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Blumhouse Productions: Roger Corman for the 21st Century?

Although it seems they are synonymous with found-footage horror, low budget movies that will still be financial successes if audiences stop turning out in droves to see them, Blumhouse Productions are arguably something far more interesting. Their prolific output can easily be read as an updating of Roger Corman’s low budget exploitation aesthetic for the 21st century, albeit one that reflects pop culture’s increasingly low standards when it comes to genre filmmaking.

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To Better Know a Team: Fantastic Four

The Fantastic Four are the first family of Marvel Comics. Created in 1961 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (apocryphally, the result of an edict by Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to tryout a superhero team, a la rival DC Comic’s super-successful Justice League) and heavily inspired by the monster comics Marvel was publishing at the time, their tremendous popularity and success is responsible for launching Marvel’s Silver Age superhero renaissance, transforming a middling publisher of romance and sci-fi comics into one of the “Big Two” publishers of superhero adventure stories, leading to the creation of some of pop culture’s most enduring and beloved characters. Without the Fantastic Four, there would arguably be no Spider-Man, no Hulk, no X-Men or Avengers. Fantastic Four #1 is, simply, the Big Bang of Marvel Comics.

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Director & Actor Teams: The Overlooked & Underrated (Part 1 of 2)

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion.  As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture. One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and …

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10 (Kind Of) Great Classic Sci-Fi Flicks You May Have Never Heard Of

We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977). And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), …

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‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ is a visually beguiling collaboration

The Masque Of The Red Death (1964) Directed by Roger Corman Nicolas Roeg was one of the more successful cinematographers to graduate from the apex of the camera team to the director’s chair, a difficult transition which he arguably traversed with far more dexterity and than his European peers Freddie Francis, Jan De Bont, or Jack Cardiff. …

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RIGHT-HAND MAN: Mike Elliott

Throughout history, standing to the right of every great king one usually finds a great prime minister turning the king’s vision from abstract ambition into fact. During critical years for Roger Corman’s Concorde studio, the man at Corman’s elbow was Mike Elliott. Look up Mike Elliott on the Internet Movie Data Base (www.imdb.com) and you’ll …

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On Corman’s Front Line: Travis Rink

If Roger Corman was the commander-in-chief, and Mike Elliott his field marshal, than Travis Rink was among the front line troops who actually had to carry the fight. Writing several scripts for Concorde in the early 1990s, Rink had a close-up look at the factory-like process which made Concorde’s prodigious output possible. Rink had made …

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Under The Radar: On Roger Corman

There have always been moviemakers who operated just outside the major studio spotlight; showmen, hucksters, exploiters working on small budgets.  Before the advent of home video and the multiplex, they could sometimes be found hand-carrying their single print from one movie house to another.  Post-World War II, many of them found small, survivable niches specializing …

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