Roger Corman

Not for Mitchell the revelations of 1956’s “It Conquered the World,” in which “it” proved to be Zontar, a cone creature from Venus, or 1955’s “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” about a giant octopus.

Closer to Corman�s The Trip than to Kubrick's 2001, though I have to admire any filmmaker cracked enough to cap a vision of cosmic transcendence with a vagina�s view of an incoming penis-missile.

If The Witch made people scared of goats, then The Lighthouse will do the same for seagulls, in a maritime spin on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven .

It's no mistake that, in one shot, Sharpe seems to have taken fashion tips from  Vincent Price in "The Tomb of Ligeia"; no mere coincidence that the heiress's family name is Cushing .

A minimalist gem with an existential sense of despair and a spooky score by newcomer Mica Levi, “Under the Skin” is fascinating and eerie and bears a noteworthy resemblance to Roger Corman’s “Not of This Earth” (1957), an early sci-fi-horror hybrid fea­turing character actor Paul Birch as a vampirelike alien dressed like a “Mad Men” executive.

Horror legend Barbara Steele ( Black Sunday , Pit and the Pendulum ) appears in a smallish role and future cult star Lynn Lowry plays a nurse (and appears nude).

In fact, a moviehouse (playing Roger Corman's The Tomb of Ligeia, a tip of the hat to Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha producer) offers our heroes pointedly fleeting shelter from debt collectors at the climax of Mean Streets, as if to caution us against using film to hide from the world; when Keitel's Charlie leaves the theatre to call his girlfriend, Teresa (Amy Robinson, who manages to both overcome a late entrance and penetrate the boy's-club atmosphere), he's none-too-subtly standing next to a poster for Point Blank.

The eloquently simple premise presents Lee and Evelyn Abbott (director/co-writer Krasinski and his wife, Emily Blunt), parents struggling to raise and protect their three children Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Beau (Cade Woodward) from lightning-fast critters resembling a mash-up of the Predator, the Deadly Mantis and the villains from "Attack of the Crab Monsters."

True, many 1950s horror and science-fiction movies tried to suggest their radioactive bugs and resurrected dinosaurs were more apocalyptic than comic-book; the most famous example of this occurs in 1954's "Them!," when scientist Edmund Gwenn, dumbfounded by the presence of giant ants, intones: "We may be witness to a biblical prophecy come true -- 'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beast shall reign over the Earth.' " Even so, there's something particularly wonderful and shameless about Corman linking the Western World's most sacred text to his cut-price tale of crustacean telepathy and carnage, as if an Old Testament context might actually cause the Saturday-sinnin', Sunday-forgiven teens at the local drive-in to react with awe rather than guffaws when Corman's giant prop crab claw swings into the frame.