There were many knock-offs of American International’s Beach Party, the groundbreaking surf musical starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello; but AIP’s own first knock-off (for ripping itself off was one of the things the company did best) was Muscle Beach Party, released in the spring of 1964. Of course “knock-off” isn’t the word that the […]

-“How do you like this title: The Behavior Pattern of the Young Adult, and its Relation to Primitive Tribes.”-“I’ve got a shorter title: Teenage Sex“. There is nothing quite like the bloodlust of a savvy movie producer, and there was never a pair of movie producers quite as savvy in such a specialised way as […]

There is, to my knowledge, only one film specifically and pointedly themed to U.S. Independence Day, and I have already reviewed it. That leaves us with the many, many creature films that take place over the holiday, and I have chosen today’s subject both because it is among the earliest, and because it also has […]

I’ve been in a Vincent Price mood lately, and Turner Classic Movies just so happened to come along to scratch that particular itch for me last week, and that is why today and tomorrow are given over to a pair of “Why the hell not?” reviews – something I frankly don’t do enough of, and […]

Hi, my Jewish friends! You didn’t think I was going to leave y’all out of the vaguely-insulting fun, did you? Of course not, and here we are with a film that, by virtue of referencing in somewhat slapdash fashion the ten plagues of Egypt, is the closest thing the world has to a Passover-themed horror […]

The last of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Roger Corman directed for American International Pictures – though by no means the last one that AIP cranked out – The Tomb of Ligeia is the most polished and classy film of the entire cycle, and it is not uncommon to find people arguing, on those grounds, […]

The seventh of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for AIP, The Masque of the Red Death, opened four years and two days after the first, House of Usher, and that is a whole lot of Poe in not very much time no matter how you slice it (and let us pause to observe that […]

“The Haunted Palace” is a great little poem, one of Edgar Allan Poe’s all-time best pieces of verse. Emphasis on little. It’s all of six stanzas long, a total of 48 lines, and its single function is to describe the atmosphere clinging to a palace in a luxuriant valley that was once, generations ago, a […]

It’s a parlor game for 19th Century literature freaks and nothing but to speculate on such questions, but let us take a moment to muse upon the most famous short story written by Edgar Allan Poe – that is, name the first Poe story that comes to mind. Ask a dozen people, and I suspect […]

As I mentioned, the third of the AIP/Roger Corman Poe movies, Premature Burial, was something of a failure – not a flop, for it’s hard for a movie produced as cheaply as even the costliest AIP picture to “flop” – and for the fourth movie in the cycle, the second released in 1962, a course-correction […]

Premature Burial, the third of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman and released by AIP, is by common consent regarded as being the ugly stepchild of the franchise. There’s one tremendously obvious reason for this: it’s the only one of the Corman Poe pictures not starring the stalwart Vincent Price, replacing him […]

For their very next Edgar Allan Poe adaptation after the surprise hit House of Usher, Roger Corman and American International Pictures went all the way around to the other side – one of the reasons that “The Fall of the House of Usher” makes so much sense as a movie story (and the reason why […]