Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack - Blockbuster New Releases Information

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Bindy Sue Frønkünschtein “bigfootsalienbaby” (under the rubble) –

  

Here’s another great collection of public domain movies! Don’t expect perfect, mint versions. These are movies that are available (although, some are not available anywhere else but this set) in a zillion different versions from tons of companies at ridiculously ranging prices! Why pay for packaging?? THE CHILLING 50 MOVIE PACK is for mature audiences as it contains lots of blood and nudity. Here’s the rundown: DEATH RAGE- Yul Brynner (West World) is a retired hitman who returns to his trade in order to find the man who murdered his brother. This one also has a beautiful blonde stripper in it! MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE- A wildman is preying on a group of hideously annoying campers. You’ll cheer him on! Watch for the wet T-shirt dance in the rainstorm! MEDUSA- George Hamilton (Love At First Bite) is a crazy guy who owes a loan shark (Cameron Mitchell) a lot of money. Someone even crazier than George is killing people! Not bad. DEADTIME STORIES- A good old fashioned horror anthology loosely based on fairy tales. I like this one! SCREAM BLOODY MURDER- A madman goes on a killing spree in this completely bonkers gore flick! Very bloody and disturbing! Don’t let granny or the tikes watch! THE BELL FROM HELL- A man is released from an asylum and gets a job at a slaughterhouse. This one’s gruesome, with a TEXAS CHAINSAW vibe at the end! METAMORPHOSIS- A decent monster flick up until the silly finale. I suggest skipping the last 5 minutes or so. NAKED MASSACRE- Another shocker like SCREAM BLOODY MURDER! NAKED MASSACRE takes the Richard Speck case and moves it from Chicago to Belfast Ireland! The killer is a sadistic, remorseless rapist. I hate rape scenes, and this one’s got ‘em! Originally titled BORN FOR HELL (a nod to Speck’s “Born To Raise Hell” tattoo), I would definitely keep granny far from this one too! HAUNTS- May Britt is a lonely woman who lives on a farm. Her small town is plagued by a stalking murderer. Is it her weird uncle (Cameron Mitchell)? I like this one, though it runs a bit long at the end. CHRISTMAS EVIL- The classic yuletide murder and mayhem film! Brandon Maggart is a guy who works at a toy factory. He snaps around Christmas time, dresses as Saint Nick, and checks that list! DRILLER KILLER- Abel Ferrara is a struggling artist with a problem. He lives with two gorgeous babes in an apartment. Unfortunately, a loud, obnoxious punk band just moved in directly beneath them! Sleep deprivation drives our hero nuts. He buys an electrical outlet belt he sees on TV, plugs in his drill, and goes on nightly hunting trips through times square! Bloody and twisted! Watch for the gal-pal shower scene! HORROR EXPRESS- Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are scientific rivals who must team up to defeat an alien being that boils people’s brains in their skulls! Telly Savalas makes an appearance near the end. Very good! THE SNAKE PEOPLE- Boris Karloff stars in this voodoo epic with zombies, cannibal women, and the ever-lovely Tongalele dancing her way into our hearts! Oh yeah! SISTERS OF DEATH- A girl is accidentally killed in a sorority hazing ritual. Years later, the gals who were there are summoned to a “reunion”. They arrive at the big mansion, surrounded by a 10-foot electric fence, and actually stay! Brainless! Still, not too awful. WAR OF THE ROBOTS- An italian space opera with goofy guys in even goofier outfits as “robots”. Dumb but fun. OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES- Not exactly Romero or Fulci, yet has a certain charm. Some college kids set out to find a treasure of WWII gold, guarded by nazi zombies! OK. THE WITCHES’ MOUNTAIN- This one’s stone-cold-boring! I barely made it to the finish! A photogragher and a girl he just met venture into the mountains where nothing really happens! Witches play a small role indeed! The ending is good, but hardly worth the misery of the rest of the movie! DEEP RED- Argento’s classic! Don’t expect anamorphic treatment! A man witnesses a murder and simply must solve it. Lots of twists and cool death scenes! THE REVENGE OF DOCTOR X- Written by Ed Wood, it’s too bad he didn’t direct this dull pile of ofal! A mad scientist sets out to prove that man evolved from plant-life (!). He succeeds in creating a plant man with venus flytrap feet! I kid you not! BAD TASTE- Yep, Peter Jackson’s first movie! Jackson made this in his spare time with family and friends! It’s a gore masterpiece! Cannibalistic aliens try to turn earth into a free-range farm for human meat! Can Jackson and his cohorts save us? Yepper! VIRUS- Glenn Ford is the president as the world is wiped out by a super-flu bug! Only an arctic outpost remains uninfected. Doom and gloom abound! THE MILPITAS MONSTER- Horrid. However, it was acually made by highschool students! So, worth at least a peak. FUNERAL HOME- A fairly good PSYCHO-type flick. A woman goes to live w/ her grandma in a renovated funeral parlor, now a bed and breakfast! Death ensues. LADY FRANKENSTEIN- The drop-dead gorgeous daughter of Frankenstein decides to make…

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S. Nyland “Squonkamatic” (Six Feet Of Earth & All That It Contains) –

  

  

I have a particular fondness for what might be referred to as ‘public domain material’; films/TV shows that are either un-licensable or not currently licensed & pretty much fair game for anyone to do what they like with. And I must say that for the dollar cost these 50 Movie Packs by Mill Creek & Treeline Films are usually worth taking a gamble on — for about $.50 cents a movie you are bound to find something worth watching more than once, and this box set is probably their best collection to date.

