Ryan Watches 50 Movies

Countdown update: If you can do basic math, you may have already guessed that after his, I only have 1 movie left to go! Just one left! That means next week is the last horror classic! But it won't be the end of this blog, no sirree, Bob. In two weeks, I'll post a grand finale of a post, which will be moving, entertaining, stirring, and spectacular. I'm calling it -- Are you ready for this? -- The 50 Horror Movies Wrap-up . Hmm. So maybe it's not such a catchy title. Certainly it's not as catchy as Dementia 13 , the title of this week's movie. It was released in 1963, produced by Roger Corman, and it's more or less the directing debut of Francis Ford Coppola , who would later go on to direct such masterpieces as The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2 , and Captain E-O . And no, it is not the sequel to Dementia s 1 through 12. Synopsis Married couple John and Louise are out in a boat, surrounded by darkness. Why would you go for a boat ride at night? Don't ...

Here I am! Boxing Day has come and gone, and now I'm ready to get back to watching old "horror" movies. And now that I've watched Last Woman on Earth from 1960, I only have five movies left! Faithful "Ryan Watches 50 Movies" reader Grady Roe has been keeping up with this blog since the beginning. He astutely observed some time ago that many of the posters for these movies tend to prominently feature females with varying amounts of their clothing torn or removed. And he's right... apparently the designers of these posters were under the impression that filmgoers' attention would be grabbed by nekkid ladies. Well, take a glance (or a long, lingering, lascivious look) at the poster for Last Woman on Earth: Wow! That's really something! And, if those figures are to scale, the woman is this movie is ENORMOUS! Towering over shirtless men, she's a BEHEMOTH of epic, exploitative nudity who terrorizes the countryside with her voluptuousness! Now let...

Is Roger Corman's 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors really a horror movie? If you have one, two, or more functioning eyeballs, you should be able to read the tagline on the poster over there: "THE FUNNIEST PICTURE THIS YEAR!" So no, it's not intended as a serious horror movie. There's a monster, and death and stuff, but the movie doesn't take itself seriously for a minute. In fact, it's so amusing that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken turned it into a very funny musical comedy (efficiently dropping the " The " from the title) in 1982, which was later turned into another (highly entertaining) movie. Perhaps someday there will be a serious horror film based on that version, but for now, let's talk about the Corman incarnation of the story. Synopsis The film is narrated faux-noirishly by Sergeant Joe Fink, a no-nonsense cop. He tells us about a case he worked on involving Seymour Krelboin, a sad sack who works at Gravis Mushnick's flower sh...

All right, so... Swamp Women ! This is a 1955 movie directed by Roger Corman, and it's included in a "horror classics" box set, so let's see if I can predict what it's about: a hapless family on a camping trip encounters a tribe of fierce mutants: half-women, half-alligators! Yeah! That sounds awesome! And it's a Roger Corman movie, so it must be something like that. Let's check it out! Synopsis It's Mardi Gras! Or, rather, it's stock footage of Mardi Gras , and it's being watched by Bob and his girlfriend, whose name I never did catch. Bob's in New Orleans because he's an oilman, soon to be looking for a good place to find oil in the swamp. Something like that. Girlfriend begs to go along with him on his trip to the bayou, and he consents, partly because he enjoys her company, but mostly because he enjoys her makeouts. Meanwhile, a police officer named Leigh meets with her captain. They've hatched a plan to track down the ...

I'm now 12 movies into watching a DVD set that includes 50 movies. When I started this crazy venture, I wondered how long it would take me to get sick of bad old public domain terror movies, and the answer is: now. This week I felt my first pangs of Horror Classic fatigue as I faced 1963's The Terror , a film directed by the prolific Roger Corman (see also Creature From the Haunted Sea ) and starring Boris Karloff and a very young Jack Nicholson. I had seen this film once before and I remembered that it wasn't great. Ah, but there was one aspect of The Terror that excited me: It's the first movie in the Horror Classics set to be filmed in color ! Would this make it more watchable? Hmm... Synopsis It's 1806, and Jack Nicholson plays Andre, a French soldier who's wandering the along coast when he discovers a mysterious and alluring woman. She says her name is Elaine... and then she walks right into the pounding surf . Andre jumps in after her, only to be attack...

Q: What's worse than a bloodsucking leech? A: A giant, bloodsucking leech. Q: What's worse than that? A: A swamp full of giant, bloodsucking leeches! This week's movie is Attack of the Giant Leeches , a 62-minute epic from 1959 that just happens to be produced by B-movie master Roger Corman (see also Creature From the Haunted Sea ). It's an hour and change of good, clean, bloodsucking fun, including a fat guy, a Mark Trail clone, and a Playboy centerfold. Let's dive in! Synopsis Our setting is a swampy rural town in Florida. At the general store, local man Lem tells his friends about the strange creature he encountered last night, before the opening credits. It was bigger than an alligator, it looked like an octopus, and he had to shoot it five times before it went away! None of the guys believe him. The guys include Dave, a big ol' boy whose trashy-sexy wife "Liz-baby" (played by Yvette Vickers, who according to Wikipedia was a Playboy centerfold i...

Today’s movie is Creature from the Haunted Sea from 1961. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was directed by Roger Corman, the prolific B-movie movie master who cranked out over 572,000 films in the 1960s, including the original Little Shop of Horrors . I will not be shocked if there’s some more Corman later in this DVD set. If you’re familiar with Corman’s style, you know that his “horror” movies were very tongue-in-cheek, and Creature is no exception. In fact, Wikipedia's article classifies the film as a comedy. I guess there's no 50-movie set of comedies, so here it is. Synopsis Our hero and narrator is an American secret agent named XK-150, who’s posing as a crooked businessman in order to infiltrate a crew led by a crime boss named Renzo Capetto. Renzo is helping some counter-revolutionary Cubans (remember, this is 1961) smuggle a trunk full of gold out of the country and across the ocean. This is explained in forest-set scene that appears to have been...