Noticias

George Armitage, who co-wrote and directed the Alec Baldwin-starring Miami Blues and helmed another 1990s black comedy, Grosse Pointe Blank, starring John Cusack, has died. He was 83.

Armitage died Feb. 15 in Playa del Rey, California, his son, Brent Armitage, announced.

As was the case with many others, Armitage got a big career boost in the early 1970s from legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman at New World Pictures.

Armitage also wrote and directed MGM’s Hit Man (1972), starring Bernie Casey and Pam Grier, and United Artists’ Vigilante Force (1976), starring Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent. Both those films were produced by Roger’s brother, Gene Corman.

Miami Blues (1990), based on the series of Hoke Moseley books by author Charles Willeford, featured Baldwin as Frederick J. Frenger Jr., who steals the badge and gun of a veteran cop (Fred Ward as Moseley) and embarks on an outrageous crime spree with a hooker...

While other releases in the Shout! Factory’s Roger Corman’s Cult Classics focus on his producing credits, the recent Sci-Fi Classics showcases three of his early directorial works. Oh, he also produced all three, worked with the writers on the scripts and even pitched the projects to investors. Like many directors today, when you call something a "Corman film", it’s because he’s influenced the project from the start.

First up is Attack of the Crab Monsters, which manages to be quite effective despite its ludicrous premise. A group of scientists arrive on a remote Pacific island to study the effects of fallout from recent nuclear testing in the Pacific. They also want to discover what happened to the first team, which disappeared without a trace.

It’s not long before mysterious things start to happen. A sailor is pulled out of the water without his head, the...

He gave life to teenage cavemen and candy-stripe nurses. Crab monsters and humanoids from the deep. T-bird gangs and towns that dreaded sundown. His name is Roger Corman. And on Nov. 14, he will receive an honor that no one would have predicted: an honorary Academy Award. The 83-year-old B-movie titan has made nearly 400 films as a director and producer. From the start, Corman was a magnet for hungry young actors, writers, and directors who would work for slave wages for the chance to make their first film. They called it the "University of Corman," and the alumni include Francis Ford Coppola,...

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John Philip Law: Diabolik Angel

By Carlos Aguilar & Anita Hass

Foreword by Ray Harryhausen

Scifiworld/Quatermass 240 pages Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none €35.00

Review by John Exshaw

Towards the end of John Phillip Law: Diabolik Angel, authors Carlos Aguilar and Anita Haas describe their book as “an unfinished work”, anticipating, as they did, further films in the strange career of an actor best remembered for playing the black-clad super-criminal in Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik (1968), the blind angel, Pygar, in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), and the turbaned hero of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). Sadly, as it turned out, Diabolik Angel will stand instead as the last word on Law, who died of cancer at the age of 70 in May of last year, during the final stages of the book’s preparation.

Due,...