necessary feeling of menace. Everything about this movie is stilted and stiff, amateurish and rather dull.

This was a rare flop for Roger Corman. It did poorly at the box office and critics were scathing.

The Velvet Vampire seriously fails to live up to its potential. At best it’s an oddity. Maybe worth a look if you’re a vampire movie completist.

The Shout! Factory DVD offers a very good 16:9 enhanced transfer, with a few extras.

Dinosaur Island (1994)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Candy Stripe Nurses (1974)

Candy Stripe Nurses, released in 1974, was the last of the hugely popular nurse movies made by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

It was written and directed by Alan Holleb.

These movies followed a formula that Corman used in other series as well. The movie tells the stories of three nurses and the adventures and misadventures they have on the job and off. Most of the adventures seem to involve the young ladies losing their clothing. The stories of the three women are intercut throughout the film although there’s no connection between their stories.

Candy stripe nurses (or candy stripers) were volunteers who performed simple nursing duties under the supervision of nurses. Such volunteers still exist but I don’t think we’re allowed to call them candy stripers any more. They were called candy stripers because of the cute candy-striped uniforms they wore, which are probably also not allowed any more.

Firstly there’s Marisa (Maria Rojo). She keeps getting into trouble at school. She’s the world’s oldest juvenile delinquent (Miss Rojo was 31 when she made this movie). Her principal is tempted to call the police after her latest outrage but offers her a way out. The matter will be forgotten if she volunteers to work as a candy stripe nurse at the local hospital.

One of Marisa’s patients is a young guy named Carlos who was wounded during a gas station armed robbery. He’s now facing prison for his part in the robbery. He assures Marisa that he is innocent (and in fact he really is innocent). Marisa plays amateur detective to find evidence that will clear him. She is motivated by a love of justice, and by the fact that she thinks Carlos is really nice and really cute.

This is the segment that doesn’t really work because it’s too serious in tone and the plot idea isn’t that great.

Secondly there’s Diane (Robin Matson). She’s an intellectual and she hopes to be a doctor one day. She takes life pretty seriously. She likes men, but she likes serious intellectual men. Until she gets involved with a patient. He’s a jock (in fact a basketball player). He’s not her type at all. At least that’s what she thinks until they have wild sex in the gym. Now she realises she really likes totally non-intellectual jocks.

Everything would be fine except that he keeps going nuts and doing crazy things. The doctors thought he was on drugs but the drug tests were negative. Diane is sure she can find a way to save him. This segment works because Robin Matson is a cute, sexy, likeable oddball.

Thirdly there’s Sandy (Candice Rialson). She’s doing really well in her studies because she’s discovered the secret of academic success. You get young doctors to do your homework for you by having sex with them. She ends up working in the hospital’s sex clinic. One of the patients being treated in the sex clinic is rock star Owen Boles (Kendrew Lascelles). He has dried up creatively because he can no longer satisfy his cute female groupies in the bedroom, and his bedroom prowess was the secret to his creative drive.

Sandy has no doubts that she can reawaken the stricken pop star’s interest in sex. This segment is the most amusing.

The acting is adequate given that the roles aren’t exactly over-demanding. Robin Matson and Candice Rialson are charming and sexy and they take their clothes off. Candice Rialson was at this stage the queen of the drive-in movies.

The Corman formula is followed rigidly. A combination of melodrama and sexy humour, very tightly paced, with lots of bare breasts and bottoms. It was a carefully calculated formula - Corman knew just how much nudity and violence he could get away with in the markets at which he was aiming. These nurse movies are very tame, but just titillating enough for those markets.

Corman knew it was a winning formula. Writer-director Alan Holleb gives Corman what he wanted and the result was never going to win any Oscars but it’s fun slightly naughty good-natured entertainment.

Candy Stripe Nurses is recommended as long as your expectations are not set too high.

Shout! Factory has released four Roger Corman nurse movies in a DVD boxed set and if you like his formula you’ll enjoy this set. The transfer is anamorphic and quite acceptable.

I’ve also reviewed another earlier Corman nurse picture, The Young Nurses (1973).

The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

The Warrior and the Sorceress is a 1984 sword & sorcery flick and with Roger Corman as executive producer you more or less know what to expect. It’s generally regarded as a rip-off of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. I generally find these low-budget rip-offs to be a lot of fun.

