Miller Time.

Continuing our tribute to the late Dick Miller, here is a quick run-down of the first five of his trademark one-scene-wonder cameo appearances that spring to my mind this week, in no particular order.

Night of the Creeps (1986): Police Armorer.

“Flamethrower?! What’s the matter, the ol’ snub-nose not good enough for ya anymore?”

Sometimes, I’m inclined to believe that if I were to pull Fred Dekker’s beloved mid-‘80s horror-comedy off the shelf for another go-round, it might not hold up so well, what with it’s heavy reliance on b-movie in-jokery and glib, self-aware humour etc.

Then I remember that it includes a scene in which Tom Atkins and Dick Miller discuss the paperwork required to requisition a flamethrower from the police armoury, and I think, no – it’s still pretty great.


Not Of This Earth (1957): Vacuum Cleaner Salesman.

“..crazy.”

From my review last October:
“Though he is barely on screen for two minutes before being unceremoniously stuffed in the incinerator, Miller is great here, with his unruly hair, his weary distaste for his own sales patter and his sardonic use of the word “crazy” as an all-purpose acknowledgement all suggesting that his character is actually some down-on-his-luck beatnik reluctantly coerced into regular employment.”


The Howling (1981): Bookstore Owner.

“You want books, I got books. I got chicken blood, I got dog embryos, I got black candles, I got wolf-bane. Look at this - silver bullets. Some joker ordered them. Thirty-ought-six. Never picked 'em up.”

Until I checked IMDB whilst preparing this post, I never realised that Miller’s character in ‘The Howling’ is identified as “Walter Paisley” in the cast-list. Which I suppose makes sense in relation to director Joe Dante’s relentless b-movie nerdery, but it does open the floodgates for some frankly unnecessary alternate universe type queries, vis-à-vis the original Walter’s fate grisly in ‘A Bucket of Blood’ twenty two years earlier.


Truck Turner (1974): Fogarty (Bail Bondsman).

“Hi Turner, hi Jerry, good to see you – I got a real easy one for you here, you’re gonna like this… guy’s name is Richard Leroy Johnson, also known as Gator; his last known address is a vacant lot; Bail is $30,000. He jumped it yesterday.”


The Undead (1957): Leper.

“They call me leper and unclean, and banish me to forest and swamp..”

From my 2017 review:
“Shortly thereafter, most of the characters attend a Black Mass in a cemetery, presided over by the Robin Hood-hatted Satan. He is keen to gather signatures for his black book, and, in return, he hands a big bag of money to some old geezer who complains he’s led a wretched life, and cures Dick Miller’s leprosy (hurray!).”

Deathblog: Dick Miller (1928-2019)

Very sad news today, as I learned (via Tim Lucas’s blog) that the great Dick Miller has passed away, mere weeks after celebrating his 90th birthday.

In keeping with the majority of Miller’s screen appearances, I’ll try to keep this brief, and won’t patronise readers by presuming that they don’t know who Dick Miller is.

Even if, for some reason, you don’t yet know his name, if you have watched a reasonable number of American films, you will inevitably be able to identify him using the holy, ceremonial title of oh, THAT guy (an attainment acknowledged by the title of this 2014 documentary about his career, which I would love to see, incidentally).

Personally however, I’ve never known him as oh, THAT guy, because I was fortunate enough to see him playing the unforgettable role of the wouldbe beatnik sculptor / loveable simpleton Walter Paisley in Roger Corman’s wonderful ‘A Bucket of Blood’ (1959) fairly early in my movie-watching career. Ever since then, I have been fully aware of the fact that he is Dick Miller, and that he is awesome.

(If I tell you of the quizzical looks I’ve received over the years, each time I’ve found myself compelled to suddenly yell “DICK MILLER!” whilst watching some movie or other in company, I’m sure many cult movie buffs will be able to relate.)

Given the strength of Miller’s performance in ‘A Bucket of Blood’, I’ve often wondered why he never really moved into playing lead roles. Part of the explanation I suppose is simply that Hollywood – even in its most marginal, low budget off-shoots – rarely makes movies with Dick Miller type people in the lead roles. I mean, I’m sure he could have absolutely nailed it as some off-beat, ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ type hero or something, but for whatever reason, it never happened.

More likely though, I’d tend to suspect that Miller’s decision to specialise in cameos and one-scene-wonder character parts was simply due to a general recognition that – please forgive me for this one – a little Dick goes a long way.

By way of further explanation, I think I’ll need at this point to revert to the aforementioned Mr Lucas, whose memorial post (linked above) sums things up perfectly*:

“He made bad movies fun, good movies better, and great movies... great movies with Dick Miller in them! Simply put, he was somebody we were always happy to see.”

