ORRIBLE HORRORS. THE GOREHOUSE GREATS COLLECTION. SAVAGE CIN- EMA. THE TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL COLLECTION. CULT TERROR CINEMA. Look on the back of these DVD compilations and you’ll see titles such as Stanley, The V
ica from the 1960s to the 1990s by Crown International Pictures, one of the best known low-budget B- movie outfits in history.
The Beverly Hills-based company was founded by
Newton “Red” Jacobs in 1959. After a stint working at RKO, Jacobs ran distribution house Favorite Films, an off- shoot of the legendary B-movie company American In- ternational Pictures. Favorite Films took AIP movies around the country regionally, which is how B-movie prints travelled in those days, “bicycled” from one state to the next through a network of sub-distributors. When Jacobs was ready to start opening exploitation films na- tionwide on his own, Crown was born. At first, he bought up foreign and domestic films that couldn’t get a deal anywhere else. The first Crown re-
leases were 1961’s Bloodlust! (which was eventually put on a double bill with Blood Mania in the ’70s), The Devil’s Hand (1962), Terrified (1963) and Varan the Unbelievable (1962). Jacobs also took on The Madmen of Mandoras in 1963, which was notoriously retitled They Saved Hitler’s Brain when it was sold to television in 1976. “A title is the handle,” Jacobs explained in an interview
with the Los Angeles Times in 1963. “You can’t lift a pic- ture very high if the handle is weak.” Crown started hitting its stride in the late ’60s, when
there were plenty of low-budget indie companies all competing for teenagers’ pocket money. Genre double
an, Malibu
High, Horror High, Nightmare in Wax, Blood of Dracula’s Castleand Don’t Answer the Phone! These are just a few of the 100-plus mad movies released to theatres and drive-ins across Amer-