davidmvining

What if Atlas was just some guy who never held up the world? What if he was some kind of ancillary figure in a story about a king trying to take over another Greek city state? What if it was kind of just boring? Well, if those questions have passed through your mind, then Roger Corman's Atlas is the exact movie for you! Part of an effort to latch onto the sword and sandals craze of the time, Atlas is a drag of a film that has no real idea how to put together an epic. Apparently, Charles Griffith later admitted that this and a few other Corman movies he wrote (like Creature from the Haunted Sea) have exactly the same structure. Really, does a goofy comic-horror film need the same structure as a sword and sandals epic?

King Praximates (Frank Wolff) is trying to take over a neighboring city-state ruled by King Telektos (Andreas Filippides). Surrounded, Telektos agrees to a one-on-one battle between champions to determine the rule of the city. Praximates, along with his girl Candia (Barboura Morris), discover Atlas (Michael Forest) at the Olympic games and convince him to come along. Here's where there's supposed to be the moral quandary, Atlas being talked into action that will remove the leader of one city-state based on his actions in place of another. Why does he do this?

There's talk about how he wants to avoid war, but by the end he's leading charges of infantry into battle. So, whatever, I guess.

Atlas, of course, wins, we watch the peaceful transfer of power. However, people are unhappy for reasons, there's an uprising that must be pushed down. Praximates is paranoid and kills those close to him. Things escalate until revolution completely breaks out.

Honestly, I think I'm making it sound more interesting than it actually is. Scenes are long, slow, and drawn out. Acting is nothing to write home about, especially from supposedly central character Michael Forest who seems to be more body-builder than actor. There's no real central fulcrum of drama as we lazily move from one scene to the next. We're just looking for something to grasp onto, but it doesn't help that Atlas isn't even really the main character. He largely disappears for a while as Praximates deals with a small revolt through...a courtroom drama suddenly inserted into the action.

Corman always had the good sense of making the most of what little he had, and filming in Greece granted him ample opportunity to get big establishing shots. However, while he does get some good, big shots here and there, his filming of conversations, of which dominate the film, look like they could have been filmed in any small set he threw up in Los Angeles. He doesn't really modify his filming style enough to take advantage of the great scenic opportunity he has.

I will give him credit for the battle scenes, though. Utilizing what he could from the local garrison of the Greek army, Corman had to cobble together a huge battle from a few dozen fighters in costume. He ended up relying on small pieces of action edited together into a non-linear whole. It's what Orson Welles gets praised for doing in Chimes at Midnight, but Corman did it first, here, four years before Welles. It's the best part of the film, but only a small slice.

Really, it's not enough to come close to thinking the film is any good. It's drab and dull, lurching from one kind of movie to the next without anything like a cohesive throughline, the main character not really driving much of anything himself. Corman using his limited resources to pave a new way to film battle scenes is interesting, but it's stuck at the tail end of a boring film that never comes close to engaging. I will say that it was interesting to see Morris, who's usually playing the plainer female characters in Corman's films, play the sexy girl. She looks good.

Whether this was made because of a bet or because rules around royalty payments to actors were changing with the new year, The Little Shop of Horror was conceived of and filmed in something like five days. Corman's lack of care around finishing out shots and scenes are the stuff of the IMDb trivia page, but the decision to push this bit of silly nonsense toward comedy works remarkably well. Consistently funny while dealing with things that, on the surface, should be scary but aren't because of the cheapness of the production just combines really well.

Seymour (Jonathan Haze) works for Mushnick (Mel Welles) in a flower shop in Skid Row in Los Angeles. He works alongside the pretty Audrey (Jackie Joseph), but Seymour's general pratfalls and mistakes have put him on thin ice with Mushnick. Instead of firing him for his latest mess up, the flower eating customer Burson (Dick Miller) convinces Mushnick to let Seymour show off his mysterious new plant. Wilted and resembling a Venus fly trap, Audrey Junior isn't that impressive in its little coffee can home. Of course, it comes out that Audrey Junior thrives on human blood, first from Seymour's fingers and later from...other sources.

Everyone in this film is searching for laughs, and so it ends up being largely uneven that way. However, I do think it hits more than it misses. Haze is something of a spaz, but his character is supposed to be that. His thirteenth trip over a bucket hits a whole lot less than his first, though. The best comedic bits really center around Dick Miller chomping away on flowers and the deeply black comedy of Seymour needing to feed people to the increasingly large Audrey Junior. I mean, it's ridiculous how he gets people in, reminding me of the silliness of similar situations in A Bucket of Blood, but leaning into the comedic side of things knowingly makes it play better. Cheap horror can work great as a comedy, especially when it's intentional.

