Roger Corman's Masque of the Red Death: C or D

Photography by Roeg!

Best Poe effort by Roger Corman

Best exchange of dialogue:

some nobleman"let me into your castle! I'll let you sleep with my wife!"

Vincent Price: "I would rather not repeat that dubious pleasure"

(Dead Heat? Okay, mostly everything...)

I have disturbing childhood memories of Robert Morley in an atrocious bouf wig screaming about his babies. And people wonder why I have insomnia. :)

It's an extremely visual movie, and yet has a very classical style to it--if you turn off the color on your tv, I feel it holds its own against those old black and white chestnuts.

But it also has Diana Rigg in a white mini and gawdy eyelashes...rowr

On Talking Pictures (Freeview 81) tonight at 10pm.

(In fact, a good evening's viewing from Talking Pictures, "I Know Where I'm Going" at 7pm and 70's Hammer, "Horror of Frankenstein" at 11.45pm.)

That is a v good triple bill. I Know Where I'm Going is an all time favourite.

There is a Van Der Valk in there too btw.

Caught an old VDV on TPTV just the other day - surprisingly sleazy. B Foster p gd VFM.

HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN is Jimmy Sangster's pisspoor effort at turning the Hammer Frankenstein series into a sex comedy w/ Ralph Bates and Dave Prowse.

There's a nice 11 minute animation of the same story I started looking at when lack of response to covid seemed to be happening in the UK and elsewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURFvYmKvoc&t=7s

Cheers for the tip, will watch later as my old VHS copy went mouldy and had to be binned (also I don't have a VHS player any more, and it's a crap format anyway). Should be required viewing for those non-city dwellers who (from personal experience of hearing them say this) think the pandemic is all happening in yonder big cities, and there just isn't that much of it out here etc.

I thought I'd used the link to this on Facebook so surprised it didn't work a couple of days back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURFvYmKvoc&t=12s

https://youtu.be/uURFvYmKvoc

Such an odd film, not really a horror movie, the atmosphere of it is so creepy and disorienting. I think Skip Martin, who played Hop Toad, was an excellent actor, but I suppose there weren't too many parts around for him back in the day.

Courtesy of mark s:

it took half a century but i finally realised that the red death in "masque of the red death" is a play on "black death", well done E.A.Poe
― coco vide (pomenitul), Saturday, 21 March 2020 13:32 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

i.e. cosign (minus the half a century part).
― coco vide (pomenitul), Saturday, 21 March 2020 13:33 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^from the "shockingly old" thread

You wonder how such a strange, ornate piece of film-making played in the drive-ins it was probably shown in. I guess a Polanski type would have made a much better film, but it would have gone 10 x over budget, and that just wasn't the AIP way. Apparently the sets were left over from a bigger-budget film - a classic Corman cost-cutting move. His autobiography (a required read, by the way) isn't called How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime for nothing.

Corman produced a remake in 1989! Directed by Larry Brand, whoever that is. It looks terrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque_of_the_Red_Death_(1989_film)#/media/File:The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death_poster.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death_poster.jpg

corman shd have directed all the films clive barker dreamed up

Just recently realized I own like 100 Corman/AIP fillums, many of them (including this one) still unwatched. And I finally started reading the more recent book about Corman (Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses) over the past week. So I'm about to make very good use of all this time stuck in the house.

I guess a Polanski type would have made a much better film,

Nah. But would "The Fearless Vampire Killers" have been better if Roger Corman had directed it?

trying to imagine it being worse, not really succeeding

LOL, I quite like it!

Technically better, is what I meant. Corman's directing style was always efficient but not exactly expansive. Still, he never went over budget! And middlebrow competence (which most technically-skilled directors end up gravitating towards) doesn't tend to allow for the sort of lurid craziness that expresses the desires of the unconscious mind far better than any film-school dullard could ever know.