screenwriter-12 Reviews

Gun of the Black Sun (2011)

So which movies has Roger Corman starred in?

[3/10 · 19 March 2014]

From a previous review: "With Gary pulling off the classic (Roger)Corman trick of casting himself in the lead (keeps the budget down and puts the producer on set every day :-)" WTF? Corman has probably produced over 100 films and though he has sometimes made Hitchcock-style walk-on appearances, he has never played the lead in any film! 'Bikeboy' references Corman about 10 times in his review but has he actually ever seen a single Corman movie? Smells like someone involved in the production trying hard to link Roger's good name with this inferior product... Jeff Burr is a good atmospheric director given decent material but unfortunately this messy film falls far below his usual standard, with the late lamented Richard Lynch being about the only reason to sit thru it. Whoever thought having a Luger pistol as a world-threatening super-weapon was a great idea? An excellent handgun for sure but not exactly the Ark of the Covenant...

The City of the Dead (1960)

An influence on 'The Haunted Palace'?

[7/10 · 23 June 2007]

Seeing this on DVD many years after originally seeing it in a theatre, I was struck by the similarity to certain scenes in Roger Corman's Poe/Lovecraft movie 'The Haunted Palace', made three years later. Notably the eerie foreboding village set (obviously shot in the studio in both films) where sinister villagers move painfully slowly through thick swirling knee-deep fog and cast baleful looks at the protagonists. I really think Corman must have seen this film and liked those scenes enough to want to replicate them in his Lovecraft adaptation.

Too bad the writers of City of the Dead/Horror Hospital didn't think to call their village Arkham as well! The title 'City of the Dead' was a bit of a cheat as Whitewater was obviously a tiny one-inn village. They tried to justify it by having the priest refer to it as 'this city' when he's barring the church door. Well, he was meant to be blind!