Customer Reviews

Horrible Horrors Collection, Vol. 2

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3 star:		(2)
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This set was a wonderful and campy Christmas gift, and features eight almost unbelievable films of varying quality, all of which have oddball quirkiness sure to satisfy the pickiest B-movie lover. There are eight features on two DVDs, and the films vary from merely silly, to over-the-top laugh-out-loud horrendous. The films are from varying time periods and the quality of the transfers varies drastically from good ("Don't Answer the Phone") to awful ("Stanley.") Little matter; people who love cheesy movies will be well satisfied with this collection.

"Don't Answer the Phone" is a creepy story of a messed up Vietnam veteran photographer who enjoys strangling women. It is more serious than the rest of the collection, and is not laughable at all due to content issues.

"Terrified" is a rather contrived B-movie about a lunatic burying people alive in a graveyard, and spawns the eternal question: why do teenagers from bad Hollywood productions in the 1950s feel compelled to check out graveyards at night? It has some creepy moments, but overall I was not terribly terrified.

"Blood of Dracula's Castle" is easily my favorite of the set. I watched it several times because of one thing: John Carradine. John always adds a special something to his roles, but here he is a butler who worships the great god Luna and serves the Count and Countess Dracula. John is at his prime here as the gaunt specter of death (who also makes dinner and drinks): he steals every scene he is in, which is most of them. The guy they got to play Dracula may be the worst Count in movie history: he reminds me more of Ross Martin than Count Dracula. The movie is a laugh-out-loud grade-Z riot, and justifies the purchase of the DVD by itself. While at least John Carradine doesn't sing in this one, the film does star the most annoying couple of the decade. In short, this film is a must see.

The other two standouts on the set are "Stanley" and "The Crater Lake Monster." I had heard of "Stanley," and about how legendarily bad it is. The rumors are true. It is a wonderful bit of schlock cinema about Stanley, a very naughty rattlesnake, and his relationships with the human race. The movie is a William Grefe tale of vengeance, and features lots of snakes in squalid locations in the Everglades. The pace is tough to endure, and sometimes time may seem to be flowing backwards. Do not panic: this is a normal reaction to "Stanley." It has among the worst production values in screen history (although it is certainly not Grefe's worst film) and the acting ranges from bad to worse. All in all it is a grade-Z horror movie delight.

"The Crater Lake Monster" is one of the most amateur of all productions, and features easily the worst clothes, hair, and accents in the collection. The premise is that a meteor lands in a lake in Oregon and the heat from it hatches a dormant dinosaur egg. Any bad movie fan knows that the locals of the small, isolated town will be snacked upon shortly (Kevin Bacon did this in the much better "Tremors" several years later.) The monster appears to be cardboard in close-up, and there are plots about boat rentals, prehistoric cave art, magic, and banjo music. The acting is awful, and the direction is both predictable and plodding. In sum, this is a fun movie to laugh at, but scary? No way.

"Nightmare In Wax" is moody and atmospheric. It's about a guy having an affair that goes a bit mental and commits serious mayhem. It's not well conceived or executed, so I disliked it as serious art, and it has a subject so dark as to not be enjoyable as camp.

The other two films, "Blood Mania," and "The Devil's Hand," were middling; nowhere near the highs of Carradine in Dracula's castle, or the lows sprinkled generously throughout the set. I give the set four stars overall; people who love monster movies of dubious quality will like the set, and the price is unbeatable, especially considering some of these films (notably "Stanley") are extremely difficult to find elsewhere.

Horrible Horrors Collection, Vol. 2
Blood Mania
Although not well received by Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film author Michael Weldon, this is actually a pretty good thriller. Obviously influenced by such Russ Meyer nudie-cuties as Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers, and Good Morning...and Goodbye!, this 1970 flick tells the tale of a beautiful and amorous young woman who kills her father to get at his inheritance. The story is throwaway and the title is misleading (some blood, but heavier on the nudity), but the camerawork and cinematography are classy, with the use of sharp, vivid colors reminiscent of Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace a few years earlier. The presentation of this film is pan and scan, but the picture is sharp. Recommended.

Blood of Dracula's Castle
Typical Al Adamson garbage. A young couple inherits a castle in Los Angeles from a long lost uncle. Dracula and Mrs. Dracula have been living there for decades. How they got there is not explained. They dress members of the 1960s cocktail party set. Their butler, John Carradine, kidnaps young women who he locks in the dungeon and drains their blood, which he then serves to the Dracula's in wine glasses. We are now 40 minutes into the film. Occasionally I run across pieces on NPR or some other quirky news media trumpeting "the endearing qualities of the vampire legend." I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that the only makeup vampires need is fangs, making it the cheapest monster movie to make. However, Adamson takes this one step further and does not even provide the fangs. Nor does he show the deaths of the vampires on camera, and you can forget about the fistfights too, they're off camera. Director Adamson is credited with having said, "give me a million dollars, and I'll give you twenty $50,000 movies." See this movie and find out what he meant. Again pan and scan. Print scratched in places and colors faded somewhat.

