Bloody Mama

Director/producer Roger Corman was more than a B-movie legend. From 1955 to the late '60s, he was America's most prolific low-budget director, and he grew more ambitious and more inventive throughout the decade. The eight features in this box set, on four two-sided flipper discs in four thinpak cases, collect many of his best films, two of them making their DVD debut here. The most notable is "Bloody Mama" (1970), his wickedly weird twist on the "Bonnie and Clyde" outlaw gangster picture, with Shelley Winters as Ma Barker, who loves her demented sons so much she sometimes sleeps with them. Don Stroud and Robert De Niro are two of Ma Barker's boys, and Bruce Dern, Pat Hingle and Diane Varsi co-star. Previously released but even more essential are Corman's notorious biker classic "The Wild Angels" (1966), which launched Peter Fonda as a counterculture icon, and the quintessential 1960s head film "The Trip" (1967), written by Jack Nicholson and starring Fonda as a burned-out TV director who drops acid under the protective watch of Dern and Dennis Hopper. The trippiest film of the bunch is Corman's hippy apocalypse "Gas-s-s-s" (1970), a groovy satirical road movie set in a future where everyone over 25 is killed by an experimental weapon, and a group of peace-loving hippies goes looking for utopia amidst the fashionable fascists that have taken root. It was his last film for his longtime studio home, AIP, because it (along with "The Trip" and "Bloody Mama" before it) was re-edited behind his back. The earliest film in the set is his zero-budget classic "A Bucket of Blood" (1959), a black comedy about a schlemiel bus boy (Dick Miller) in a beatnik coffeehouse who aspires to be a sculptor. This madhouse of poseurs, drug-dealing lowlifes and poetry-spewing beards is high on the list of B-movie mondo greatness. Also features a pair of films starring Ray Milland -- the Poe adaptation "The Premature Burial" (1962) and the eerie science fiction thriller "X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes" (1963) -- and the DVD debut of "The Young Racers" (1963) a low-budget production that Corman directed on location, on the most famous racetracks in Europe.

Corman provides commentary for "The Trip" and makes clear that the studio imposed the anti-drug introduction and tampered with his final image. The rest of the talk is informative and instructive, as he talks both about his art and his solutions to the problems posed by budgetary constraints. The 20-minute interview that accompanies "The Premature Burial" takes the same approach. Also includes the featurettes "Love and Haight" and "Tune In, Trip Out," both on the making of "The Trip," and a footage of the psychedelic film effects.