There literally is something for everyone on here: Giant rampaging monster movies (MILPITAS MONSTER, TRACK OF THE MOON BEAST), cult Euro horror (WITCHES MOUNTAIN, THE BLANCHILLE MONSTER), urban slashers (DRILLER KILLER, DRIVE-IN MASSACRE), 80s teen oriented trash (DEADTIME STORIES, FUNERAL HOME, MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE), a classic Euro crime/revenge thriller (DEATH RAGE), some genuine classics from American horror (SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT, MESSIAH OF EVIL), even some stuff completely out of left field that sort of defy description (HORROR OF SPIDER ISLAND, REVENGE OF DR. X, PANIC, THE COLD) and will command multiple viewings. Something which cannot be said of say, the new KING KONG DVD. Heck, you even get Mr. Jackson’s BAD TASTE, an aptly named film that is ten times more imaginative, clever and endearing even if a bit primative compared to what his computer programmers can whip up. Anyone else had enough of that junk? Well here are 50 movies that don’t use any CGI and some are actually very well made, even if the DVDs aren’t.

And while the print quality is uniformly poor — most are old fullframe home video or television prints — the content is so diverse and some of it so utterly obscure that they sort of transcend the “bargain bin” nature of the collection and makes the box set a very rewarding investment for those who like to see stuff that might be a bit more obscure than what you can find on Netflix: This box set marks the first ever DVD pressing of WITCHES MOUNTAIN, the 85 minute print of SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT is the most complete version currently described (most run 83 minutes, including the old VHS versions), nobody else seems to have TRACK OF THE MOONBEAST or THE MILPITAS MONSTER, and who can resist stuff like THE REVENGE OF DR. X, DEADTIME STORIES (with all of the nudity, sleaze & gore), DRIVE-IN MASSACRE and Alfonse Brescia’s WAR OF THE ROBOTS?

One other thought, which is that these sets kind of represent the future of this medium of public domain collections. The packaging is bare-bones, two movies per side on 12 double sided DVDs, cardboard sleeves for the discs inside of a larger carton, and so much material to sample & choose from that if a movie stinks, let it. Just move on to another title and let fate take you where it will. For $.50 cents apiece the movies are allowed to stink and the DVD transfers be somewhat sub-par: The collection very easily pays for itself just by being so darn watchable. I highly recommend taking a chance, and Mill Creek did a wonderful follow up with their ’5O DRIVE-IN CLASSICS’ collection too. Someone working there knows what they are doing.

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Unbelievable. OK, I’m amazed that five pages of reviews focus on the cost vs the number of titles (must be Mill Creek employees that started that trend), or the quality of the movies. This is a 50-movie budget boxset…do people really expect A-grade films and become disappointed to find mostly B-movies and worse? Yes, folks…a 50-movie budget box is going to be packed with a mix of bombs and sleepers. The quality is going to also be mixed because these are public domain films and the sources are always going to vary. These details should be a given, and yet they are noted endlessly as if they are revelations and buyers should find this information unusual.

So as I waded through 47 reviews looking for some piece of unique information — in this case, does Mill Creek pop their logo up throughout the film — not a mention of this useful detail. Some even called the set Mill Creek’s best compilation yet. I gritted my teeth and added it to my cart. I also knew that I was spinning the roulette wheel since Mill Creek have this disconcerting habit of releasing their sets with multiple versions, causing confusion when buyers purchase the set only to find that the movie they bought the set for is on an alternate version. Charming. In the software world, updated versions use version numbers, but even though Mill Creek update the box and discs, they can’t be bothered to note a difference anywhere in the packaging so buyers have to play guesswork as all versions are lumped together here. Charming.

Those logos you see in the bottom corner of the screen are known in the industry as a “bug”, which is ironic. And every fifteen minutes, you get to see Mill Creek’s gaudy, non-translucent, obtrusive logo fade in, strike the pose, divert your attention away from the movie, then finally fade away until the next scheduled interval. Charming. That’s the type of thing you expect from free TV, not something you pay for — regardless of the cost per title. Would you buy a barrel of spoiled tomatoes just because the individual cost of each is mere pennies? Of course not. I like to pull out my movies, pop them up on the bigscreen for a cinema-style experience with my friends to simulate a theatrical showing. How is this possible when some little company is compelled to advertise themselves constantly, to remind you that this purchase you made came from them. It did serve the purpose for me, as that ugly logo is all I remember when I see this set on the shelf. I have several other Mill Creek sets that this does not occur on, and before writing this review, I had a whole bunch more ready to buy. Mind you, none of them are in my cart now. Nor will anything released by this company find its way into my cart. (I said that previously after this occured on their Cult Classics collection, but I was unwittingly lured in by the fact that the bug wasn’t mentioned in any of the reviews…please note these things in your reviews folks, otherwise the practice will continue or get worse!)

These films are public domain. With a little diligence, I could have downloaded all fifty of them and that would be perfectly legal. And that is what I will do with the other titles that I would have gladly paid for before experiencing this transgression from yet another careless publisher. A response from Mill Creek? Yeah, assuming this review doesn’t get buried on the last page, you’ll see “This review was not helpful” numbers since, after all, why would informing potential buyers about the quality of the package be something consumers would have a problem with? Am I being a negative creep, a hater? Nope…just letting the public know what they are paying for (or not.) If none of these details bother you, then purchase away. If they do, let Mill Creek know by saving your hard-earned money or spending it with companies that don’t expect you to pay for shameless self-promotion.

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