It takes place on an Earth-like planet inhabited mostly by humans.

A Mysterious Stranger (played by David Carradine) rides into town, only he doesn’t ride. He walks. There don’t seem to be any horses on this planet. In fact there don’t seem to be any animals at all. Wagons are pulled by slaves. The Mysterious Stranger is named Kain (an obvious nod to Carradine’s famous 1970s TV series Kung Fu) but he is also referred to as the Dark One.

He’s a Holy Warrior but his religious order has collapsed and now he’s cynical and disillusioned. Now he fights for money.

The town is the scene of a struggle for power between two rival warlords, the sinister Zeg and the fat debauched Bal Caz. They’re the first two major bad guys to be introduced.

Much of the struggle concerns the town’s only well which is apparently the only water source for miles around.

Kain spends most of the movie playing the two rival warlords off against each other. He changes sides countless time and always seems to end up with a large bag of gold as a result.

When he arrives in town he meets a Wise Old Man known as the Prelate. The Prelate still believes in the Holy Warrior concept and seems to think that Kain will come around to his way of thinking.

Kain also encounters the sorceress of the story, Naja (María Socas). Zeg is holding her captive. He wants her to make him a magical sword. She doesn’t want to do this but Zeg is confident he can persuade her. His methods of persuasion are crude but they’re usually effective.

There’s a third major bad guy, Burgo the Slaver (Armando Capo). Burgo and his fellow slavers are some kind of reptile-men. The three chief villains are all quite happy to try to cut each other’s throats. Kain is happy to work for the bad guys, and to betray them.

We don’t really know at first what Kain’s agenda is. He seems to be as violet and immoral as any of the bad guys, although he does seem interested in the beautiful young sorceress.

There’s a great deal of action and the action scenes are handed quite well. Despite the countless killings I don’t recall seeing a single drop of blood in this movie. It’s entirely gore-free. The movie’s R rating obviously had nothing to do with violence. It was probably large due to the scene in which Zeg has a naked slave girl hurled into a kind of giant fish tank. The scene includes some fairly explicit frontal nudity.

Of course the R rating might have had something to do with the fact that María Socas is topless for the entire movie.

The acting is generally quite passable.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about David Carradine as an actor but he’s not too bad here. He gets across Kain’s moral ambiguity and cynicism and Kain is supposed to be a slightly mysterious guy so for me Carradine’s performance works.

Luke Askew as Zeg and Guillermo Marín as Bal Caz make fine villains. Anthony De Longis is good as Zeg’s chief henchman, a worthy opponent for Kain in a swordfight. María Socas is a fairly convincing sorceress.

It’s a Roger Corman production so it’s obviously made on a very low budget but that’s not a major problem. The monster effects are a bit cheesy, but a movie like this benefits from a bit of cheesiness.

The plot is quite serviceable and it more or less makes sense.

John C. Broderick proves to be a competent enough director.

This movie is included in Shout! Factory’s four-movie Roger Corman sword and sorcery set and the anamorphic transfer is fine.

The Warrior and the Sorceress isn’t as much fun as Deathstalker II (1987) or Barbarian Queen (1985) but it’s still rather enjoyable. Recommended.

Stripped To Kill (1987)

Stripped To Kill is an erotic thriller directed by Katt Shea for Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures in 1987.

The story of how the movie came to be made is in some ways more interesting than the movie itself. Katt Shea had acted in movies for Roger Corman but had never directed a movie. She came up with the idea as a result of a bet she lost with her husband Andy Ruben. The penalty for losing the bet was that she had to visit a strip club. He thought that was the worst penalty you could impose on a woman. She visited the strip club, and she absolutely loved it. She was totally captivated by what she saw as a fascinating form of female artistic expression and she was blown away by the effort and imagination the girls put into devising their acts. She decided that she absolutely had to direct a movie about strippers.

More than that, she wanted to make a movie with real strippers playing the roles of the strippers. Which is what she persuaded Roger Corman to allow her to do. Apart from the lead actress Kay Lenz and one other all of the girls are real strippers. And although a choreographer was brought in to teach the girls how to hit their marks so that their routines would be filmable all of the strip-tease routines seen in the movies were the girls’ own routines.

Shea also wanted her movie to make the point that strippers are not trash, they are in fact artists.

Shea sold Roger Corman on the idea and Shea and her husband came up with a script, and Corman gave the go-ahead.

