Dick Randall

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 (Il pelo nel mondo (1964) The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968)), low-rent horror (Eva, la Venere selvaggia (1968), Lo strangolatore di Vienna (1971), Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette (1974), Chorakhe (1979)), giallo murder mystery thrillers (La casa della paura (1974), Casa d'appuntamento (1972)), martial-arts action (Diao shou guai zhao (1973), Zui she xiao zi (1980), Mie jue qi qi (1980)), secret agent action thrillers (Death Dimension (1978), For Y'ur Height Only (1981)), soft-core sleaze (Emmanuelle 3 (1980), The Daughter of Emanuelle (1975), Never on Friday (1975)) and slasher schlock (Mil gritos tiene la noche (1982), Don't Open Till Christmas (1984), Slaughter High (1986)). 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.