Don't Answer the Phone!
Made after Halloween, but taking its inspiration from the 1968 version of The Boston Strangler, this low budget shocker enjoyed something of a cult reputation in the years following its release for being unusually sadistic and unflinching. When I saw it in 1986, I was nonplussed, and seeing it again in 2009, I was struck by how tame this nearly bloodless serial killer movie is. The cops are on the trail of a nutjob who kills young beautiful women, strips them naked, photographs them, and then sells the photographs to pornography magazines. You think it would be pretty easy to find the guy with such a boneheaded MO, but these cops are wisecracking goofballs. Most of the movie follows the murderer, who talks to himself a lot, which sort of reminded me of Maniac (1980) with Joe Spinell, but this murderer isn't as filthy or demented as Spinell was. Incompetently made, but not unwatchable. Pan and scan. Picture slightly blurry, but not problematically so.

The Devil's Hand
Stars Robert Alda, father of MASH's Alan. If you thought Rosemary's Baby was the first modern devil-worshipping horror flick, think again, this flick did it first. Alda is engaged to marry girl-next-door-type Donna, but starts having dreams of a beautiful woman calling to him. He finds the girl via a "portrait doll maker" (you give the guy a photo of someone, he makes a doll for you that resembles the person. I'm not sure if such a business really exists.), and then she makes him her lover and lures him into a Satanic cult (worshipping "the devil-god Gamba" no less). The Satanic church has voodoo dolls, a statue of the Buddha, a bongo player, and some reasonably talented black dancers. The beautiful woman, Bianca, is stunning, and her, the cigarettes and martinis, and the moody cinematography give this film an effective noir-ish feel. Still, not much happens, and the film feels long at 80 minutes. Feels like a padded episode of The Twilight Zone. Kudos for the cool rockabilly opening that sounds like Dick Dale. Picture is crisp and full screen.

Terrified
Dullsville, man. This is a 1963 movie that opens with a murder by tossing a guy in a vat and filling it with wet cement. The cement only comes up to his chest, so I'm not sure how exactly he dies. Next, a masked maniac plays chicken with drivers on the highway. The main characters turn out to be a psychology student researching people's reaction to fear, "the girl," and his psych student's rival for the girl's affection. The three go out to a ghost town nearby and find a local murdered. This is about thirty minutes into the film, and then my patience ran out. The acting is wretched, the story meanders, they mill around at the ghost town too long not doing anything, and it takes place at night and you can't see anything but the actors' faces most of the time. Worst of the lot.

Nightmare in Wax
I have real Creature Feature memories of this one from when I was a little guy, so seeing it again was a treat. That being said, it is not a lost gem, rather it is very bad and dated, but still watchable. Not to be confused with the House of Wax with Vincent Price made ten years earlier, this 1969 dud is about a Hollywood makeup man who is horribly disfigured by when a big shot producer sets his face on fire, driving him insane. He opens a wax museum where the wax models are actually famous movie stars who have been injected by a nerve agent that causes paralysis. That's right, the museum displays living people as wax models (no one's gonna figure that one out). Occasionally, the serum wears off and they start moving around. As box office stars disappear and the number of exhibits in the museum grows, you would think the police would catch on, particularly when the museum is run by Cameron Mitchell in a cape and eyepatch, who has no other employees, but they don't. The violence is pretty tame by today's standards, and although there is no nudity, it does offer a totally bodacious go-go dance scene with interesting period costumes.

The Crater Lake Monster
A meteor hits the lake in a mountain village in northern California, unearthing a carnivorous dinosaur in this 1977 stinkfest. The dinosaur eats some of the locals, mostly off camera. When I was a lad, horror fans used to get excited about stop-motion animation, but now that we have CG, I don't think anyone cares anymore. In any event, the dinosaur's movement is pretty jerky and it only gets about 30 seconds of screen time anyway. The film spends a lot of time with two town fools and their boat leasing business, serving as the comic relief. The film also offers up a liquor store stickup man and a magician and his assistant traveling through town. If this movie wasn't so padded with inconsequential scenes, it would have been around ten minutes long. Nice California mountain scenery, though.

Stanley
OK, so I'm reviewing these as I see them, and this last one is definitely the worst of the bunch. Damn, it's insipid. A Seminole Indian Vietnam vet with a fascination with rattlesnakes gets back at the greedy businessman and others who would do them wrong. The businessman (Alex Rocco, who plays Moe Green in The Godfather) wants snakes for their hides to make belts for a European company. Instead of trapping them, he has his henchman wander around the swamps of Florida shooting them with shotguns, so he can probably only make a few dozen belts a year. In the end, after getting his snakes to kill Alex Rocco, he kidnaps the man's beautiful daughter, goes nuts, and dies as his shack goes down in flames. The rat movie Willard came out a year before this one in 1971. See it instead. I couldn't help but to notice that Amazon is hawking Stanley: Special Edition, which will probably fit nicely into your collection between Ishtar: Special Edition and Battlefield Earth: Special Edition. Yeesh! Dimly lit pan & scan.

You can find many of the same movies on the Gorehouse Greats collection.

The quality of the films vary, but are still watchable. The Crator Lake Monster is hillarious. An actor trying to look and sound sophisticated, fake English accent and all. Clay-mation monster, backwoods brothers...it has it all. Every film has its own reason to watch it. Oh the Horror! Very enjoyable.