A month ago, we reported that legendary producer Roger “King of the B’s” Corman was starting a subscriber-only YouTube channel this summer called Corman’s Drive-In that would bring an extensive catalog of over 400 films he either produced, directed, or both to the Internet.

Corman’s Drive-In is now officially open for business and we have some other crucial details for you. The channel will feature a rotating selection of 30 titles that will be refreshed every month and it will all be made available to viewers for the low monthly price of $3.99. It will premiere with a double feature of the first two films Corman made with future Oscar-winning Hollywood icon Jack Nicholson: the 1958 exploitation drama The Cry Baby Killer and 1960’s man-eating plant comedy Little Shop of Horrors, the latter the inspiration for the 1986 musical remake and the off-Broadway show it was based on.

Roger Corman may be known to most as the premiere producer of some of the finest exploitation movies ever made, but to those in the know he is also one of the most important and influential figures in the entertainment industry. Many of Hollywood’s finest talents on both sides of the camera owe their careers in some part to the go-for-broke tutelage they were given by working for Corman, including filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Towne, Peter Bogdanovich, and Ron Howard, and actors like Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, and Robert Englund. Corman is a legend, and that is the undisputed truth.

This summer Corman is bringing a catalog of over 400 films he produced and/or directed to the vast cybernetic landscape of the Internet as he launches Corman’s Drive-In, a YouTube channel that will offer up his films for viewing for a fee still yet to be determined.

Founded in 1954 by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, American International Pictures released hundreds of independently produced, low-budget films in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. With titles like She Gods of Shark Reef and The Vampire Lovers, American International produced creature features, beach party movies, and exploitation flicks for teenagers.

The production company was also home to Roger Corman‘s early films, including The Fast and the Furious, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, and House of Usher, starring Vincent Price.

With the resurgence of grindhouse and exploitation films in popular culture, Lou Arkoff, Jeff Katz, and Hal Sadoff plan to remake 10 titles from the American International Pictures library. The initial 10 films are: Girls in Prison, Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, The Brain Eaters, She-Creature, Teenage Caveman, Runaway Daughters, The Undead, War of the Colossal Beast, Cool and the Crazy and Day the World Ended.

Trailers from Hell! Volume Two
DVD
Starring Joe Dante, John Landis, Guillermo Del Toro, and Roger Corman
Shout! Factory
Release Date: July 5, 2011

I love DVD collections of old movie trailers. Since 2005, Synapse Films has been releasing volumes of classic grindhouse and drive-in exploitation trailers on DVD under the 42nd Street Forever and early this year unleashed their first Blu-ray edition in the series. One of those discs can provide an entire evening’s entertainment for the true connoisseur of cinema. Independent home video distributors understand the slim but still lucrative market value of a movie trailer collection. If you ask a bunch of people what their favorite part of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez B-movie double feature homage Grindhouse was, chances are most of them will say they loved the spoof trailers directed by Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, and Rodriguez. Movie geek meccas like the Alamo Drafthouse and the New Beverly Cinema often program vintage trailers to go along with that night’s film selection. People still make their old trailer compilations for fun. Roth even talked about making a feature film in the form of a reel of trailers.

Trailers from Hell is a highly-addictive website where film directors, writers, and producers provide introductions and commentaries for the trailers to some of their favorite films. From beloved classics to obscure cult flicks, from Oscar-winning epics to kinetic blasts of pure psychotronic insanity, there is no vintage preview that the TFH crew will not unearth and gab about to the delight of movie geeks everywhere. They’ve even started releasing DVD collections of the finest trailers and commentaries on their site that they could secure the rights to through the amazing Shout! Factory, a true friend to film fans with expansive DVD and Blu-ray libraries (and this is the part where yours truly sheepishly raises his hand). So with that in mind I bring you Trailers from Hell! Volume Two.

Not Of This Earth
Netflix Streaming
DVD
Directed by Jim Wynorski
Starring Traci Lords, Arthur Roberts, Ace Mask, Becky LeBeau
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Originally Released: May 13, 1988

Heading for a change of pace in our weekly Netflix Streaming Review, this week we take a look at the cheesiness and campiness of the classic and cult B-Grade sci-fi flick, Not Of This Earth. The film has the distinct fame for being Traci Lords‘ first “serious” mainstream acting vehicle after her first few adult film flings. The movie is a flashback to an era of filmmaking when B-Grade flicks had their own culture and fan following, when it was acceptable and almost mandatory to include a bad story with bad acting, but special effects and lots of boobs. That is the way of things when it comes to movies like Not Of This Earth.

First off, this movie is totally campy, cheesy, and ill budgeted – it’s best to be aware of these elements before going into viewing it. In fact, it is so stuck in the 1980s, it has a nude tittie shot followed by awful keyboard-induced music within the first five minutes of the film – it’s so seamlessly done and indicative of the era that it puts both Flesh Gordon movies to shame. But that’s what these movies were all about both back in the day and in this day looking at it in retrospective.