DVD review: 'Roger Corman's Cult Classics Triple Feature: Sci-Fi Classics'

“Roger Corman’s Cult Classics Triple Feature: Sci-Fi Classics” contains three prime examples of this period, starting with “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” in which a group scientists becomes marooned on an island and are terrorized by giant mutant crabs that have attained their imposing size plus intelligence and the ability to absorb people’s minds due to atomic testing in the Pacific. The script by longtime Corman collaborator Charles B. Griffith is actually plausible and sometimes even clever, but watching Russell Johnson (“Gilligan’s Island”) and the rest of the cast running in stark terror from a bunch of herky-jerky plastic crustaceans brings on fits of laughter rather than fright — which was probably fine with Corman, because people were paying to see this stuff.

It was followed in a 1957 double feature by the original “Not of this Earth,” an absolute gem of a thriller starring Paul Birch as an alien seeking human blood to save his dying race on the planet Davana. Scream queen Beverly Garland co-stars as the unsuspecting live-in nurse hired to give him transfusions.