Saturday evenings are usually spent with my favorite girlfriend, Credit Card Olga from the Ukraine, some loaded weapons, a bottle of Grey Goose, and the Sci Fi Channel. I love their movies. Ridiculous scripts, atrocious special effects, acting from the school of "hey you with the nippley big hooters, want to be in a movie."
Titles like Bone Eater (not worth the sexual pun even for me), Flu Bird Horror, Dinocroc vs Supergator, House of Bones, Hellhounds, Mongolian Death Worm, and SS Doomtrooper are the grandchildren of such endearing cinematic gems as Little Shop of Horror, the Poe adaptations, The Raven and House of Usher, and Creature from the Haunted Sea. While other Madison Central High students in the early 60s were learning them educating skills for a normal adultifying life, I was a kid sneaking into the Capital and Orpheum Theaters on State Street waiting in the dark for the next Roger Corman brain blight.
50 years later Corman is still The Man. His latest assaults against the ongoing waste of big budget Hollywood movie making are for the Sci-Fi Channel. His current epic of eye wincing wonderment, SHARKTOPUS, proves what I've always said about him--and probably one of the reasons why I got tossed out of UCLA Film School. Roger Corman is the greatest film maker of all time. Even the influential French film magazine, Cahieres du cinema said he was the greatest maker of du film ever. As I don't read French, I believe somewhere in their many Jerry Lewis tribute issues that remark was made. Some lovers of film crave Chateaubriand a la Bouquetiere with Marchand de Vin Sauce. I'll take chicken gristle cocovan with a side order of Eric Roberts.