Somebody is murdering strippers. Undercover cop Detective Cody Sheenan (Kay Lenz) discovers the first body while on another case so she has some personal interest right from the start. She is persuaded to go undercover as a stripper. She tries out in an amateur night contest at the Rock Bottom Club. The guy who runs the club, Ray (Norman Fell), tells her she is the worst dancer he has ever seen but when she assures him that she is reliable he hires her.

Cody starts out with the usual prejudices against strippers but she discovers that she likes the girls, she is impressed by the work they put into their routines and she is fascinated by their world. She also discovers that she actually enjoys stripping.

There’s an obvious suspect, a creepy guy known to the girls as Mr Pocket, and her partner Detective Heineman (Greg Evigan) is convinced that he’s the killer. Cody has a strong feeling that Mr Pocket is weird but harmless.

Of course the killer ends up going after Cody and that leads to a not totally satisfying conclusion.

While the movie is indeed an erotic thriller Shea saw it more as a movie about the world of strippers and it is more successful on that level than as an actual erotic thriller. The plot isn’t all that fantastic and it relies on a gimmick that has been used before and used better and always comes across as a gimmick.

There are however plenty of things to like about both the screenplay and the movie. The strippers are interesting colourful characters. Ray is not the sleazebag you might expect. He’s a pretty nice guy. The awkward relationship between Cody and Heineman is handled extremely well. There’s an attraction between them that they have never got around to consummating but it’s obvious that eventually they will. He’s disturbed by the fact that Cody enjoys stripping but he isn’t a clichéd character. He might be disturbed but he doesn’t turn against Cody.

Kay Lenz and Greg Evigan are excellent and they have the right chemist.

There’s some real subtlety to the characterisation of Cody. She’s obviously a bit uncomfortable about sex and stripping is for her a way of becoming more at ease with her sexuality, and more confident about it.

The strip-tease routines are very tame (the movie was from the beginning intended for the straight-to-video market and Corman clearly did not want the movie to be shelved in the porno section of video stores). There are countless topless scenes but breasts are all you ever get to see. These routines would have been considered tame in a burlesque theatre in the 1940s. But the routines compensate for this by being energetic and imaginative and filmed with a certain amount of flair.

Despite her inexperience and the low budget Shea pulls off some reasonably effective visual set-pieces. The murders are not all that graphic but they’re cleverly staged and manage to be unsettling without relying on gore.

As a movie aimed at giving the viewer a glimpse into the actual world of strippers rather than the popular conception of that world it works very very well. And it succeeds in making us really care about these girls.

Overall Stripped To Kill is quite interesting and it’s recommended.

The Scorpion Releasing DVD looks good and includes lots of extras including a director’s commentary track.

The Terror Within (1989)

The Terror Within is a 1989 Alien rip-off produced by Roger Corman for his Concorde Pictures production company. It was directed by Thierry Notz.

Instead of being set in space it’s set on a post-apocalyptic Earth (which was obviously going to make it much cheaper). The apocalypse was the result of a plague. This movie does not waste time giving us any complicated background.

The eight or so surviving personnel of the Centre for Disease Control’s Mojave Lab are besieged by gargoyles. The gargoyles are monsters which are apparently some kind of human mutants. The Mojave Lab is in intermittent contact with the CDC’s Rocky Mountain Lab. How many humans have survived the plague is unclear. There are some but their prospects seem grim. The Mojave Lab personnel are safe within their fortress-like facility, or at least they think they’re safe.

Two of the personnel leave the lab to look for more human survivors. Those two do not come back.

One human survivor, a woman, is found. She is pregnant, but the father was definitely not human.

If you’ve seen Alien you know that the mother-to-be is going to be in for a really bad time.

Things get worse. One of the lab’s crew, Sue (Starr Andreeff), gets raped by a gargoyle. She is found to be pregnant but she’s been having an affair with David (Andrew Stevens). The baby could be David’s or it could be the gargoyle’s, which leaves the lab’s doctor Linda (Terri Treas) and the mother-to-be in a quandary. This also provides the movie’s sleaze factor.

The real action starts with a gargoyle running loose in the laboratory. The lab people are hunting the gargoyle, or maybe the gargoyle is hunting them. The problem is that gargoyles are just about unkillable. If only the gargoyles had some weakness. Of course it turns out that they do, but it might not be enough to shift the odds in the humans’ favour.

