Shot in a Weekend

Roger Corman’s reputation was built less on what his movies were about than on how fast and cheap he made them, and these four are the proof, each one an object lesson in wringing a real movie out of almost nothing. Swamp Women, his 1955 directorial debut, is a cheap Woolner Brothers quickie about an undercover policewoman infiltrating a prison break by three women searching the Louisiana swamps for hidden diamonds, shot on location with a then-unknown Beverly Garland and a pre-stardom Mike Connors. A Bucket of Blood, shot in five days for the price of a B-picture’s catering budget, turns a beatnik busboy’s accidental killing of his landlady’s cat into a satire of art-world gullibility that gets funnier, and grimmer, with every corpse he varnishes afterward. The Little Shop of Horrors pushes the format to its limit — about two days, one borrowed set, a talking plant that demands to be fed people — and became, twenty years later, the basis for a hit stage musical. The Terror closes the set as the strangest case: Corman shot the bulk of it in roughly two days to use up standing sets and the last of Boris Karloff’s contract time, then had it patched together over the following months by a rotating crew of young collaborators that included Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and Jack Nicholson, who also stars. None of these were built to last. All of them did.