Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror is the cinematic equivalent of a gothic wine flight: three mini-doses of Edgar Allan Poe, poured into one luridly lit glass, swirled with gallows humour, and gulped down with Vincent Price’s velvety voice as the chaser. Released in 1962 at the height of Corman’s “Poe cycle,” it’s both spooky and…
Tag: Roger Corman
The Premature Burial (1962) – Review
Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial is a morbidly elegant slice of Gothic terror, a film drenched in fog, obsession, and the soft echo of “Molly Malone.” The third of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations—though notably the only one without Vincent Price—it trades sardonic grandeur for subdued melancholy. What results is an eerie and atmospheric exploration…
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) – Review
A dark castle perched above a raging sea, thunder splitting the skies, and a torture chamber buried deep in its stone heart—these are the trappings of Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, a moody masterwork of Gothic terror so fevered it could only have sprung from the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. With Vincent…
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985) – Review
Some films feel like they were carefully crafted. Others feel like they were assembled out of spare parts found behind a medieval-themed garage sale. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom proudly belongs to the second category, a scrappy, barely coherent artifact of the low-budget empire run by Roger Corman. It’s cheap, chaotic, and accidentally fascinating in…
Queen of Blood (1966) – Review
Let’s say you’re a low-budget filmmaker in the mid-60s, you love weird horror, and you’ve just gotten your hands on some cool Soviet sci-fi footage, stuff that looks a hundred times more expensive than anything you can shoot in California. What do you do? If you’re Curtis Harrington, you spin that into Queen of Blood,…