The Terror Within/Dead Space + The
Warrior & The Sorceress/Barbarian Queen (Roger Corman Cult Classics:
Double Feature/Shout! Factory DVDs)
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C- Films: D
By the 1980s, it seemed two new things rolled around to
challenge Roger Corman, ending his reign as the B-movie king: blockbuster genre
films and home video. This did not stop
him from continuing to produce films, but he was running out of ideas and finally
started to hit a wall of repetition which would make his work more repetitious
than ever by the middle of the decade.
We are now getting a good look at these films in the Double Feature DVDs
from Shout! Factory and will now look at each film.
The Terror Within (1989) is a bad example of the
Sci-Fi/Horror plague-kills-the-world tale with George Kennedy (experiencing a
career revival around this time with the Naked
Gun films) and Andrew Stevens battling killer gargoyles (!?!) in this very,
very silly film. The only terror here is
that there is no suspense or originality in the script and even with
cinematography by Ronn Schmidt (The Mist),
the film simply cannot distinguish itself in the genre in any way. The only extra is trailers.
Dead Space (1991) has Marc Singer (The Beastmaster) still working in a
genre that should have given him a better career than he got in this poor
remake of the Corman-produced Forbidden
World (1982, reviewed elsewhere on this site) which itself was a rip-off of
Alien, which recycled sets from
Corman’s Galaxy Of Terror and Battle Beyond The Stars, so this is so
many generations from an original idea that no one here stood a chance of this
working. This is now a curio since Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston is in
it and Fred Gallo (1992’s Dracula Rising)
directs. Extras include trailers and a
feature length audio commentary by Gallo.
The Warrior &
The Sorceress
(1984) has David Carradine back in another lead role for Corman around the time
he was enjoying new exposure in the hilarious North & South TV mini-series and its sequel. As Kain (no relation to his Kung-Fu TV role), he is the last of a
tribe and expert swordsman who is now available as an assassin, but he lands up
in the middle of a civil war and I about to be drawn into the madness. Too bad the film is silly and does not
work. Luke Askew (Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider)
also stars. The only extra is trailers.
Barbarian Queen (1985) is as bad and is sadly one
of the few staring roles of actress Lana Clarkson, who was murdered a few years
ago. Genius record producer Phil Spector
was sentenced to 19 years in jail for this and makes this the sadden kind of
curio. The film has her happy future and
marriage in a world far away ruined by her husband being imprisoned, village
destroyed and people killed, molested and worse. So what’s a girl to do about all this raping
and pillaging? Become a vengeful killer
sword fighter. James Horner and
Christopher young did the music score.
The only extras are trailers.
The 1.33 X 1 image on Space
and anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on the rest of the films show their
age, with hardly any restoration applied in any case. They are not coming to Blu-ray for now, so
that is no surprise. The Dolby Digital
2.0 sound is pretty much monophonic throughout, with dated fidelity, flat sound
and harmonic distortion throughout. Some
places even have warped sound.
- Nicholas Sheffo