Amen to that.

R.I.P., and our condolences to the great man’s nearest and dearest. A sad day.

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* I also stole the photo above from Lucas’s blog, because it’s unbeatable – I hope he doesn’t mind.

October Horrors # 4: Not Of This Earth (Roger Corman, 1957)

My attempts to gradually familiarise myself with Roger Corman’s pre-‘House of Usher’ filmography may have hit choppy waters last year with The Undead and Creature from Haunted Sea, but we finally make landfall here, with what must be one of the absolute best of his late ‘50s pictures.

‘Not Of This Earth’ first hit screens in February ‘57 as half of a ready-made double bill with ‘Attack Of The Crab Monsters’ and, in view of its title and poster, you may well wonder what it’s doing in the middle of a marathon of horror reviews. Well, like many of the best low budget ‘50s Sci Fi films (cf: The Man From Planet X), this one draws just as much from horror traditions as it does SF, melding the two rather nicely and inadvertently kick-starting the loose cycle of “space vampire” movies that went on to include Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965), Curtis Harrington’s ‘Queen of Blood’ (1966), and, eventually, Tobe Hooper’s ‘Lifeforce’ (1985) in the process.

Admittedly, the opening scene may not bode terribly well, as a carefree bobby-soxer bids a chaste goodbye to her eager boyfriend (HIM: “don’t be a drag, you know how you flip me”, HER: “I’m hip, but if my father dug the scene, he’d put small round holes in your head”) and subsequently falls victim to the less than convincingly monstrous figure of a burly middle-aged man in a black hat and shades (Paul Birch), who proceeds to extract her blood using some kind of machinery concealed inside a suitcase.

As a characteristically modernist animated opening sequence unfolds (created by Paul Julian, this one features skulls, paint-dripping alien landscape and a roving pair of shining eyes), we would seem to be en route to yet another paranoiac “the aliens are among us” type yarn (hey, at least the special effects are cheap), but thankfully this initial premise is taken in a very different direction by Charles Griffith & Mark Hanna’s witty and relentlessly imaginative screenplay.

Next up for instance, we see the black-clad killer barging into a quiet suburban doctor’s surgery, where, using slow but precisely enunciated English that leads Beverley Garland’s nurse to assume he is some kind of visiting foreign aristocrat, he declares that he is critically ill and demands an immediate blood transfusion.

Understandably, William Roerick’s doctor is reluctant to acquiesce to “Mr Johnson”s demands, particularly given that he refuses to submit to a blood test, but the application of some voiceover psychic powers soon resolves their disagreement, with the doctor in thrall to “Johnson”, and sworn to secrecy regarding his dealings with this new patient. (1)

In fact, the doc even ends up consenting to Johnson’s wish to recruit his nurse on a full time, private basis, in order to prepare his daily transfusions and – as he puts it - “to see that I do not expire”. When Nadine (for that is Ms Garland’s character name) hears how much this weirdo is willing to pay her, she is happy to go along with this arrangement, and ends up accompanying Mr Johnson to his home, despite the reservations of her cop boyfriend (Morgan Jones), who is outside slapping a ticket on the fiend’s illegally parked sedan.

Mr Johnson’s welcoming of Nadine into his household closely mirrors the old ‘Dracula’ tradition, right down to the alien’s attempt to lock the nurse’s door without her permission, and his offering her comforts (food, access to the swimming pool) that he himself refuses to enjoy.

In fact, whilst he may be largely ignorant of human customs and behaviour, Mr Johnson nonetheless seems to know exactly how a vampire should live, and as such he has acquired an impressive mock-Tudor mansion, and has even employed a local small-time hoodlum (Jeremy, played by Corman regular Jonathan Haze) as his all-purpose cringing crony.

As well as driver, porter, cook and cleaner, Jeremy also serves duty as Johnson’s all-purpose guide to human conduct (“I told you not to drive a car before ya learn how,” he snaps at his employer in first scene). Despite happily admitting that “this guy is six kinds of a freak”, Jeremy is happy to put his suspicions on deep freeze and do Johnson’s bidding. After all, as long as his boss keeps on handing him piles of gold ingots to convert into U.S. currency, who has time for questions?

So, that’s our basic set up, and, with admirable brevity, the remainder of the film gives us something extraordinary to chew on about every five or ten minutes, regular as clockwork.

