Dick Randall(1926-1996)
- Producer
- Writer
- Actor
Dick Randall was a jolly and colorful film producer who specialized in
blithely trashy low-budget exploitation pictures. Randall was born as
Irving Reuben on March 3, 1926, in the Catskill Mountains, New York. He
started his show-business career as a writer: he penned gags for
Milton Berle and contributed to various
1950s television quiz shows. Randall initially got into films as a
distributor, then began producing his own features. Dick made a slew of
movies all over the world in such diverse genres as mondo documentaries
(Mondo Inferno (1964)
The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968)),
low-rent horror
(Kong Island (1968),
The Mad Butcher (1971),
Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974),
Crocodile (1979)), giallo murder mystery
thrillers
(The Girl in Room 2A (1974),
The French Sex Murders (1972)),
martial-arts action
(Snake Fist Fighter (1973),
Bruce: King of Kung Fu (1980),
Challenge of the Tiger (1980)),
secret agent action thrillers
(Death Dimension (1978),
Y'ur Height Only (1981)),
soft-core sleaze
(Le journal érotique d'une Thaïlandaise (1980),
The Daughter of Emanuelle (1975),
The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1976))
and slasher schlock
(Pieces (1982),
Don't Open Till Christmas (1984),
Slaughter High (1985)). Moreover,
Randall also either wrote the story or co-wrote the scripts for several
of his films and occasionally appeared in quirky small roles. He was
married to singer Corliss Randall, who
appeared in a few of his pictures and worked behind the scenes on
several of them as well. His last film was the twisted horror black
comedy Living Doll (1990). Dick
Randall died from a stroke at age 70 on May 14, 1996, in London,
England.
