That final night of Roger Corman

I mentioned two weeks ago that TCM was going to be running three nights of movies involving Roger Corman, who died earlier this year. The first two nights were a bunch of movies that he directed, while the final evening, which is tonight, is different in that he was the producer. It's an interesting night as well in that we get to see Corman giving several young directors an early shot at becoming big-time directors. There are five movies, and I've blogged about the first three before. So I'm looking forward to seeing the latter two:

The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Boxcar Bertha, directed by a young Martin Scorsese. It's a fake biopic, in that it's based on a book that purported to be an "as told to" memoir although in fact the person doing the telling didn't really exist. The movie is set in the 1930s and tells of Bertha (Barbara Hershey), who gets involved with Depression-era union agitators on the run.

That's followed by Targets at 9:45 PM. This really underrated film, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, stars Boris Karloff in one of his final roles (he really does look like death warmed over), as an again actor on his way to a drive-in that's going to be doing a retrospective of his work and using him as the main attraction. Unbeknownst to him, a sniper who's killed his family is going to converge on the drive-in.

Then, at 11:30 PM, is Dementia 13, which gave Francis Ford Coppola an early start. A family gets together in Ireland for a memorial service for a member of the family who died several years ago. The matriarch of the family is going to be leaving behind a substantial inheritance when she finally dies, and that leads somebody -- but who -- to try to speed things up.

One that I thought I might have seen is Caged Heat, at 1:00 AM. Directed by Jonathan Demme, Caged Heat is another of those 1970s prison movies. But I think the ones I've seen are the American International prison films from the early 1970s co-starring Pam Greer.

The night concludes with Piranha at 2:30 AM, which as you might guess is a horror movie involving the titular steretoypically ultra-vicious fish. The director, Joe Dante, did have a reasonable career, but not as big as the other four directors.