In Roger Corman's GAS-S-S-S, Or It Became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It, the military releases a gas that kills everyone over the age of 25. The result? A bongo-bruising hippie dance party, and a movie you really need to be on hash to appreciate. What do you do when all the old farts are dead? Have a crazy rave party, with freaky shapes, at a drive-in theater... featuring Country Joe And The Fish!

Nooooo! Make it stop!

I love how in apocalyptic movies, the roads are always clogged with derelict cars. It never fails:

Basically, here's the story. Jack Nicholson is fancy French soldier who washes up on an island and is promptly saved and snogged by a hot, giggly girl named Helene or maybe Ilsa. Either she's just an innocent maid, or she's been possessed by the spirit of a dead woman (Ilse) murdered by her husband, the local Baron. And the local Baron is either the Baron or Ilse/Helene's old lover. Plus there's an old witch who is either just an old witch or the mother of Ilse's old lover. Luckily Jack is there to figure it all out by delivering a lot of hammy lines and running around.

He wants to rescue Helene, whom he thinks isn't really Ilse. But Helene, who thinks she really is Ilse, wants to destroy the Baron. Except of course the Baron just thinks he's the Baron, and he's really . . . oh, whatever. Just enjoy this final scene, where everybody jumps in the water in an old tomb and when the walls collapse the rocks start floating on the water. Maybe the rocks just think they are rocks, and they are really styrofoam!

The Terror via IMDB

If you're in the United States, you can watch the whole darn movie on Hulu:

This little film, that I can't imagine anyone would want to miss after that viral nonsense, is called Splatter. Corey plays the character Johnny Splatter, naturally, who loves Ed Hardy, magic, and has terrible aim. That is all we know so far, and Corey is attempting to keep this bizarre movie a mystery until audience members stream the film from Netflix on its big premiere night.

Here's what Corey wrote at his blog:

"So the project we are doing is a very scary exciting one. This has all been top secret for some time now, and I am finally able to leak out some information. I cannot tell you everything as there are still some restrictions until next week. But heres what I can tell you. We are joined together by the power of Netflix. The project is titled "Splatter" and is being created for Netflix. This will be their first ever live streaming web series. Splatter will be a multi episode web series that will go live on the web on Halloween weekend. My characters name is Jonny Splatter."

My question is how did Gremlins creator Joe Dante get involved in this nonsense? Roger Corman is also producing.

It is a proven paradox that during eras of real impending global disaster we have been given what is arguably the best doomsday cinema of all time, from the cold-war comedy classics to the matinee apocalypse of the atomic age. Is it any wonder then, that as economies collapse and nations riot, we are once again inundated with end-of-the-world media. The big difference this time around is in the heavy-handedness of the messages. What happened to the humor? Here are some cult classics you may have missed.

In the 1980's, the end-of-the-world just gave us the giggles. 1982's britcom Whoops! Apocalypse spawned a film of the same title, with almost as much satire and as many DC superhero references as the series itself.

The heyday of the teen comedy, the 1980's gave us what are now cult classics of the end-of-the-world genre with a healthy dose of teen angst and synth-heavy soundtracks. War Games gave us one of our first hacker-geek heroes, and Night Of The Comet reminded us that even in the midst of a zombie outbreak you could still find time to hit the mall and have some fun.

Never has the threat of the end of civilization been more entertaining. From the fifty-foot woman to giant killer bugs, the world was put in danger in increasingly more and more creative ways during the 1950's. While the films themselves were usually thinly-veiled analogies real-world threats, they still sought to make people both think and smile. Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers helped pave the way for all alien invasion films to follow, while the King of ‘B' movies Roger Corman gave us showed us what would happen on the day the world ended. (Hint: it involves a dumb blonde and a mutant monster.)

And last but not least, who could forget Slim Pickens' rodeo rocket ride into oblivion in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb?

Here's secret footage of a meeting of the U.S. Congress' secret UFO committee, where chain-smoking men get together to watch stag films about mysterious 50-foot cones, and "fiery horse-drawn sky chariots." Your tax dollars at work! [IMDB]

Roger Corman produced Last Exit To Earth for Showtime in 1996, and it's about as racy as an episode of Red Shoe Diaries. (Although in the far future, women no longer have nipples.) Despite being written and directed by women, it clings pretty closely to the traditional SF storyline, where a female dominated world is really just waiting for a strong manly man to come and fix things. The women travel back to the year 2100, and collect a real man:

[IMDB]

This film is famous for such awesome dialogue as "It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down." And the bit in the scene above, where Mary-Belle Monaghan says she'll love her guy until she day she dies... and then she dies a second later. [IMDB]

Like all Corman monster flicks, Attack of the Giant Leeches has a lot of seemingly extraneous stuff going on outside monster's lair that's actually far more interesting than the rubber-suited menaces. (Not that I don't fucking adore these sucker-mouthed guys.) The woman you see being drained of blood here was having an affair with one of her husband's pals, which is how they ran into the leeches in the first place. Hubby had followed them out to their swampy borking pad and held them at gunpoint until they fled into the water . . . and were dragged away by leeches! The fake white trash accents and noir-ish sex triangle are insane and eyebrow-raising.

Not to take away from the glory of the leeches. I'm totally not doing that. Leeches FTW! [Attack of the Giant Leeches via IMDB]

The biggest mistake in this movie? The inclusion of an evil leprechaun named The Jeweler, who somehow becomes crucial to the FF's mythos. It's the Jeweler who steals the crucial crystals that power the Four's spaceship (while dancing a jig across a laser security system). Later, he adopts the Thing into his family of freaks and also kidnaps the Thing's girlfriend. Finally, he has a thrilling stand-off with Doctor Doom. If you've ever wanted to see the evil Latverian genius face off with a comedy leprechaun, this is your chance. Oh, and Doom's "I will destroy New York" speech is campy in a very, very bad way.

How did this disaster happen? A German production company owned the rights to make a Fantastic Four movie, but was unable to raise the $40 million it needed before the rights were due to expire. So the company turned to Roger Corman, who said he could make the movie cheap and quick. (As commenter ManchuCandidate points out, Corman was willing to take chances.) At $1.4 million, this movie had a huge budget compared to a usual Corman spectacle. After the film was completed, Marvel paid a few million to suppress it. The team worked in secret to complete post-production on it, but then Marvel ordered all prints destroyed. So it's a minor miracle that you're able to suffer through this clip.