Who could forget The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra?
Can’t believe I get to be the first: The Last Broadcast. Made for, if I recall, under $1,000; shot on digital and edited on a home computer. Nice little chiller; if you watch it, you’ll notice a distinct resemblance to the idea of The Blair Witch Project; but The Last Broadcast was made first, was actually cheaper, and was better, possibly because it used an actual script.
Looking forward to it. It’s a remake of H. Gordon Lewis’s 2000 Maniacs. I love H. Gordon.
There are several movies by that title. Which did you see? The 1937 one that introduced the Dead End Kids was the first thing I thought of. But that was a big budget “A” movie.
The Gods Must Be Crazy - I can’t find how much it cost, but I’d guess it’s under a million.
Googling turned up that the film’s writer/director/producer/editor, Jamie Uys, died in 1996. It’s too bad; he could do a lot with a little.
Swingers had the look of a cheap-o indie film, but I don’ t know if that’s from actual cheap-o-ness or an artistic choice.
Two early films by Jim Jarmusch: Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law. Maybe slow going for some, but I thought they were a hoot.
Also a few by Hal Hartley: I liked The Unbelievable Truth, Trust and Simple Men.
I thought that Thirteen was a very good low budget movie. It’s quite funny if you watch it with the audio commentary they spend ages talking about how they filmed scenes on such a low budget i.e the car scene the cast pushed the car from behind while the camera guy sat in a shopping trolley (or something along those lines.) Very neat.
Holly Hunter is incredibly fantastic, and fully worth watching the movie for.
I came in here just to mention Roger Corman. His Poe films are great, although you mentioned Vincent Price but left out Peter Lorre - see The Cask of Amontillado for one that just wouldn’t be the same without him.
Try Corman’s book about his career for some good hints on keeping the budget down. For example, he had rented a ghost town for the weekend to shoot a western, and finished within the two days, even though the female lead fell off a horse and broke her leg. He says they rearranged the shooting schedule and rewrote the script so she could finish her scenes sitting down, and did it all before the ambulance arrived from the nearest town.
I came here to mention Trust. I couldn’t find a site for how much it cost to make, though.
Citizen Kane was a low budget picture.
No, it wasn’t. Citizen Kane was the biggest budgeted movie RKO made that year, and RKO was one of the seven major studios.
Detour is a good film noir that was apparently very cheap to make. Unfortunatly, few people have heard of it.
How Green was my Valley had almost twice the budget of Kane $1,250,000 compared to $685,000 for Kane. Sgt York was $1,400,000 but then again The Maltese Falcon only had a budget of $300,000. So I guess Kane is a middle budget picture.
John McTernian’s first film, Nomads.
The Incredible Shrinking Man and the original 1950s D.O.A.** were both literally “B” movies – meaning movies that were given low budgets. They’re really good, though. So is Panic in Year Zero, a low budget science fiction film about Ray Milland frantically trying to save his family after the commies nuke L.A.
“Hester Street” is one of my favorites. It’s about Jewish life in the lower east side around 1900. Carol Kane is wonderful in it; makes you wish she’d not spent all the rest of her career doing broad comedy.
For a long, long time, Manos, the Hands of Fate was King of the Hill on IMDB’s worst movie list. I think it should still be there.
Two incredibly telling points from IMDB’s trivia about how cheap the movie was:
Filmed entirely with a handheld camera that could only record thirty seconds of film at a time. The film was shot without sound; all the lines were later dubbed by only three people - two men and one woman.
The only two members of the cast that were paid for their performances were Jackey Neyman and the Doberman. Jackey got a bicycle and the Doberman got a bag of dog food. Every other member of the cast was to be paid by a cut of the movie’s profits, which, of course, never materialized.
Eating Raoul: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083869/ Budget: 350k. Excellent movie.