September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, September 27 are The Raven, The Terror, The Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Saturday, September 28 has The Beyond, Opera, Cemetery Man and A Blade In the Dark.

In his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Roger Corman went into detail on this film, an infamous one in his career: “It began as a challenge: to shoot most of a gothic film in two days using leftover sets from The Raven. It turned into the longest production of my career — an ordeal that required five directors and nine months to complete.”

While Corman is listed as the director, it was also worked on by Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and even Jack Nicholson. It all started with a rained out tennis game, as Corman decided that since the sets were still there for two days and he had access to Boris Karloff. Nobody really knew what the movie would be about, other than to be in a castle, and that Karloff had two days to do his part. The icon of horror had no clue that some of that would be spent in a tank of cold water.

The funny thing is that American-International Pictures paid for the sets for The Raven, but Corman was making this film by himself. He never asked if he could do it. He just started shooting. Samuel Z. Arkoff knew something was happening when at the wrap party, all of the sets were still standing. Then again, he knew that Corman would be coming to him to distribute the movie.

Other directors came in instead of Corman, as this was a non-union job and he was a union director. The beach scenes were shot by Coppola, along with Hill and Gary Kurtz, much of which was unusable as Coppola didn’t tell the cameraman that he was shooting night shots and then he went way over. Eleven days of shooting, which was like two Corman films worth of shooting.

Dennis Jakob shot Hoover Dam for the water scenes — while also working on his thesis film, something Corman couldn’t get angry about, because he was doing the same thing so often — and Monte Hellman and Jack Hill finished the film. Well, then Corman thought nothing worked together and it was boring, so he went back and shot a bunch of new scenes to make the movie work together. In a lot of those reshoots, Jack Nicholson’s wife Sandra Knight is noticeably pregnant when she wasn’t in the early shoots.

Meanwhile, Corman had promised Karloff $15,000 if this movie made $150,000. It didn’t,. but he had another idea. If Karloff would appear in Targets, he would get the cash. Corman told Peter Bogdanovich that he would finance his film if he shot twenty minutes of new Karloff footage, added in twenty minutes of this movie and then shot forty minutes with a new cast. Bogdanovich used footage from this movie at the beginning of his film, as Karloff watches himself and proclaims the movie as terrible.

French soldier André Duvalier (Nicholson) has left his men after a battle gone wrong and is rescued by Helene (Knight), a woman who looks just like the dead wife of a Baron. Twenty years before, after finding his wife with another man, the Baron (Karloff) killed her and had his servant Stefan (Dick Miller) kill the man he found her with.

A witch named Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) has been sending the ghost of the Baron’s wife to torment him, asking him to kill himself and join her. That’s because she thinks that the Baron killed her son Eric when the truth — ready for the spoiler — is that Eric killed the Baron and has gone so insane that he thinks that he is the Baron and killed Eric. By the time she learns this, it’s too late to enter the castle and as she runs to save her son, she walks across consecrated ground and burns. Just like Shakespeare, everyone dies except our young lovers, except that Helene is a ghost as well and she turns into a corpse after kissing André.

Speaking of saving money, AIP used to send its composers to more inexpensive European studios. In spite of this movies small budget, Ronald Stein was able to record both this movie’s soundtrack and the score for Dementia 13 all in one session while using the 90-piece Munich Symphony Orchestra. Speaking of that movie, The Terror played double features with it.

So yes, this isn’t a perfect movie, but at least Nicholson has good memories of it, saying “I had a great time. Paid the rent. They don’t make movies like The Terror anymore.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Also known as Bruce’s Revenge, Return of Fists of Fury and Ninja vs. Bruce Lee, this was made as Zhong lie Jing wu men. It super stars — that’s what they said — Bruce Le as Bruce Wong, who comes to Manila to visit his uncle who has apparently forgotten and just left home. So he wanders the streets and meets a young thief named Piggy and save a girl from the deadliest pimp in the Philippines, Mr. Cross.

One of the women Bruce saves is his cousin, who runs a martial arts school with his other cousin. He helps them fight Mr. Cross, who has one henchman who is such a gay stereotype that even far right people will be offended by this movie’s homophobia. Anyways, Bruce shuts almost everything down, so the bad guys hire a killer named Sakata to kill everyone, starting with his male cousin,.

This movie has an instrumental version of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” that completely made me insane, screaming out the lyrics. “I’m standing on the edge of time, I’ve walked away when love was mine, Caught up in a world of uphill climbing, the tears are in my mind and nothing is rhyming.”

Also: This ends with the police all coming to bust up the final fight between Mr. Cross, Sakta, Sakata’s brother, a hundred goons and Bruce. Piggy watches, all alone on the beach, crying, realizing that he will forever be alone. So…an unhappy ending?

If you were Asian, did martial arts and looked like Bruce Lee with aviator sunglasses on, you always had a job in 1977.

Director Joseph Velasco also went by Joseph Kong and made Bruce’s Secret Kung Fu,. Thundering Ninja, The Clones of Bruce Lee, Treasure of Bruce Lee, The Young Dragon, Enter the Game of Death, Bruce’s Deadly Fingers, Bruce and the Shaolin Bronzemen and Kung Fu Master: Bruce Lee Style. He made more off Bruce Lee than Bruce Lee made off of Bruce Lee.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, September 27 are The Raven, The Terror, The Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Saturday, September 28 has The Beyond, Opera, Cemetery Man and A Blade In the Dark.

The fifth of Roger Corman’s Poe movies, this was written by Richard Matheson and based on the poem “The Raven.” It has an astounding cast with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff — who was also in the 1935 adaption — as sorcerers locked in magical combat with one another.

