Richard E. Cunha was a cinematographer and director who achieved some renown at the end of the 1950s for a series of low-budget horror and science fiction movies. Born in Hawaii, Cunha served in the U.S. Army-Air Force during World War II in a newsreel unit, where he was trained as a motion picture photographer. During the postwar years, he organized his own company, making industrial films and early television commercials. His earliest feature work was as a cinematographer on Red Rock Outlaw (1950), a low-budget Western made by Elmer Clifton during the late '40s. In the mid-'50s, Cunha and producer Arthur A. Jacobs formed Screencraft Enterprises, a production house for TV commercials. In 1957, they moved into low-budget film production, as well, with an economically produced sci-fi horror thriller aimed at the booming B-movie market. Cunha's first movie, with the working title "The Diablo Giant" (a better name than the one they finally used, Giant From the Unknown) was a fascinating tale of suspended animation and a resurrected conquistador terrorizing modern Californians. Cunha also shot and edited the film utilizing the skills that he had acquired doing low-budget commercials, doing his close-ups simultaneously by panning between actors in a scene and, in effect, editing most of his shots in the camera. The resulting film, although displaying low production values, had a visceral energy to go with its intriguing story and benefited from a surprisingly strong cast -- including Ed Kemmer, Morris Ankrum, Sally Fraser, Bob Steele, and Buddy Baer in the title role -- and these factors made it stand out amid the world of shoestring horror productions.
Giant From the Unknown was sold to Astor Pictures for distribution on condition that Cunha and Jacobs deliver a second film to go out with it. That was how Cunha moved to his next production, the slightly more ambitious She Demons, a jungle/shipwreck adventure movie involving unrepentant escaped Nazis, volcanoes, and sinister experiments. Cunha made two more films in a similar vein, Frankenstein's Daughter and Missile to the Moon, the latter a remake of Astor's own Cat Women of the Moon under the auspices of producer Marc Frederick, which also went out together to drive-ins and smaller neighborhood theaters. There they delighted younger audiences through early 1959, and then took on a separate life on television for decades to follow. Although the last two of these productions were marred by cheap special effects and deficiencies in the make-up department, they had a logic (sort of) and a charm all their own that endeared them to many baby boomers. Cunha later directed The Girl in Room 13 (1961), a joint U.S./Brazilian feature, and then returned to work as a photographer on Bloodlust that same year, an unofficial adaptation of Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game directed and written by Ralph Brooke, and co-starring a young Robert Reed and future off-Broadway producer Gene Persson. In addition, he made the low-budget thriller The Silent Witness (1962). During the mid-'60s, he also served as cinematographer on the television series Branded, starring Chuck Connors, in tandem with Lester Shorr. He remains a beloved figure to "psychotronic" film fans for the quartet of low-budget horror movies that he made from 1957-1958 for Astor Pictures.
