You can’t call dying at 98 a tragedy, but I definitely had a sense of the Passing of a Heroic Age when I heard that Roger Corman, B-Movie Impresario Extraordinaire, had died. There’re a lot of paths for people to find his work; in terms of monster films, his aesthetic (and sheer output) makes him one of the greats, but “serious” film fans probably also know him for his (sometimes exploitative) role in giving some heavy-hitters their first jobs in the movies. Or they might appreciate the work he did in distributing art-house foreign films through his company New Worlds – Fellini, Kurosawa, Herzog, a bunch of huge international names got work into American theaters because of Corman. And, of course, you’ve probably seen a number of his movies if you’re an MST3K fan (which, apparently, Corman himself was not).

I’m a huge fan of 50s/60s era sci-fi and horror, so of course Corman is one of my favorites. He made cheap, fast movies designed to turn a profit, a very pulp approach to entertainment that I find endearing, but there’s another key to his success that I think got lost in the obits and retrospectives that’ve come out since his death. Corman movies are often slyly and subversively fun. Partly I suspect that’s down to material considerations; teeny tiny budgets meant that they needed to find other ways to engage an audience’s interest, often relying on bonkers ass weird shit to paper over some of the cracks and rough edges. Jack Nicholson’s work in Corman movies is a great example of this: The Terror (1963) is a terrible, barely coherent movie, but Nicholson is absolutely unhinged in it, and his screaming and confusion kicks it into almost transcendent weirdness.

Subversion in Corman’s work is also important. I think there’re often more legitimate and sincere revolutionary ideas and attitudes in popular entertainment than in high-brow art – the simple fact that the former have to be a little more sneaky about their subversion makes that almost a given. But also, I think the ludic qualities of pulp/pop entertainment underscores and reinforces the subversion – you can make a dour and self-serious meditation on Debordian spectacle and commodification of the body under capitalism that nobody will ever see, or you can make Deathrace 2000. And beyond those sorts of societal-scale ideas, a lot of Corman movies proceed from the assumption that “normal” people don’t exist, that there’s a lot of strangeness and oddity in each of us, a refreshing and important reminder I think.

Don’t get me wrong, Corman wasn’t some kind of secret Dadaist using his films for culture jamming or anything like that; dude liked money and found a niche in Hollywood that let him make a lot of it! And of course there’s plenty of laughably bad shit in the Corman oeuvre – if you ever do a marathon of em, the cat fights or women showering scenes will get real old, real fast – but I do think that he (as director and later producer) sometimes created an environment where fun work could be made that used the limitations of production and the conventions of genre in very interesting and, honestly, instructive ways. I mean, goddamn, there’s almost no comparison between the “B” movies of Corman’s heyday and the absolutely vile shit being put out now!

Anyway, he’s obviously an important figure in film history, but in order to help spread some appreciation of the FILMS themselves, I thought I’d put out a little list of some of my personal favorites that you might wanna check out!

Not of this Earth (1955) – This is a spooky, atmospheric bit of paranoid sci-fi, with an alien that presages the MiBs of Point Pleasant and the Saucer era. Weird medical horror and a strange and interesting premise make this one one of Corman’s best, even if he did torture Paul Birch with awful contact lenses.

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963) – a legit classic! Corman often drew water from the same well, and this is a good example. He clearly thought the deadly eyeball stuff in Not of the Earth was an effective bit, so it gets expanded into this wild and very odd story. All sorts of interesting commentary in this one; industry research, snake oil salesmen, and organized religion all get picked apart, and it’s all capped off by a really great cosmic horror ending, one of the few things I’d call truly “Lovecraftian” to ever appear in any movie anywhere!

The Haunted Palace (1963) – ostensibly one of the famous Corman “Poe” series, this one is actually based on the Lovecraft novel (never published in his lifetime) “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Extremely fun to see the Lovecraft stuff get name-checked here of course, but it’s also got a great performance by the master Vincent Price as well as a very brief but very effective glimpse of something living in the pit below the palace. Great stuff!

The Masque of the Red Death (1965) – probably the best of the “Poe” flavored adaptations that Corman did, with beautiful and evocative photography and scenes plus, again, Price is just one of the best actors ever. There’s a lot of atmosphere and menace in this one, and the totentanz scene is one of the great horror set pieces in movie history.

The Dunwich Horror (1970) – probably my favorite Lovecraft adaptation of all time (after the silent Call of Cthulhu from 2005, of course). Dean Stockwell’s Wilbur Whatley is incredible, strange and alien and alluring, a real departure from the source material that nevertheless does manage to keep some of the repulsion in there. Plus this is another great example of the Corman “there’s no money so be creative” school of special effects – turning Yog Sothoth into a writhing mass of hippies is actually pretty inspired and a zillion times more interesting and effective than whatever CGI bullshit they’d try now.

Death Race 2000 (1975) – I mean, holy smokes, this is a masterpiece. Violent, convoluted, and campy as hell. Madcap cornball fun, highly recommended.