Dear trash-film aficionados (and I say that with both affection and respect): I ask you—is there a more exciting line of DVD reissues than Shout! Factory’s seemingly endless Roger Corman’s Cult Classics releases? For my money, there is not. Corman’s body of work, his aesthetic, his legend, his controversy…out of all the people my role at FANGORIA has allowed me access to, I will go on record saying that no one else gets me more excited to speak with. Part of it is that measured, smooth timbre of his voice, which you can hear in an exclusive interview below the jump.

That voice makes him a pleasure to listen to, but of course the main reason is that the man is film history…living, breathing and still incredibly active cinema made flesh. I won’t bore you here with an elephantine history of why Roger Corman matters, because I’ve done it before, as have many other, better writers and film scholars. So let’s just proceed…

When Shout! announced that amongst the Cult Classics editions would be a quadruple feature (out September 27) including two of my all-time favorite ’70s sex-and-death-obsessed shockers—Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 bisexual-vampire junk-food orgy THE VELVET VAMPIRE and Mel Welles’ softcore Eurotrash campfest LADY FRANKENSTEIN (starring the charmingly curvy Italian horror siren known as Sara Bay, or Rosalba Neri to her closest pals) from the same year, I flipped. (The other two titles are the space-mummy thing TIME WALKER and the survival-shock lump GROTESQUE. I did not flip for those titles—but two out of four ain’t bad…)

Anyway, the stories behind VELVET and LADY are dense, as they were helmed by two of the most fascinating figures to emerge from Corman’s canon: the trailblazing protofeminist Rothman and actor (in a slew of other Corman classics, among them the original 1960 LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS), writer and director Welles. Neither of these names come up when discussing Corman’s most influential protégés, but they nonetheless are important pieces of his puzzle. And when you see the flashes of virtuoso genius that often splash across the screen in VELVET and LADY, you realize that only circumstance, not talent, kept them from becoming as big as they should have been.

So I decided to call Corman up to and talk about these little pics. I was going to transcribe his quotes and scribble up a feature, but…well, I just love listening to his voice, and I really wanted to just let his amazing memory and brilliant articulation play out as I heard it.

Oh, and for you younger fans who only know the name Roger Corman from his hybrid-giant-monster flicks on the SyFy channel, he talks a bit about his latest project, called…PIRANHACONDA.

So have a listen…

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