Movie review - "Some Nudity Required" (1998) ***

 Thought provoking documentary about nudity in Hollywood, power imbalance, etc twenty years before metoo. Roger Corman was upset about this apparently but he comes out of it as always - rational, reasoned, fine. 

The film is also fascinating because it's a personal essay from the filmmaker Odette Springer, who was music supervisor for Corman at New Horizons. She talks a lot about herself which isn't always interesting but it does mean the work has a personal vision.

Some great other talking heads like Sam Arkoff of AIP, Dan Golden, Fred Olen Ray, Andy Sidaris etc.

Movie review - "Wizards of the Demon Sword" (1991) *

I like the story of the making of this - Fred Olen Ray saw some sets left over from the 1989 Masque of the Red Death and used them to shoot a few days of a movie, then went and shot the rest in a couple of days. It is impressive you can knock out a film in a few days but it will impact on quality and that's the case here.

Corman quickies like Little Shop of Horrors and The Terror stand the test of time because you've got elements like Charles Griffith's script, Boris Karloff,  Jack Nicholson and so on. They also are set pretty much in the one place. This is a "quest" movie so doesn't adapt as well to quickie locations.

I also don't think Ray is a very good filmmaker. I love the idea of him, love his books, and it's always fascinating to see how he gets production value - for instance Russ Tamblyn, Lawrence Tierney and Lyle Waggoner, the "names", are all based in one or two locations but referred to throughout the film so their parts seem bigger.

The actual leads are Heidi Paine and Blake Bahner - he rescues her from an attack and they go to rescue her dad, who is Tamblyn.  These performances are weak but in the actor's defence they don't have characters to play - Ray doesn't even do something simple like make the girl hoity toity and the guy swashbuckling, to get some character conflict.

Scenes are awkwardly staged, shot and acted - I kept thinking throughout "that bit's amateurish... and that bit".

It's fun to see Tamblyn and Tierney, some of the sets are okay and one or two bits I didn't mind... but it felt like a bunch of amateurs on the weekend throwing something together, like in a country town or something.

Movie review - "Naked After Midnight" (2014) **

A late entry in the woman-going-undercover-as-stripper-to-solve-crime genre. It's not particularly lively or energetic, but I enjoy watching Fred Olen Ray movies, in part to see how he goes about getting the best production value (i.e. actors doing scenes all clearly done in one day).

Richard Grieco is good value as a creepy shrinky and Tawny Kitaen even better as the lively owner of a strip club. The undercover stripper isn't that great but there's some decent support and a strong twist at the end.

Movie review - "Sniper: Special Ops" (2016) **

The meeting of two legends, in their own way... Steven Seagal and Fred Olen Ray. Seagal's best days are behind him; Ray has enjoyed a more consistent career trajectory.

It's a perfectly acceptable low-ish budget action film. A special team go rescue a congressmen, but have to leave some blokes behind... they then return to get them. Complicating things are a sexy photojournalist and an Arab woman.

Several elements of this are underserviced - I wish they'd made more of the Arab woman (relative of a local leader)... but we never get to see her and it's possible Ray didn't hire an acress. The Congressmen was forgotten - wish he'd paid off.

Seagal's scenes look like they were shot in a day. He's in the movie for around 20 minutes and spends most of it sitting down and talking, sitting down and shooting, or standing and shooting. He walks for a bit.

The real star is Tim Abell, who I liked - a good bearded tough guy. I felt they could've done more with the set up and situations but it's decent enough.

Movie review - "Dinosaur Island" (1994) **1/2

Great fun from Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray, two very much kindred spirits whose careers have so many similarities. They directed this enjoyable pastiche of 50s American-men-crash-on-all-female-island movies - with the additional twist of the island containing dinosaurs.

I wish there had been more dinosaur action because the stuff of the soldiers blasting machine guns at them is entertaining - I assume this was due to budget. There are however plenty of cave girls, who are sometimes topless... the thing that brings this into the 90s. The style of acting and dialogue and stories are all very 1950s.

This starts off well with the very overweight soldiers crashing on the island and battling stop motion and puppet creatures, and meeting the cave girls. Some of the wisecracking of the soldiers may put viewers off; personally I preferred the straight acting of Ross Hagen, as the senior soldier.