The escalation of bodies goes from an accidental killing of a railroad detective to the psychotic dentist who loves giving his patients pain to Mushnick tricking a robber into Audrey Junior to the plant mind-controlling Seymour into getting him to feed a prostitute into her gob. If this were a more serious effort at horror, the choice to go with mind-control in the end would cause more questions. Instead, in a comedy, it's just fodder for silly antics to get us another moment where something blackly comic happens.

The one comedic bit that doesn't seem to work that well is the Dragnet parody maintained by Sergeant Joe Fink (Wally Campo) and Officer Frank Stoolie (Jack Warford). It's more just Dragnet impersonation without any actual jokes or funny things attached to it.

Of course, it's impossible to talk about the movie without mentioning Jack Nicholson's small role as Wilbur Force, a pain addicted patient that Seymour has to operate on because of blackly comic shenanigans. I mean...it's pretty funny. There's not a whole lot else to talk about other than this being one of Nicholson's very earliest roles and how he's pretty memorable in it.

The film also benefits from having an actual character story in the middle of all the amusing black comedy. Seymour wants Audrey. Seymour wants validation as a botanist for Audrey Junior. Audrey Junior always grows and needs to feed at sundown. Mushnick wants his business to thrive but is horrified by the needs of Audrey Junior. It honestly might be Charles Griffith's best and most balanced screenplay.

It's not a long, deep, or challenging film. It's light fun that's over pretty quickly, understands its assignment and accomplishes it well. The unevenness of the comedy hurts it slightly, but it's mostly a breeze of a fun time.

Another one of those films that Corman made at the tail end of another production on location (this one tied to Creature from the Haunted Sea), Last Woman on Earth has the distinction of being the first film that Robert Towne wrote for the King of Cult. It's also Towne's first acting role (not that he had too much of a career that way), but that's about the extent of interest in the film. Towne demonstrates himself to be a capable writer, making the most in what must have been a very rushed first draft, but ultimately this is just another one of Corman's films that really needed more time, especially at the scripting stage, to come together.

Harold (Antony Carbone) has gone to Puerto Rico to avoid the press around legal troubles implicating him for stealing lots of money. With him is his wife Evelyn (Betsy Jones-Moreland) and lawyer Martin (Towne) who meet for the first time at a cock fight. Martin doesn't want to be there in Puerto Rico. Evelyn is stifling under Harold's control. We have our stage and players. There's just one more detail to be had: The end of the world. When they go scuba diving, something happens on the surface while they're below, doing something to the air, suffocating all of humanity. When they come to the surface, they have to use their oxygen tanks to breathe until they get to shore when they can coalesce around trees to take in their oxygen (sure, whatever).

What follows is...not as robust as I think it should have been. It's Harold determining a path forward, that they never actually follow through on, and Martin and Evelyn chaffing under Harold's rules while having an obvious sexual attraction to each other. What is the point of a marriage contract in a destroyed world with only three people? Asks the one guy on the planet without a girl. The problem is just that they don't do very much.

Harold talks about needing work to remain sane instead of sitting around in their excess of a resort with tons of alcohol on hand to just watch the time go by. The only way it manifests is in them fishing supposedly more than required which drives Martin a little crazy. It's thin and doesn't really manifest any real issues with Martin. It's mostly delivered through dialogue. The tension between Martin and Evelyn is probably the most potent thing in the film with a quality scene where they're on the beach, reciting "Jabberwocky" to each other, as Evelyn lords over him at the same time.

However, that being said, the actual love triangle feels kind of trite without any real punch. The pieces are there (the tension between Evelyn and Martin, Martin's loneliness, Harold's controlling nature), but they don't really connect, and I think the problem is the Harold side of things. I don't think he's actually that well written, and his effect is more conceptual than impactful. In a film that is really about characters, he ends up feeling more like a caricature whose demands and rules that so stymie everyone don't actually feel that demanding.

And that undermines the big finale that throws all three at each other. It's actually not even that well filmed, using different elements that don't cut together very well and confusing geography, which is unusual in my experience with Corman at this point.

So, it actually begins better than it ends. The character stuff is largely okay with some definite bright spots. The genre stuff is more background than anything else. For something made in a handful of days and probably written overnight, it's far from the worst, but this really is just a way to use a few free days to make something fast.

It has none of the passion of House of Usher, but Towne did his best in the five minutes he had to write. Corman filmed it fine (except good chunks of the ending requiring cars). It's okay, but, again, a rewrite really would have helped.