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New World Pictures (1970-1983) was the brainchild of Roger Corman. It was his second attempt (after The Filmgroup in the early '60s) to run his own production/distribution company. As in his earlier career at American International Pictures, Corman was able through New World to launch the careers of numerous now famous directors like Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, and Joe Dante and cult figures like Stephanie Rothman. Most intriguing was the company's bizarre melding of feminist politics, anticapitalist rhetoric, and parody with quasi-softcore sexploitation. Women held key positions at New World both behind and in front of the camera (and in the corporate structure), and were most often the subject of its films. Corman inaugurated new genres (the nurse film, the matriarchal rural chase film a la Big Bad Mama) and revived some old ones (the women-in-prison film, biker movies), and pioneered the use of cheap foreign location shooting in places like the Philippines. What follows are some brief portraits of some of the studio's players and motifs.
BARBARA PEETERS
In the early days of New World Pictures, Corman and his acolytes prided themselves on the company's feminist bent, citing women as a primary focus of their films and as true collaborators both in front of and behind the camera. Barbara Peeters was, along with Stephanie Rothman, one of two female pioneers in this area; both were writer-directors who contributed important and profitable work to New World's playlist. While Rothman has been the subject of considerable study for films like The Velvet Vampire and The Student Nurses that are believed to be feminist-subversive, Peeters is a virtual unknown, despite the fact that her New World work is arguably more subversive than Rothman's.
 Dixie Peabody  |
Bury Me an Angel (1971) is Peeters' second directorial credit and her first for New World. Unlike Rothman's work, Angel is a straightforward genre effort based on a role-reversal, with a woman violently appropriating the classic role of a revenge-seeking hero. The film has a crude power reinforced by its lack of the kind of parody typical of much of New World's product. Peeters' heroine Dag (Dixie Peabody) is grim and single-minded in her pursuit of the man who killed her brother. She's linked with traditionally masculine accoutrements — motorcycles, guns — and has submissive male companions who emulate her and vie for her attention as they would a dominant male. The film resembles the other early New World biker films in portraying California as a visual and spiritual wasteland, but is far indeed from the company's trademark tropical backdrops of the women-in-prison films or the comic-anarchic California of second-phase New World pictures like Hollywood Boulevard or Death Race 2000.
Peeters' other New World credits include Summer School Teachers (1975) and Starhops (1978), both in the company's classic template of the romantic and professional adventures of three young women. Her last film was Humanoids from the Deep (1980), a flawed but fascinating mix of 1950s-style aquatic monster drama, social consciousness, and naked women raped by gill-men. In spite of its success, it marked the end of her directorial career. Corman's magic touch, which catapulted Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and others from exploitation into the mainstream, didn't work with Peeters (or Stephanie Rothman, for that matter); after 1980 her name appears only on forgotten television shows like Misfits of Science and Shadow Chasers (both 1985).
BARBARA STEELE
"I started out playing this woman from the deep, and I went on doing it … forever." Barbara Steele (b. 1937 in England) lamented in an interview with Michael Godwin in 1978, the same year she took a small part in Joe Dante's satire of Jaws, Piranha. The "depths" of her career encompass a memorably wide range of subterranean roles and a wide geography, from the resurrected witch in Bava's masterful Black Sunday to the adulterous anima figure in Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum. With her stylized gestures, glaring green eyes, and smoldering sexuality, Steele found most accommodating the demimonde of low-budget, personal filmmaking. Her roles in more mainstream films, such as Fellini's 8-1/2, Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, were mostly tiny, and sometimes reduced to near invisibility in the final cut.
Like Mary Woronov, Steele is also a painter, and they share a sub-career as exotic window dressing in several New World Pictures along with a devoted cult following that dutifully searches out even their most obscure films — and there are many, for both — for a glance at them. While her work for Bava, Corman, and Riccardo Freda is considered her best — with Black Sunday particularly thrilling because she gets to play two parts — she's well remembered for adding her peculiar darkness to two New World pictures. In Demme's Caged Heat she brings humor and power to the role of a sexually repressed, wheelchair-bound, quasi-lesbian warden in a women's prison. Reportedly she disliked her work in the film, but few who have seen it will forget her dream sequence where she appears as a sexy cabaret artist demanding the women give her "contrition!" Steele has said that she begged Joe Dante for the meatier role of the doctor played by Kevin McCarthy in Piranha, but was told the investors would never stand for it. But there's some compensation here when a smiling Steele, playing a pitiless military scientist, gets the very last close-up in the film.
ECO-TERROR
One of New World's more political subgenres — let's call it "eco-terror" for convenience — harks back to 1950s monster movies in which secret government experiments go out of control and terrorize humanity, usually in the form of messy mutated animals or people. Corman made his share of such films, among them The Day the World Ended (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), both of which explicitly link their horrors (respectively, murderous mutations and giant crabs) to America's suicidal flirtation with the atomic bomb. By the 1970s, there was room in the culture to blame specific areas of the military-industrial complex for such problems, along with profit-mad corporations willing to sacrifice ecosystems and native cultures for short-term gain.
Joe Dante's Piranha, the working man's Jaws, articulates a common counterculture idea of the time that has since proved far from fantastic — that the government is engaged in heinous biological experiments that it is ill equipped to contain. The terror in Piranha are mutated carnivorous fish created "to destroy the river systems of the North Vietnamese." These radioactive mini-monsters are inadvertently released into a corporate "aqua park" and a kids' swimming area, where they frenziedly chomp their way through blood and bone. Piranha puts a beautiful face on its cruelties: Barbara Steele as the coopted fish geneticist who, apprised of the destruction, says simply, "Some things are more important than a few people's lives." Conversely, the audience gets the pleasure of seeing her counterpart, a devious colonel who's also a corporate investor, getting chewed to bits by the creatures whose existence he refused to acknowledge.
The effects of another kind of genetic experiment in Barbara Peeters' Humanoids from the Deep (1980) are much messier and involve kinkier sex than even New World devotees were used to seeing. Variety noted that the film had "more nudity and gore than … any exploitationer in recent memory," but they paid less attention to the political angle. A corporation destroys a native salmon fishing business by introducing a growth hormone that climbs the food chain to change coelacanth-like creatures into studly gill-men who kill men and rape women. These monsters are the next cinematic-evolutionary step in the development of the Creature from the Black Lagoon; the sexual promise of that sad 1950s creature is violently visualized by director Peeters in scenes that show the gill-men raping the townswomen in grueling, seaweed-drenched detail.
NEXT PAGE: Woronov mesmerizes
