Mark Wong Odd. Strange. Scary. Terrifying? No. But it's a great cult classic that anyone who really loves thinking movies should watch.

Hollywoodshack ..this film. I was often a fan of Dick Miller and his ensemble of characters in American International films, many who also were in Wasp Woman, War of the Satellites, and Little Shop of Horrors. But this was a gross disappointment. Corman tries a tepid effort to build sympathy for Miller as the main character, a waiter in a beatnik coffee shop who feels teased and rejected by the "in crowd" giving him some bizarre motive to plaster over a cat he stabbed by mistake, leaving the knife in! Why wouldn't everyone get suspicious about his sculpture with a knife sticking out of it? He kills a detective (Burt Convy) and plasters him over. Where is the missing persons bureau and a citywide search to find out what happened to him? And using a pizza pan..lethal force for sure. It's no wonder most of Convy's career remained on Match Game and Hollywood Squares quiz shows. What an embarrassment to anyone's resume.

Rainey Dawn This is a film I have forgotten about until I started watching it again. I remember this film. It's actually a cool art-house comedy-horror film. I find it to be more of a decent horror than comedy but there are a few funny moments in it.It all started with a dead cat - an accidental death of his landlady's cat. The cat was covered in plaster to cover up the evidence. It is considered "brilliant" art and highly praised... soon after people began to disappear and more "brilliant" works of art appear.This is a pretty good film to kick back and enjoy for a fun watch one boring afternoon. It's not a "must see" film - but it's an enjoyable film for those interested in black comedies and horror.7/10

tnrcooper Awkward and possibly mentally challenged, Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is desperate for love and respect. He works at a hipster cafe frequented by impossibly pretentious people and yearns to fit in. He is rejected as staid and hopelessly straight by its patrons and is largely viewed with pity. One day, he stumbles across a devilish way to make realistic sculptures, something he can't do ordinarily and his work is a big hit at the cafe. Walter's never had adulation and regard like this before and he realizes this is his ticket to popularity. How fully he realizes this becomes dreadfully clear as the film goes on. This is a pitch black satire of the cluelessness of hipsters. The cafe's owner Leonard de Santis (Anthony Carbone, who looks remarkably like Humphrey Bogart) realizes what a monster Walter is but doesn't intervene right away. Walter is a remarkable mix of slow and lonely and this makes him ripe for the the depredations to which he increasingly succumbs. In this day and age a decent attorney would claim that Walter was not fully responsible for his actions because of his low IQ, but I don't imagine that claim would have held up as well in 1959.In any case, Walter's fame grows as he continues to lose it. The hipsters don't smell a rat. Corman obviously takes great glee in mocking this. The clueless hipster is most perfectly embodied by Maxwell (an excellent, stentorian Julian Brock), a beard-wearing, abstract poet who is so enchanted by Walter's "work" that he holds a party in his honor and writes a poem for him!The beautifully ironic thing about this film is that the one character who most sees through Walter's inability as a sculptor is the most cold-eyed and callous character, Alice (Judy Bamber). She questions Walter's ability and by that time he is so well-regarded that his adoring fans savage HER for her lack of sophistication! That she and the relatively cool- headed cafe owner Leonard are the only ones who see through Walter is hilarious. Corman apparently shot this film in 5 days and for $50,000 and it's only 66 minutes long, but what a punch it packs! A scabrously funny script, some excellent acting, and no happy ending. If you like your comedy dark, this is one for you.