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Wally Campo, the Roger Corman regular who did his best Det. Joe Friday impersonation as Sgt. Joe Fink — and also served as the narrator — in the original The Little Shop of Horrors, has died. He was 99.

Campo died Jan. 14 of natural causes in Studio City, his son, musician Tony Campodonico, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Campo also played a goofball in Monte Hellman‘s Beast From Haunted Cave (1959) and appeared for director Burt Topper in Hell Squad (1958), Tank Commandos (1959) — where he was top-billed — and the Victor Buono-starring The Strangler (1964).

Campo showed up in the Corman-directed Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), Ski Troop Attack (1960) and Tales of Terror (1962) and in the Corman-produced Devil’s Angels (1967). Many of his movies were made at the filmmaker’s low-budget American International Pictures.

His acting credits also included Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock (1959), the Vincent Price-starring Master of the World (1961) and Shock Corridor (1963), directed by Sam Fuller.

Born...

The Little Shop of Horrors is a 1960 comedy horror movie directed by Roger Corman, starring Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph, Mel Welles, and Dick Miller. It was in this movie that Jack Nicholson made one of his earliest appearances on film. He was years later quoted in Corman’s 1998 book recounting how he experienced the reception of the movie saying that the audience

“laughed so hard I could barely hear the dialogue. I didn’t quite register it right. It was as if I had forgotten it was a comedy since the shoot. I got all embarrassed because I’d never really had such a positive response before.”.

from the book ‘How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime’ by Roger Corman The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) Premise

Seymour works in a skid row florist shop and is in love with his beautiful co-worker, Audrey. He...

One of Jules Verne’s most fantastic sci-fi fantasies got the big screen treatment from American-International, which hopped on the Verne bandwagon that raked in big $$ for Disney and others. A production challenge given a minimum of resources, the colorful show is still admired for the performance of Vincent Price as Robur the Conqueror, a mad terrorist. Charles Bronson also gets high marks as the proto- G-Man dispatched to put an end to Robur’s Albatross, an aerial ‘weapon of mass destruction.’ We also fell in love with art director Daniel Haller’s magnificent design for the airship — even if the special visual effects no longer seem as special as they should be.

Master of the World

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1961 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date August 31, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Vincent Price, Charles Bronson, Henry Hull, Mary Webster, David Frankham, Richard Harrison, Vito Scotti, Wally Campo.

Cinematography:...

As the first wave of ‘adult’ westerns began to fade, 1959 gave us a burst of genuinely adult stories about the famed lawless towns of the frontier. Henry Fonda is at his moody best in a replay of his earlier Wyatt Earp, de-mythologized as just one more self-oriented opportunist in a land where even lawmen have an angle to play. But Fonda’s gun skills are impressive, and his deadly Clay Blaisedell is halfway to becoming the soulless ‘Frank’ from Once Upon a Time in The West. Edward Dmytryk almost rights his capsized directing career, and Robert Alan Aurthur’s screenplay delivers both an intense drama, & great gunslinging action.

Warlock

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1959 / Colo / 2:35 widescreen / 122 min. / Street Date May 21, 2019 / Available from Twilight Time Movies / 29.95

Starring: Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Dorothy Malone, Dolores Michaels, Wallace Ford, Tom Drake, Richard Arlen, DeForest Kelley, Frank Gorshin, Vaughn Taylor, Don Beddoe, Whit Bissell,...

Lock your doors! Hulking menace Victor Buono gets the full-on psycho treatment, based (very) roughly on early reports of The Boston Strangler. The 'baby doll' killer also prefigures the fiendish Richard Speck. Burt Topper's film is routine but ex- Baby Jane star Victor Buono's performance is decidedly not. The Strangler DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1964 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 89 min. / Street Date November 10, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Victor Buono, Diane Sayer, Davey Davison, Jeanne Bates, Ellen Corby, Mimi Dillard, Selette Cole, David McLean, Baynes Barron, Michael Ryan, Russ Bender, Wally Campo, Byron Morrow, John Yates, James Sikking, Robert Cranford. Cinematography Jacques R. Marquette Film Editor Robert S. Eisen Original Music Martin Skiles Written by Bill S. Ballinger Produced by Samuel Bischoff, David Diamond Directed by Burt Topper

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The old-time independent producer Edward Small gravitated to United Artists in the 1950s, while his counterpart...