![]() ![]() ![]() For that is the secret truth about Corman in his heyday: though he was unabashedly in it for a buck, and the quicker that buck the better, he was by no means an untalented man and his particular genius was not in finding ways to make movies as cheaply as possible (many dozens of '50s and '60s producers were good at that, and their films are often completely unwatchable) it was in making movies on the cheap with such cleverness that every one dollar spent brought back two dollars of production value. There were many of these films eight of them are regarded as "the" Poe films, because those were the eight directed by Corman, the ones made with such confidence and even a sort of low-grade artistry - and, crucially, all but one of them featured Vincent Price in the lead role - that they transcend their limitations as low-budget Gothic shockers, to become each in its own way a Classic of Horror Cinema. And they had big, elaborate sets, though part of the reason that there ended up being so many of the AIP Poe movies was that the cost of those big, elaborate sets could be amortised across the production of five or six or twenty movies. Which is to say, they were still outstandingly cheap by the standards of the big studios, but they were in Technicolor. It was at this time that the company released a number of films adapted from the works of 19th Century American Gothic horror writer Edgar Allan Poe sometimes these adaptations were faithful and sometimes they absolutely and in every possible way were not but they were, at the time, the must sumptuous and rich and costly films that AIP had ever handled. ![]() For a brief stretch in the 1960s, AIP, via the all-time great Z-movie director and producer Roger Corman, flirted with opulence. In fairness, this continued to be the case well after 1960 as well, and would remain so until the company's dissolution in the late 1970s.īut there was a moment. Prior to 1960, American Interntational Pictures - the legendary & notorious AIP -was known almost exclusively as the purveyor of quick, cheap cash-ins, movies that sought to grab the largest possible audience at the smallest possible expense, courtesy of lurid titles, even more lurid posters, and stories that rather more often than not could be summarised with some combination of the words "teen", "monster" and "bikinis". ![]()
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