In the book The Raven, Matheson said, “After I heard they wanted to make a movie out of a poem, I felt that was an utter joke, so comedy was really the only way to go with it.”

As Dr. Erasmus Craven (Price) pines for his lost wife Lenore (Hazel Court, The Man Who Could Cheat Death), he is visited by a raven that he helped to transform back into the human form of Dr. Bedlo (Lorre). Now, Bedlo wants revenge on the man who turned him into a beast — Dr. Scarabus (Karloff) — and gets Craven to come with him, claiming that he’s seen Lenore’s ghost in his enemy’s castle. Along for the ride are Craven’s daughter Estelle and Bedlo’s son Rexford, who is a very young Jack Nicholson.

It all turns out that Lenore is alive and faked her death to become Scarabus’ mistress and doesn’t even bat an eye when the evil wizard tortures her daughter. Of course, a duel between magicians is the only way this can all end.

Lorre was given to improv, which Price grew to enjoy, Nicholson loved and Karloff hated. Between that and the goofy Latin phrases the magicians say when they cast spells, this movie always makes me laugh.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Jack (Jack Lee) has come to fight in a martial arts tournament run by his friend Peter (Bruce Le). He’s brought a book of JKD secrets that was written by and given to him by Bruce Lee himself. After a rival fighter, Miguel (Romano Kristoff) defeats Peter, Jack gives him the book to learn from. However, Miguel kidnaps Peter’s girl Miriam (Carla Reynolds) and demands the book.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that it has the song “Shanti Dance” by Droids in it. A band that was the invention of Fabrice Cuitad, they had one album, Star Peace and a single, “(Do You Have) The Force.” Cuitad was a label manager at Barclay and founded the label Egg. Musicians Yves Hayat, Richard Lornac and Jean-Paul Batailley play on the album and in most live appearances, Hayat and Lornac performed.

Director and writer Bill James mainly worked as an actor. This also has Bruce Le take a girl on a date to a cock fight, which in no way feels like romance. And if I get confused by this, it’s also because it’s almost the same movie as They Call Him Bruce Lee.

How many books did Bruce leave to people after he died, anyway?

I’ve seen this listed as a 21st Century release but can’t find any proof. Anyone know if they had it at some time?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Directed by its star Fred Williamson, this film sees him as Johnny Barrows, a former football star and Silver Star winner who is dishonorably discharged after punching a superior officer. There’s nothing back home for him, as he’s attacked by cops and forced to live on the streets.

However, he’s not in such bad shape that he’s working going to work for mobster Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), who he meets while looking for a handout at an Italian restaurant. Instead, he works at a gas station where he’s ripped off again, which leads to him beating up his boss, Richard (R.G. Armstrong).

While Johnny is struggling, the mob has been at war. The Da Vinci family wants to start dealing drugs and the Racconis are an old school gang. They don’t want to get people strung out. A double cross leads to Mario being shot and his entire family being wiped out. Using his girlfriend Nancy (Jenny Sherman) as a go-between, he tries to hire Johnny, who still doesn’t want involved but this being a Fred Williamson movie, she soon sleeps with him. When the Da Vincis kidnap and assault her, that finally brings Johnny into the war.

Of course, it’s not all so simple.

This movie makes good use of cameos by Roddy McDowall as one of the Da Vincis and Elliot Gould as a wise man of the streets, Professor Theodore Rasputin Waterhouse. It also reminds me a lot of The Farmer, which is a better movie, except with the originally shot downer ending.

It ends with this: “Dedicated to the veteran who traded his place on the front line for a place on the unemployment line. Peace is Hell.”

Originally released by Atlas Films, it was rereleased by Flora Releasing and Dimension Pictures. 21st Century got this movie when they bought Dimension.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Herbert Biberman was so against the U.S. Lend-Lease to the United Kingdom that the FBI suspected Jewish director of being a Nazi. After being investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to be questioned by Congress. Beyond being blacklisted, he was jailed for six months. Other than 1954’s Salt of the Earth, this is the only movie that he made after that. He was kept out of the Director’s Guild until he was posthumously added back in 1997.

His film Slaves was not well-reviewed. Vincent Carnaby summed up many other notes by saying that it was “…a kind of cinematic carpetbagging project in which some contemporary movie-makers have raided the antebellum South and attempted to impose on it their own attitudes that will explain 1969 black militancy. The result, which opened here yesterday at the DeMille and neighborhood theaters, is a pre-fab Uncle Tom’s Cabin, set in an 1850 Mississippi where everybody—masters and slaves alike—talks as if he had been weaned, at best, on the Group Theater, and, at worst, on silent-movie titles.”

Stephen Boyd — are you shocked that I am excited to mention that he’s in Marta? — plays the evil slaver in this. He said of being in it, “Some people have the impression that people are in this picture because they want to say something. I don’t have a damn thing to say. MacKay says it, and what he says, God knows….Show me a business anywhere which is successful, and I will show you a man who could very easily be MacKay. And that, to me, is really the point.”

He gets to purchase Luke (Ossie Davis), a slave who had been promised by his elderly master that he would get to be a free man. At the same auction, he also purchases Cassy (Dionne Warwick) to be his lover against her will.

Boyd has some involved speeches in this and excels at being evil. Davis is good as well and you feel for his character, a man sure he will never see his children again. While sold as exploitation, it’s nowhere near Mandingo or Goodbye Uncle Tom, but then again, the latter is as horrible as it gets.

Originally distributed unrated by Continental Distributing AKA the same Walter Reade Corporation that screwed up Night of the Living Dead‘s release and caused it to be a public domain movie. In fact, this played doubles with Night! It was rereleased in 1981 with an R rating by 21st Century.

You can watch this on YouTube.