Roger Watkins

Roger Michael Watkins (September 17, 1948 – March 6, 2007) was a film director best known for the notorious 1970s grindhouse movie Last House on Dead End Street. He also directed several porn films. He worked with famous porn actors like Jamie Gillis and Vanessa del Rio.

The Internet Movie Database lists a number of Watkins' aliases (see the information box at right), most of which he seems to have used in Last House on Dead End Street to conceal the fact that he worked in several technical capacities on that film - director, actor, cameraman, etc.

Watkins began his career in adult film by writing the screenplay for Mystique (1979) which was directed by Roberta Findlay and for which he was uncredited. The following year he began writing and directing adult feature films under the pseudonym Richard Mahler, which he took from combining the names of two of his favorite composers, Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. His best known adult films (Her Name Was Lisa (1980), Midnight Heat (1983), Corruption (1983), and American Babylon (1985) are considered by many to be more cult films or arthouse films than pornography due to their multi layered narratives that are downbeat in tone, comtaining elements of avant-garde, horror and satire.