There are no original ideas in Thomas McKelvey Cleaver’s screenplay but at least he and the director understand the formula they are ripping off. They know which ingredients need to be included and they make sure those ingredients are present. The screenplay might be unoriginal but it’s perfectly serviceable.

Thierry Notz knows what he’s doing. There’s no need for subtlety. This movie requires action, scares, nasty monsters, gore and monster rape creepiness. It needs to be fast moving, and it is.

Considering that this was made on a Roger Corman budget it looks quite acceptable. The sets are simple but they provide a decent arena for the action scenes.

The big problem with the low budget is that the film cannot possibly reproduce anything approaching the monsters special effects of Alien and instead has to rely on guy-in-a-rubber-suit monsters. The monster is a major weakness. It looks a little bit silly rather than terrifying. It didn’t bother me because I happen to love guy-in-a-rubber-suit monsters, although it has to be said that this is not one of the great guy-in-a-rubber-suit monsters.

The acting is generally quite adequate. Andrew Stevens as David makes a perfectly fine hero. The two female leads are quite OK and both Sue and Linda get the chance to be heroic.

The acting weak link is the movie’s only well-known name, George Kennedy. He’s the lab commander, Hal. Usually the problem with George Kennedy is outrageous overacting but here he gives a very flat lifeless performance. He just doesn’t seem interested. Admittedly the part is badly underwritten and Hal is the least interesting character.

Instead of Ripley’s cat we have David’s dog, Butch. Butch ain’t pretty but he’s likeable and brave. I’m not going to tell you which (if any) of the humans survive the movie but I will tell you that Butch survives. I know some people find a movie impossible to enjoy if they think the animal star isn’t going to survive.

If you can accept the very cheap monster effects then this is a very competently done Alien ripoff. The action scenes are well-staged and it’s exciting violent fun with some decent suspense. I liked it. Recommended.

This movie is paired with another Concorde movie, Dead Space, in one of Shout! Factory’s Roger Corman double-feature DVD releases. The Terror Within gets a good anamorphic transfer.

Piranha (1978)

Piranha is the notorious 1978 Jaws rip-off from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. It was a major hit for Corman. Joe Dante directed.

Skip-tracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is trying to find a young couple who have disappeared into the backwoods. Misanthropic hermit Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) reluctantly offers to help her after her jeep breaks down.

She finds them, or at least she finds a skeleton that might belong to one of them. The young couple broke into a deserted research facility and found an inviting swimming pool so they decided to take a dip. Unfortunately the pool was full of piranhas.

These are not just your regular piranhas. These are mutant super-piranhas. They’d been bred in that research facility. The facility belonged to the US military and the piranhas were intended as a biological weapon for use during the Vietnam War. The war ended and the project was shut down, officially. Unofficially one scientist, Dr Hoak (Keven McCarthy), remained behind and continued his research. Now he’s bred super-piranhas that can live in fresh or salt water.

Of course if the piranhas get into the nearby river they’ll be able to reach the sea and they will become a global threat. But that can’t happen unless someone drains the pool, thereby releasing the piranhas into that river.

And that’s exactly what Maggie inadvertently does.

Maggie, Paul Grogan and a very reluctant Dr Hoak now have to try to undo the disaster. The first problem is the children’s summer camp on the river. The kids swim in that river. What would happen if the piranhas got loose among a hundred kids cavorting in the river doesn’t bear thinking about, but that summer camp is precisely where those piranhas are going to be heading. And Paul Grogan’s eight-year-old daughter is at that summer camp.

The second problem is that the next step on the piranhas itinerary will be the new resort which has been built by a consortium led by crooked businessman Buck Gardner (Dick Miller) and a crooked colonel. There will be carnage when the piranhas arrive.

And Dr Hoak has managed to smash up Maggie’s jeep. The only way for the trio to reach the summer camp in time is by raft. Rafting down a river infested with super-piranhas will be a challenge.

Maggie and Paul also face the problem that the military is determined to cover up the fiasco. And Dr Mengers (Barbara Steele), who has been sent to investigate, is determined to cover up the problem as well. She doesn’t see why the prospect of a few hundred people being eaten by piranhas should stand in the way of vital scientific research. The US military needs new and imaginative ways to kill people.