Johnson’s communication with his home planet of Davanna for instance is accomplished via a hologram-based radio transmitter and matter transfer device that he keeps in his closet, and that will turn any connoisseur of vintage space-age clobber green with envy. Describing the earth’s inhabitants to his controller as “second state, sub-human, weak and full of fright,” he subsequently recites a list of his instructions from on-high, none of the potential results of which sound very promising for the people of Earth, whose fate is either to be harnessed as blood cattle should Johnson be able to subsist on their blood, or flat-out destruction if he does not.

Next up, Johnson opens the door to Dick Miller, appearing here in the role of a dishevelled door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman whose fast-talking patter briefly confuses the stern alien. Though he is barely on screen for two minutes before being unceremoniously stuffed in the incinerator, Miller is great here, with his unruly hair, his weary distaste for his own sales routine and his sardonic use of the word “crazy” as an all-purpose acknowledgement all suggesting that he is actually some down-on-his-luck beatnik reluctantly forced into regular employment. A joy.

Towards the end of the film meanwhile, Johnson is surprised to encounter a female of his species on the street; wearing similar wrap-around shades, she looks like a classic film noir vamp. The two aliens speak telepathically whilst browsing at a magazine stand (I wish the print was good enough for me to see what they’re reading), and the woman explains that she is fugitive who has escaped from Davanna, using the ‘dimension warp’ installed in Johnson’s closet without permission.

Johnson declares that the woman will face severe punishment for this transgression, but she responds by informing him that things have gone south pretty sharp-ish back home on their dying planet. She provides a harrowing account of Davanna collapsing into anarchy, as ‘enemy prisoners’ are drained of blood en masse to quell the hunger of the mob, prompting her to make the jump to Earth to escape the violence. Now, she too desperately needs blood, and begs Johnson to help her, prompting him to break into the doctor’s surgery where, in a horrible mix up, he selects the wrong bottle and doses her with rabid dog’s blood.

Then, just when you think you’ve already got your moneys-worth from this picture, Johnson – who is presumably beginning to feel rather desperate once the woman’s body is discovered – unveils a bizarre, flying jellyfish creature that he keeps rolled up in a glass tube(!), and sends it to attack the doctor. A wonderfully hideous, Lovecraftian creature design, this thing drops from the sky like a demonic lampshade and engulfs the poor guy’s head, Flying Guillotine style, until he ceases to struggle and thick gloops of blood trickle out from beneath it. Yowza!

Though blighted by a few minutes of unnecessary and tension-free running around in the final reel, ‘Not Of This Earth’ is otherwise a more or less perfect sci-fi/horror concoction. Clocking in at a brisk sixty-seven minutes, Griffiths and Hanna’s screenplay is superb, full of way-out ideas, razor sharp (or at least, extremely strange) dialogue and a wide variety of diverting shenanigans.

Like Corman’s more celebrated horror comedies of the era (‘A Bucket of Blood’, ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’), the strength of the writing here makes for a film that is both eerily unnerving and genuinely funny, but with the pendulum perhaps swinging more strongly toward the former aspect on this particular occasion.

Performances too are great across the board. The odd, unnatural phrasing and impossible-to-place accent Birch employs as Mr Johnson also strike a perfect balance between humour and menace, whilst Garland makes for an absolutely swell heroine, obviously taking great pleasure in portraying a smart, capable and hard-headed woman who could easy run rings around any of the male characters.

Haze meanwhile is a gum-chewin’, street corner stupid-smart delight as Jeremy, and hell, even the cop boyfriend is kind of likeable. (You’ve got to love the moment when, after discovering that Johnson is a malevolent alien, he tells Garland “If I didn’t have to go on duty in half an hour, I’d go over there and get you out myself”.)

What I love above all most about the films that emerged from Roger Corman’s orbit across the decades (even the bad ones) is that they never play their audience for suckers. Cheap, simplistic and crassly commercial though they may be, you never get the feeling that Corman and his collaborators set out to make a movie they wouldn’t want to watch themselves.

Rarely allowing levels of enthusiasm or ingenuity to flag, Corman never talked down to his viewers the way that so many low budget operators did, only resigning himself to a “fuck it, this'll do” approach on rare occasions when the extreme haste and poverty under which his productions were undertaken made it impossible to save a picture from ignominy.

In this sense, Corman’s films strike me as a cinematic equivalent of the Marvel comic books overseen by Stan Lee during the ‘60s. Though working at crippling speed in areas of culture widely regarded as disposable, juvenile trash, these men saw no reason to let his own artistic standards slip, ruthlessly applying a credo that I’ve always taken to be one of the key rules of any creative endeavour; namely: if you set out to make something really good, with a bit of luck you’ll make something ok. If you set out to make something “ok”, you might as well give up and go home, because what you make is going to be worthless.

