bills were the staple of the drive-in and tried-and-true formulas made good business sense. In 1969, for example, Crown had the double bill of Blood of Dracula’s Castle and Nightmare in Wax (both written by Rex Carlton, who also gave us The Brain That Wouldn’t Die). Dracula’s Castle was a contemporary take on the popular Gothic-flavoured Hammer films, while Nightmare was essentially a modernized retelling of 1953’s House of Wax. The Crown version of the latter film sees Cameron Mitchell as a mad sculptor
seeking revenge against his enemies by injecting them with a serum that causes paralysis, and then putting them on display in a wax museum. (Mitchell’s character even sports an eye patch, which was surely a nod to House of Wax’s one-eyed di- rector Andre De Toth.) In addition to B-movie regulars Scott Brady and John “Bud” Cardos (who went on to direct 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders), Victoria Carroll also had a memorable role as a ditzy blond go-go dancer who becomes a statue in the museum. She recalls her death scene: “[Mitchell] did a five-minute monologue, and there I was, trying not to blink! My favourite review when the film came out was, ‘Victoria Carroll does her best acting as a corpse!’” Carroll would go on to a prolific
career in television, appearing in prime-time series such as Hogan’s Heroes and The Incredible Hulk, and later doing voice acting for Saturday morning cartoons, including Scooby-Doo and Darkwing Duck. Crown films typically featured talent on both the upsides and downsides of their career trajectories. For ex- ample, Blood of Dracula’s Castle features both a late-career John Carradine as George the Butler and, behind the camera, an early career credit for legendary cinematogra- pher László Kovács (billed in the credits as Leslie Kovacs), who would later shoot Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and Ghostbusters. The film was directed by the late Al Adamson (Satan’s Sadists and Dracula vs. Frankenstein) and also stars Alex D’Arcy as the Count, Paula Raymond as his bride, Adamson regular Jen- nifer Bishop and Bud Cardos returning again for a brief role. Dracula’s Castle cost approximately $60,000 – around the average budget for the director’s projects throughout his ca- reer – and the shoot was roughly three to four days without any reshoots. (“Al was very good at sticking to the budget,” says Bishop, with a laugh. “He knew where to cut corners and get the job done, but that’s what he was famous for.”) The film would also prove to be a launching pad for Adam-
son and his producing partner Sam Sherman, as later that year they founded their own distribution outfit, Independent International Pictures. The company’s first release, Satan’s Sadists, was timed to the biker trend, but Crown had already jumped on the fad a couple of years earlier with The Wild Rebels – pushed into theatres in 1967 so it would be the sec- ond biker movie to hit the market after Roger Corman’s very successful The Wild Angels. Wild Rebels director William Grefe (Impulse, Mako: The
Jaws of Death) started working with Crown because he knew the company followed the popular trends. “I had written a script in 1966 about a stock car racer and I raised the money to shoot it,” he recalls. “While we were in pre-production, I read in Variety that Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels was a huge hit, and I said to myself, ‘This motorcycle thing is gonna be the next big trend.’ If you’re the second or third guy on the bandwagon when a trend comes along, you can make a lot of money, so I made a movie about a motorcycle gang instead of a stock car racer.” Crown was competing with AIP even though they were also a sub-distributor for the famed B-movie company, but it
wouldn’t be long before Crown would be forced to stake its own claim in the drive-in world. “Most independent companies like AIP didn’t have the money to distribute their own pictures at a national
level because that meant they would have to set up offices all across the United States,” Grefe points out. “So they’d go through what were known as sub-distributors that would handle the distribution for them in different territories.” AIP had become so successful that co-founder and president Samuel Z. Arkoff wanted to expand the com-
pany’s operations. “Sam was a real smart business guy who thought, ‘Why should we be paying commissions to Crown in these thirteen western states, when we can just go ahead and form our own distribution unit?’” says Grefe. “So Crown lost that big contract with AIP.” With Crown now on its own, the company worked harder than ever to keep up with the drive-in trends of
its rivals, and horror would play an increasingly vital role. The company’s biggest success came in 1972 with its in-house production Stanley, a nature-run-amok horror film that was basically Willardwith snakes instead
25RM
Barely Hold A Candle: John Carradine as George the Butler in Blood of Dracula’s Castle.