Let's face it. If that darn cat hadn't gotten locked somehow behind a wall and immediately petrified when a knife entered its body, the slow-witted Walter (Dick Miller) wouldn't begin looking around finding other subjects for his art. All he wanted was to be accepted at the beatnik joint where he picked up plates and glasses and did dishes and got abused. For some reason, the purified cat becomes a hit and before long, he's bringing in other statues he's made, all quite life like and all quite frightening to look at, disturbing those who view them but fascinating them as well.
This early Roger Corman film is a terrific cult classic, maybe not a great movie but quite entertaining and very funny in a tongue-in-cheek way. Basically Walter is a sweet guy, and Dick Miller plays the innocence of his character perfectly. For the most part, the people surrounding him are pretty rotten, and the girl who poses sans clothes for him is actually quite nasty to him. She'll live on through the beauty of sculpture, maybe not in the way she'd like, but it's quite amusing to watch her statue being unveiled.
This film moves at a speedy pace, never stuffing it with nonsense footage, just giving us the grit and not the gristle. There's one particularly gruesome scene involving a wood shop but everything is insinuated so there really is no bucket of blood. In fact, I saw no bucket. For films like this, I can't really rate them as good films, but they are fun to watch, a product of a busy imagination that is perhaps a bit sick at times. This will grip you right up to the end as long as you don't end up in a mold of clay yourself.
This early Roger Corman film is a terrific cult classic, maybe not a great movie but quite entertaining and very funny in a tongue-in-cheek way. Basically Walter is a sweet guy, and Dick Miller plays the innocence of his character perfectly. For the most part, the people surrounding him are pretty rotten, and the girl who poses sans clothes for him is actually quite nasty to him. She'll live on through the beauty of sculpture, maybe not in the way she'd like, but it's quite amusing to watch her statue being unveiled.
This film moves at a speedy pace, never stuffing it with nonsense footage, just giving us the grit and not the gristle. There's one particularly gruesome scene involving a wood shop but everything is insinuated so there really is no bucket of blood. In fact, I saw no bucket. For films like this, I can't really rate them as good films, but they are fun to watch, a product of a busy imagination that is perhaps a bit sick at times. This will grip you right up to the end as long as you don't end up in a mold of clay yourself.