Customer Reviews

Full Moon Archive Collection 18-dvd Box Set

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I just received the Full Moon Features: The Archive Collection as an early Christmas present from my wife and I have to say it is a great collection of entertaining B-Movies. I may not be the biggest Full Moon fan in the world but I did grow up with many of their movies and do enjoy many of the films the company produced (at least in the early days of the company). With that said I am not a Full Moon die hard that is going to give everything the company releases an automatic 5 star rating solely for the fact Full Moon released it.

At first glance it seems a job well done. The box the DVDs are housed in is very attractive and high quality. All the DVDs come house in standard keep cases with individual artwork so the set is quite large and impressive.

The films featured in this collection (which is supposed to be the studio's most popular films) is very good. You get Puppet Master 1-3, Trancers 1-3, Subspecies 1-3, Dollman, Demonic Toys, The Pit & the Pendulum, Crash and Burn, Robot Wars, Arcade, Doctor Mordrid, Castle Freak, and Head of the Family. The only film I could have done without with is Head of the Family which was made in Full Moon's latter lackluster years. The only film I truly like from Full Moon's later years is Castle Freak. I would have preferred them to replace that film with Shadowzone, Mandroid, or some other film from Full Moon's classic era (circa 1989-1994) instead. I do find it strange that they have the distribution rights to Trancers as that was an Empire Pictures production (Charles Band's production company before Full Moon). It seems almost every Empire Pictures film is owned by MGM but somehow Trancers fell through the cracks. Still however the films picked for this collection is nearly perfect.

However not is all perfect per say. The DVDs themselves seem to have been cheaply thrown together. All the cover artwork for the movies is the same and feature the Full Moon Features - Archive Collection logo. The titles of the individual films aren't even on the front covers! I don't see the point of giving the films individual cases if they were going to make all the covers exactly the same. The back of the cover inserts features cropped versions of the movie posters centered with plot notes below it (some printed so small one can barely read). The Trancers poster art is even squished making this look like the artwork was quickly designed and cheaply. Why they didn't have the poster artwork on the front cover of the DVD is beyond me! Another odd point is no film credits or other info is featured anywhere on the cover art like traditional designs. All the DVDs on their spine read in blah writing "Full Moon Features: The Archive Collection" and then the title of the film. To be completely honest I could have come up with MUCH better artwork with just a few hours in Photoshop.

The transfers themselves are watchable but nothing to write home about and there are some glitches. All the films look like laserdisc and/or VHS sourced (Trancers and Puppet Master II have the worst transfers). All films are in full screen, except for Crash and Burn which is letterboxed. The transfer to Puppet Master II gets an annoying wavy effect towards the end (just like every other release of it). Pit & the Pendgulum has a small video encoding error. Dollman has 3 separate instances of audio dropout. No glitches on the Subspecies discs thank god. Again watchable but people who are Blu-ray enthusiasts are going be sorely disappointed with the video quality not to mention people with the glitches.

All the transfers are also ported off of previous DVD releases from Full Moon. For example the Trancer menus say "The Difinitive Collection" and the Doctor Mordrid menu says "Charles Band Collection Volume One." Yes they didn't even take time to change the menus to pertain to this particular box set.

Most of my discs also came pre-scratched. Lots of small circular scratches no doubt due to poor quality control (my wife purchased the set new from the factory directly). So far they all play fine but it just further illustrates how cheaply and quickly this set was put together.

It does seem I'm bashing this set a lot but it still is a great collection of B-movies. This set is great for Full Moon casual fans (like myself) but die hard fans might want to pass it up to collect their other box sets to get ALL their films. All these movies have a charm to them and it's no wonder the company gained a large cult following. It's just a shame not more work was put into their DVD releases.

This box set is said to be limited to 900 copies. They are all supposed to be signed and numbered. However the set I got was not signed or numbered (and it was supposed to be) making me wonder if this set isn't going to be as "limited" as it was supposed to be (Puppet Master box set flashback!).

This 18 DVD set includes many of the original classics that Full Moon produced when the studio was in its prime. This set truly is the archive collection with most of the best films Full Moon has ever made. This set is great for those who appreciate films like Puppet Master and others that came out around the same time. The Pit and the Pendulum is a timeless classic that is unavailable to buy individually. This set is a must have for all Full Moon fans.