Big Bad Mama

B-movie kingpin Roger Corman cranked out low-grade film product at a Fassbinder-esque pace for decades, but his great contribution to the world of film wasn’t his films. Rather, it was the great filmmakers who cut their teeth on Corman productions, a group that includes Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdonavich and James Cameron. For the most part, Corman’s actual films exhibited little more than grindhouse competence, questionable morals and a compulsion to keep telling stories no matter the circumstance or effect. Nevertheless, MGM has put together a box set of eight rare Corman titles like Steve Carver’s 1974 Big Bad Mama, the sort of film that seems more fun on paper than on screen. Seven years beyond Bonnie and Clyde, it was yet another lowbrow, drive-in-ready knockoff, held together by gunfire, gratuitous nudity and a violently retrograde take on radical feminism.