The two main flaws of this film I felt were the fact that, after a flying start, the story got bogged down. It was a lot of hanging around the girls, and repetitive romance/sex stories, instead of building momentum. Secondly, the humans were quite mean to the dinosaurs, taking their eggs and being a nuisance - I felt sympathetic to them.

But I totally got where Wynorski and Ray were coming from and it's a high spirited fun movie. Roger Corman helped finance it.

Book review - "Father of the Blob" by Jack H Harris (2015)

Harris gives some of his best stuff up the front, talking about making The Blob then goes into his life story. Much of it at first feels familiar to regular readers of movie bios - Russian Jewish immigrant ancestors, moving to the US, becoming interested in the film industry on the exhibition side. Harris had a spell as a child actor and served in the war, then going to work for his dad. The two men clashed, Harris went out on his own and made a success of it (for instance, distributing old Laurel and Hardy films). Harris decided to go into actual production at had a home run hit with The Blob.

After that the book becomes less predictable and more interesting. He makes/finances a series of films, of wildly varying quality - The 4D Man, Dinosaurus, The Unkissed Bride with Tommy Kirk, Dark Star with John Carpenter, Schlock with John Landis, Equinox with a bunch of unknowns, Prison Ship with Fred Olen Ray.

He earns a lot of money with his movies including a Danish sex film, his marriage breaks up, he lives in Malibu where his neighbours include Larry Hagman (who makes a Blob sequel) and Jon Peters (who he becomes friends with, and Barbra Streisand, leading to Eyes of Laura Mars), doesn't like The Blob remake.

It's a jaunty tale. A lot of the time you do wonder if he's telling the truth but it's an entertaining read.

Movie review - Corman #25 – “The Last Woman on Earth” (1961) **

Robert Towne not only wrote the script for this film, but has one of the three main roles (he’s clean shaven). He plays the lawyer of a shonky businessman with a beautiful wife: the three of them go diving in Puerto Rico one day and when they come up it seems everyone has been wiped out.

While Towne’s script isn’t quite Chinatown it’s still a pretty decent effort, full of conflict and interesting characters – for instance, the businessman is established as a bit of a scum bag but once they’re the last people on earth he’s the only one who has ant ideas about what to do.

Towne’s acting is more of a drawback – it’s not so much he’d bad just a bit too laid back for a role which could have done with more energy, or sexiness. (The sexiest thing about the film is the credits, slow panning over a naked shape of a woman). And while the three characterisations in this are strong there isn’t much of a story. One would think Corman would really get into the visuals of showing people-running-down-empty-streets but that only happens towards the end. And he doesn’t get into any end-of-the-world fantasy sequences eg ransacking shopping centres.

This film a bit more adult and sexy than Corman’s films to that date eg there’s no doubt Towne and Jones-Moreland have sex. Maybe this is why Corman was distracted from tackling other end of world issues eg there’s no mutants or other survivor – something which would have given the film a better third act than adultery. I also the film would have been sexier if Corman had cast his original choice in the female role, Alison Hayes, but he ended up seeing Jones-Moreland in a play and going with her instead.

This was issued on DVD with special features as part of the “Roger Corman Puerto Rico trilogy”. Until I saw the DVD I had no idea the film was shot in colour! (To be honest, colour doesn’t add super much to the film – there’s a lot of brown eg brown walls, brown shorts and the location isn’t really exploited; and besides black and white kind of suits apocalyptic tales anyway.)

There’s an entertaining commentary with Fred Olen Ray, some other dude and two of the actors (Olen Ray says Robert Towne was invited and the door was left open for him to turn up right until the last minute but he doesn’t show).

The actors continually refer to Corman’s cheapness, not really in an affectionate way - Jones-Moreland bitches about the lack of hairdressing, costume, stuntman, etc (one story – she was having trouble in the water and asked for rope and they threw the whole rope in.); although later on both say they admire him and pay tribute to his energy. The commentators poke some affectionate fun at the 60-ness of it all – dressing for dinner, drinking martinis, etc even after the apocalypse.