Though he may not have put it in quite those terms, it is this attitude that led Corman and the creatives he corralled around him to create films like ‘Not of this Earth’ – one week wonders that fell so far beneath the radar they didn’t even attract critical contempt upon their initial release, but that remain thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking over sixty years later, keeping them alive in an era when I’ll bet 90% of the movies that gained an Oscar nomination in 1957 have been long forgotten.

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(1) As an aside, I liked the decision here to name the alien “Johnson” – though clearly not a deliberate reference on the part of the scriptwriters, it puts me in mind of the “Johnsons” celebrated by William Burroughs in his novels, referring to the invisible, subterranean brotherhood of quiet, seemingly law-abiding citizens who are nonetheless always ready to help out a junkie, to harbour a criminal without ratting to the law, and to generally act in opposition to ‘straight’ society.

October Horrors #7: The Undead (Roger Corman, 1957)

More bona fide Roger Corman weirdness here, with what I think must rank as by far the strangest – certainly most unconventional – film he turned in during his black & white double feature years at AIP.

These days, I suspect the film itself is far less widely seen than its striking (if somewhat misleading) poster design… and perhaps for good reason, as, make no mistake, ‘The Undead’ is some real oddball shit. A curious mish-mash of ideas that never really coalesces into anything terribly appealing, but is nevertheless noteworthy, not just for its sheer strangeness, but for the way in which it strongly prefigures most of the themes and aesthetic fixations that would come to define Corman’s directorial career over the following decade.

We know we’re in for something a bit different right away here, as the film opens with a brief introduction from no less a personage than The Devil himself. As embodied here by actor Richard Devon, Satan sports a neat black goatee, a Robin Hood hat and wields some kind of bloody great trident thing. “Behold the subtle working of my talents,” he declares “and pray that I may never turn my interest… upon you”, before bidding us farewell with an outrageous theatrical guffaw.

Once that’s over with, we find ourselves in the spooky, mist-shrouded exterior of the ‘American Institute of Psychical Research’, where Dr Quintus Ratcliff (Val Dufour), whose appearance and mannerisms remind me somewhat of Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper, is escorting a lady - Diana, played by Pamela Duncan - inside to meet the unassuming Professor Olinger (Maurice Manson), who appears to be the boss of the whole outfit. [Special thanks to IMDB for helping me to get through that paragraph in one piece.]

As it transpires, Ratcliff is a former student of the Professor who has just returned from Nepal (hey, makes a change from Tibet), where he has been hanging about with some Yogis and mastering all kinds of whiz-bang techniques that (he claims) are sure to revolutionise the way that the American Institute of Psychical Research does business. Diana, it is strongly implied in non-production code busting fashion, is merely a hooker he has picked up on his way over. (The two men make various derogatory remarks about her low intelligence and corresponding susceptibility to hypnosis etc, all whilst she is clearly within earshot.)

Anyway, it seems that Ratcliff intends to put Diana into a 48 hour trance state, wherein he will attempt to prove his theories regarding reincarnation and so forth by allowing her consciousness to regress straight through to her past lives.

Now, as I recall, William Hurt had to ingest massive quantities of psychoactive drugs in order to achieve this in Ken Russell’s ‘Altered States’ a few decades later, so Ratcliff must really be some real hot shit, because he manages to get Diana over the wall with little more than a few hand gestures and a bit of the old “you are feeling sleepy..” type patter.

From this point onward, we leave faux-Agent Cooper and the American Psychical Society far behind, as we journey back to a gothic fairy-tale version of medieval Europe, where Diana’s distant ancestor Helene is locked up in ‘The Tower of Death’, facing execution at dawn – by decapitation, no less - on a charge of witchcraft.

After a bit of good advice from the disembodied voice of her 20th century descendent however, Helene manages to clobber her gaoler with a chain and make her getaway. Subsequent to this, we are gradually introduced to a wider cast of spectacularly annoying medieval characters, including a painfully unamusing “bewitched” gravedigger named Smolkin (Mel Welles), a standard issue knight in shining armour (Richard Garland), a proper, no-messing-around pantomime witch (Dorothy Neumann, rocking some of the worst ‘warty nose’ make-up ever seen on screen), and, most pleasingly, Livia (Allison Hayes of ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’ fame), a hella intimidating, shape-shifting femme fatale of a Bad Witch, whose ‘sinful curves’ are displayed to fine advantage by the faux-medieval equivalent of a slinky little one piece number.