This was the late 70s and cynicism about the US Government and the US military was at its height.

Scientists don’t come off too well either. Dr Hoak is a nice enough guy but he can’t see any moral problem with his work. There’s always a price for progress.

This was an expensive movie by Roger Corman standards, which means it was a very cheap movie by anyone else’s standards. But Corman’s pictures always managed to overcome their budgetary limitations. Corman had a knack for employing people who could get good results with very little money.

The special effects were achieved fairly simply. The piranhas are just stick puppets. But they look fairly convincing. The scene where they attack the raft is particularly effective and genuinely frightening. The underwater scenes are done well.

There’s quite a bit of gore. The body count is high. Those piranhas are hungry. Of course you keep telling yourself that there’s no way this movie is going to show us little kids getting eaten by killer carnivore fish. I mean there’s just no way that’s going to happen. Maggie and Paul will get to the summer camp in time to prevent such horrors. They will, won’t they? You’ll keep telling yourself that until the piranhas start chomping up the kiddies. This is a movie that packs quite a punch.

The acting is OK. Bradford Dillman makes a good surly hero type who never wanted to be a goddamn hero. Heather Menzies is fine. Barbara Steele is delightfully evil. Dick Miller overacts entertainingly.

Piranha succeeds in doing what it set out to do. It’s a low-budget Jaws rip-off that offers effective thrills and horrors and it’s extremely entertaining. Corman got his money’s worth and if you bu\y the Blu-Ray you’ll get your money’s worth as well.

The Shout! Factory Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer, there’s an audio commentary by the film’s director Joe Dante and producer Jon Davison and a number of other extras as well.

Piranha is good reasonably gory fun. Highly recommended.

Not of This Earth (1988)

One of Roger Corman’s notable early directorial efforts was his low-budget space vampire flick Not of This Earth (1957). Wearing his producer’s hat Corman decided to remake this movie in 1988, with the same title, with his protégé Jim Wynorski in the director’s chair this time.

To add some spice to the remake it was decided to feature the then-notorious Traci Lords as the star. It was a good decision and the remake was a major commercial success. It was a good decision for Lords also. Having faced persecution for her career in adult films she needed a break and Not of This Earth gave her the chance to pursue a more mainstream career which she went on to do with some success.

Jim Wynorski and R.J. Robertson based their screenplay very heavily on the Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna screenplay for Corman’s 1957 movie. It’s still more or less the same story.

Corman had made his movie at his usual breakneck pace with shooting completed in just twelve days. Wynorski made a bet with Corman that he could shoot his remake even faster and Wynorski won the bet. Shooting was completed in eleven-and-a-half days.

The movie starts with the landing of an alien spaceship. Then this strange guy (whom we will later learn calls himself Mr Johnson) who says very little and always wears dark glasses zaps a girl who was having sex with her boyfriend in the back seat of his car.

Mr Johnson then turns up at a blood clinic. He wants a transfusion, in fact he wants a whole series of blood transfusions. He persuades the doctor to agree to this. He also persuades the doctor that he’ll need his nurse, Nadine Story (Traci Lords), to be his live-in nurse. Nadine is suspicious but when Mr Johnson offers her two thousand bucks a week she’s happy to agree.

Once the doctor performs some blood tests he obviously realises that he’s dealing with someone who isn’t human but Mr Johnson uses his alien mind control powers to ensure that the doctor keeps his secret.

Mr Johnson is from a distant planet, a world ravaged by nuclear war. The inhabitants of that planet are dying because their blood is no longer viable. They need a source of fresh blood. Mr Johnson is therefore a kind of vampire, but an interesting and original kind of vampire. The 1957 movie had been possibly the first space vampire movie and the remake is certainly a space vampire movie.

Nurse Nadine doesn’t know of any of this. She just thinks Mr Johnson is a bit weird but for two thousand bucks a week she doesn’t mind having a weird employer. Her cop boyfriend Harry (Roger Lodge) is a bit suspicious. Mr Johnson’s hired hand Jeremy (Lenny Juliano) knows that something very strange is going on in Mr Johnson’s house but he wants to keep his job.

The cops are concerned that corpses drained of blood have started showing up.

