Galaxy Of Terror
Roger Corman’s Cult Classics
Blu-ray | DVD
Directed by Bruce D. Clark
Starring Edward Albert, Ray Walston, Grace Zabriskie, Bernard Behrens, Erin Moran, Robert Englund, Zalman King, Taaffe O’Connell, Sid Haig, Jack Blessing
Shout! Factory
Release Date: July 20, 2010

Until the rise of home video in the early 1980’s, the best place to get quality exploitation cinema was to fire up the car and head out for a night at your local drive-in theater or dilapidated grind house, and during the heyday of exploitation, Roger Corman was the king of unbeatable schlock.

Today the prolific producer/director is as much known for his ability to churn out low-budget B-movies that would always turn a profit thanks to a shrewd marketing strategy that the blockbuster filmmakers of today would take and run with for a while before perverting into blandness, as he is for discovering or at least recognizing the hidden talent in some of the most important figures in the New Hollywood group of filmmakers that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s: names like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, John Sayles, Sylvester Stallone, Ron Howard, Carl Franklin, Peter Fonda, and so on.

In the early 1970s, Corman founded New World Pictures, the independent studio where he made most of his more well-known titles and provided a training ground for many of today’s finest directors, writers, actors, and technicians. Recently the DVD label Shout! Factory bought the rights to most of Corman’s finest B-movie gems and have been releasing them to DVD and Blu-Ray under their “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” banner complete with brand new high-definition transfers and tons of extra features, some of them holdovers from previous DVD releases. Several of these titles have never been available since the slow death of home video and I’ll be reviewing the two most recent releases from Shout! Factory, both making their first appearance on the little shiny disc, with my first review being Galaxy of Terror.