Upping the ‘medieval weirdness’ quotient considerably, Livia travels everywhere with some kind of perpetually cackling imp/familiar type creature that I’m going to assume must be played by an actual adult person of small stature, because the alternative possibilities are too weird/horrid to contemplate.(1)

The pair frequently transform into bats (fake, unconvincing ones), cats (real ones) and sometimes mice or spiders (could go either way). This is achieved by means of a sparkler-aided variation on the old ‘Bewitched’ style jump cut effect (which, as Saxana proved, never gets old). Naturally, Livia and her imp are up to their necks in some high level scheming, primarily aimed at ensuring Helene does indeed get executed as a witch, thus allowing Livia to steal the hunky knight-in-shining-armour guy from her.

And, if you’re wondering by this point where the hell all this is going, the answer is… nowhere fast. Whilst ‘The Undead’s heavily atmospheric, overtly fantastical take on a medieval setting – half Edgar Allan Poe, half ‘Wizard of Oz’ – clearly sets the stage for aesthetic sensibility Corman would go on to develop in his epochal Price/Poe films a few years later (and more specifically, the strain of heavily stylised medievalism that fed into both his ’62 remake of ‘Tower of London’ and the extraordinary ‘Masque of the Red Death’ in ’64), ‘The Undead’ is early doors for the director’s exploration of this sort of material, and there is an overriding “horribly misguided community theatre production” vibe to these fairy tale scenes that soon begins to grate. (2)

Indeed, as these tiresome, pantomime-like characters proceed to faff about to no great effect, belting out the charmless cod-Shakespearian dialogue of Charles Griffiths’ script as if they were delivering it to an gymnasium full of noisy school kids, it was only my slack-jawed disbelief at the sheer strangeness of ‘The Undead’ that kept me going at some points.

It is just as well then that the movie’s final act sees things getting even stranger, as, back in the 20th century, Dr Ratcliff suddenly becomes concerned that his meddling with past life regression might have brought about a bunch of temporal paradoxes or something. This leads him to decide that he must follow Diana’s spirit back into the past to set things straight. Achieving this through means that are never really made clear to us, the good doctor arrives in the middle ages naked, Terminator style, and swiftly steals a set of clothes from a passing knight before setting off to track down Diana/Helene.

Shortly thereafter, most of the characters attend a Black Mass(!) in a cemetery, presided over by the Robin Hood-hatted Satan. He is keen on gathering signatures for his black book, and, in return, he hands a big bag of money to some old geezer who complains he’s led a wretched life, and cures Dick Miller’s leprosy (hurray!).

In a scene that must have looked absolutely superb during the fuzzed-out UHF TV broadcasts through which I’d imagine this movie was primarily viewed for many years following its theatrical release, three female dancers in appropriately charnel garb provide the entertainment at this infernal knees-up, swaying and swirling like otherworldly gothic swamp creatures with polystyrene gravestones behind them, before they disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Elsewhere, a couple of people get their heads cut off, Lavinia gets rather gorily stabbed for her trouble and there’s a ‘knock down, drag out’ fight between the doctor and ‘Gobbo, the Jailer’ – all of which helped ensure that ‘The Undead’ was actually refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Censors in 1957.

Thereafter, some deals are done and some conflicts resolved, Satan gets the last laugh, as well he should, and… I dunno, what more can I tell you? A quintessential “what the fuck did I just watch?!” sort of picture, ‘The Undead’ seems to have been specifically designed to leave inebriated late night TV viewers waking up the next morning wondering whether or not they dreamed it. But let me tell you friends, I watched it relatively early in the day, whilst sober, and I can assure you – it is absolutely real.

As well as providing an early demonstration of Corman’s interest in gothic/medieval settings, ‘The Undead’ also touches upon his quasi-bohemian interest in new age psychology and mysticism, and his penchant for disorientating his viewers by flinging them across time and space (something that reoccurs not just in his late ‘60s “psychedelic” movies but also in his remarkable directorial swan-song ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ from 1990).

But, most of all perhaps, ‘The Undead’ simply serves to demonstrate Corman’s increasing dissatisfaction with the back-to-back formula pictures he was churning out for AIP. The film may not have really proved much of success in this regard, but whatever you make of it, it’s certainly a big leap forward from ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’ in terms of narrative ambition, that’s for sure.

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(1)IMDB confirms that the imp is actually played by renowned littler person actor Billy Barty, who made his first screen appearance in 1927 at the age of three, appeared uncredited as a “baby” in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ at the age of eleven, and continued to work consistently in film and TV right up to the late 1990s. Respect is due.

(2) Interestingly, ‘The Undead’ actually debuted a full eighteen months before ‘The Seventh Seal’ – which was certainly a huge influence upon ‘Masque of the Red Death’ – was released in the USA, meaning that Corman significantly pre-empted Bergman’s reinvention of metaphysical medievalism in cinema here, for whatever that’s worth.