Wynorski serves up some horror, some cheesy special effects and plenty of humour. The intention was clearly to make a movie that would be pure fun. There’s some engaging goofiness (as when Mr Johnson receive a strip-o-gram and when he picks up three hookers who get more than they bargained for). It doesn’t descend into mere silliness - there’s still a solid enough sci-fi/horror plot here.

The big question that would have occurred to most people at the time was - can Traci Lords actually act? The answer is yes. She might not be the world’s greatest actress but she’s cute, sexy, likeable and funny. She makes Nadine a heroine we can care about.

This movie features Lords’ last-ever nude scenes. Not surprisingly she looks stunning but they’re fun rather innocent nude scenes.

There is of course plenty of nudity from other actresses as well. This movie adheres to the Corman formula of the 80s - plenty of skin, a few thrills, cheap but effective special effects, fast pacing and lots of entertainment value. All done on a ridiculously small budget. Wynorski uses footage from other 80s Corman movies which was realistically the only way to get the movie made on such a tight budget. Wynorski does at least integrate this footage into his movie with considerable skill.

Shout! Factory’s DVD provides a very good anamorphic transfer and there are plenty of extras. These include two audio commentaries. The first, done early in the DVD era, features director Wynorski and it’s fun and informative. The second, done a few years later, features Wynorski and Traci Lords and it focuses as much on Traci Lords as on the movie. There’s also an interview with Lords.

Not of This Earth manages to be every bit as entertaining as Corman’s 1957 version. It offers everything you could want in an 80s Roger Corman movie. It was directed by Jim Wynorski, a guy who understands Corman’s movie-making philosophy perfectly and is totally in tune with it. And having learnt his movie-making skills from Corman he knows how to make a pretty decent-looking movie with virtually no money and he knows how to make such a movie fast-moving, slick, action-packed and sleazy.

Not of This Earth is terrific fun. Highly recommended.

I reviewed the Roger Corman version, Not of This Earth 1957), a while back.

Cover Girl Models (1975)

Cover Girl Models is another Roger Corman-produced flick shot mostly in the Philippines and directed by the gloriously inept Cirio H. Santiago. It’s part of the Lethal Ladies 2 collection from Shout! Factory, along with the Pam Grier vehicle The Arena and the kung fu stewardess movie Fly Me.

Cover Girl Models follows the usual Corman formula, following the misadventures of three beautiful girls. This time they’re not nurses or stewardesses but models and they’re off to South East Asia for a fashion shoot.

Mark (John Kramer) is a photographer for a magazine that is aimed at liberated women but all Mark wants to know from editor Diane is how much cleavage is required in his photos.

He already has three models lined up but decides he can’t work with one of them. He finds a replacement when his assistant Mandy (Tara Strohmeier) falls into a swimming pool and he notices what’s beneath her wet T-shirt. Along with Claire (Lindsay Bloom) and Barbara (played by Pat Anderson who also appeared in Fly Me) they set off for Hong Kong.

Barbara inadvertently gets mixed up with international spies when microfilm is hidden in the lining of one of her dresses. The spies try to kidnap her but she gets rescued by a Chinese kung fu-fighting travel agent (yes, this is a kung fu cover girl models movie). We tend to suspect that whatever he is he’s probably not a travel agent.

Claire is trying to sweet talk a movie producer to further her film career. She doesn’t actually have a film career but she really wants one.

Mark decides he kinda likes Mandy and he’s going to make her a big-time model, but then she runs into a photographer from a leading Asian fashion magazine who has the same idea. It’s quite possible that Mark is really more interested in getting Mandy into bed than in her potential as a model. He’s that kind of guy.

At some stage just about every female in the movie becomes a target of kidnappers. That seems to be the one big idea that scriptwriter Howard R. Cohen had so whenever he’s not sure what should happen next he throws in a kidnapping attempt.

This is standard Corman fare. There’s some nudity, some humour and an action/mystery sub-plot.

Cirio H. Santiago obviously believed that the art of film directing consisted in getting the camera in focus, which he manages to do most of the time. Well, a lot of the time anyway. Pacing is a concept to which he had apparently never given any thought. The script is thin and not terribly coherent and tends to wander about in circles.

There are spies from at least three different countries and there’s a revolutionary army in there somewhere as else.

At the end we get an extended action sequence which is actually quite decent, with gunplay taking the place of kung fu. The three girls are caught in the middle. They’re no action heroines but they do have a highly developed sense of self-preservation. The plot doesn’t exactly resolve but hey if you have enough shooting the viewer isn’t going to care if all the plot strands are not neatly tied up.

