As he had done with The Secret Invasion seven years earlier, Roger Corman went the independent route to make 1971's Von Richthofen and Brown , which was his last film as a director before he turned to producing full-time. (He would return to the director's chair in 1990 to make Frankenstein Unbound , but that was a one-time deal.) Written by John William and Joyce Hooper Corrington (who may...

In 1964, while he was in the midst of polishing off his Poe cycle for AIP, Roger Corman struck out on his own and traveled to Croatia and Yugoslavia to film the World War II adventure yarn The Secret Invasion (not to be confused with with the Red Scare allegory -- and MST3K staple -- Invasion, U.S.A. ). Written by R. Wright Campbell, who had penned The Young Racers for Corman the year before...

Charles Bronson had been knocking around Hollywood for close to a decade (occasionally acting under his birth name Charles Buchinsky) when Roger Corman gave him one of his first starring roles as the title character in his low-budget gangster film Machine-Gun Kelly . Released in 1958 (the same year as Corman's similarly themed I, Mobster ), the film portrays Kelly as a bank robber with a short...

...aware of it myself until it was brought to my attention by horrormeister Aaron Christensen (a.k.a. Dr. AC ), who kindly sent me a copy of 1963's The Raven when I told him it was the one Roger Corman/Vincent Price AIPoe I had never seen. He said it was "all about sharing the scare," which is all well and good, but when you get right down to it, scaring the audience is pretty low on The Raven...

No sooner had I finished watching Amazon Women on the Moon last night than I found out Beverly Garland had died on Friday at the age of 82. Garland was an early favorite of Roger Corman's, appearing in five of his films between 1955 (when she starred in his directorial debut -- and MST3K favorite -- Swamp Women ) and 1957. Apart from Not of This Earth , the one that probably shows her off...