Do the girls find true love? Do their dreams come true? Well, not exactly, but it was a learning experience for them. Who knew that modelling could be so dangerous?

As with Fly Me the movie’s biggest asset is Pat Anderson. She’s gorgeous and likeable and as an actress she’s perfectly adequate for this type of movie.

The transfer is pretty decent if unspectacular. There are no extras.

Cover Girl Models has plenty of flaws. It would be difficult to describe this as a well-made movie but Corman knew his market and made sure that all his movies contained the ingredients that the market demanded. It’s no cinematic masterpiece but if you set your expectations fairly low it’s an acceptable time-waster and the girls are very pretty and if you’re in the mood it’s kinda fun. Worth a look if you’re going to buy the Lethal Ladies 2 collection anyway (The Arena being almost certainly the reason you will buy it).

Fly Me (1973)

Shout! Factory’s Lethal Ladies Collection volume 2 offers three wonderfully trashy Roger Corman’s produced 70s exploitation movies, including the excellent Pam Grier vehicle The Arena plus Cover Girl Models and Fly Me. Fly Me is the one we’re concerned with at the moment. It was helmed by Cirio H. Santiago who did lots of these sorts of movies for Corman. The king fu sequences (yes, you read that right, this is a stewardess movie with kung fu) were directed by Jonathan Demme.

It’s set in Hong Kong, Manila and Tokyo and it was apparently filmed in Hong Kong and the Philippines.

At first it seems like it will be a typical 70s stewardess movie - some nudity, some jokes, some exotic settings, some melodrama. But take a look at that tagline about stewardesses battling kung fu killers. This is a stewardess action thriller.

There are of course three stewardesses (much the same formula as Corman’s nurse movies) and they’re all babes. Pat Anderson (who really is drop-dead gorgeous) plays new stewardess Toby. Toby is looking forward to some fun when the plane gets to Hong Kong and she’s met a handsome doctor on the flight who should be able to provide just that. And then Toby makes a grisly discovery - her mother is on the flight as well. And her mother is going to be on her next flight as well. Mother is determined to defend Toby’s virginity. Of course back in the 70s (if we’re to believe all those stewardess movies) trying to defend a stewardess’s virginity was likely to be an uphill battle.

Andrea (played by Lenore Kasdorf who is also pretty darned cute) has a problem. She was going to meet her boyfriend in Hong Kong but he’s disappeared. This is our first hint that this is to be a thriller.

And then the third of the trio of stewardesses, Sherry (Lyllah Torena), disappears as well. In fact she’s been kidnapped. And she’s about to be sold into white slavery.

Meanwhile Andrea is being stalked by those kung fu killers but fortunately Andrea is a martial arts expert (stewardesses needed a wide variety of skills in the 1970s). She’s also being stalked by a blind assassin.

The three female leads are not great actresses but they’re certainly enthusiastic. The other cast members are not so great in the acting department.

The kung fu scenes are not exactly of the standard you’d find in a Hong Kong kung fu movie of this vintage.

The plot is all over the place. Trying to keep three plot strands (one for each stewardess) going simultaneously is always a bit of a challenge and in this case the result is something of a confused mishmash.

The plot strands eventually come together, with the aid of some unlikely coincidences. This is not what you would call a tightly plotted movie.

 

Fortunately this is a Corman picture so when the action starts to flag you can be sure that one of the girls will take her clothes off.

The jokes become more sparse as the movie progresses but there are some genuinely amusing moments early on. In its later stages it relies more on suspense and thrills, but the suspense isn’t that suspenseful and the thrills aren’t that thrilling. Which doesn’t really matter. This is a silly goofy movie and we’re certainly not expected to take it the least bit seriously. It’s very much a popcorn movie.

The anamorphic transfer is a bit iffy with quite a bit of print damage early on. It’s not a major issue and in this type of movie it actually adds a bit more seediness so in some ways it’s a bonus.

Fly Me is not by anybody’s standards a good movie but if you’re in the mood for light-hearted entertainment with three pretty female leads who have trouble keeping their clothes on then you’ll probably enjoy it.

Most people are going to buy the Lethal Ladies Collection volume 2 for The Arena so if you think of the other two movies as bonus movies you’ll be well satisfied.