Chilling Classics - 50 Movie Pack (DVD, 2005, 12-Disc Set)

Although I've yet to even come close to viewing all 50 films as of yet, I have sat through a dozen or so and already am convinced that I've gotten my money's worth and more! At a price like this, you can't expect any extras, or even high quality reproduction of these mostly well under the radar "Chilling Classics", but with 50 movies to choose from, there's got to be something here that's worth spending your hard earned cash on. Here are the highlights and lowlights of what I've come across so far.

The good:

Scream Bloody Murder - This low budget 70's shocker starts off strong and rarely lets up. A young demented psychopath with a serious mama's boy complex freaks out and kills a bunch of folks. The lead actor plays the part way over the top, just like it should be. There are even some legitimately creepy visual effects, and our boy is haunted and taunted by the dead. A bit more blood and this would have been about perfect.

Deep Red - Dario Argento's classic still resonates through a moderately poor visual and audio reproduction. The plot is slightly convoluted, but there are some cool death scenes here.

Bad Taste - Peter Jackson's early work is fun and loaded with gore. Jackson would later perfect this type of comedy meets gory horror with Dead/Alive. On a shoestring budget and using friends and family as cast and crew, Jackson appears to be having a great time acting in and directing this fun film

Gothic - This is one of my favorite Ken Russell films. The story of these affluent intellectuals getting together in a creepy mansion to stimulate each other's aesthetic capacity with bold talk and illicit substances is rather fascinating to me, and Russell throws in enough weird unsettling images to keep the viewer off kilter for the final third act.

Horror Express - These cheesy story about a monster on a train would fail in other less capable actor's hands, but with Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Telly Savalas (!) on board selling this thing like their lives depended on it, Horror Express is great fun.

These five films alone are worth the price of admission, and I haven't even seen over half of them yet. Of course there are some duds here and while some of them may be in that "so bad they're good" category, here are a few that I thought just plain sucked.

The bad bad bad:

War of the Robots - Antonio Sabato stars in the worst looking sci-fi movie I've ever seen. This is so incredibly lame and boring, I confess that I couldn't make it through to the end.

The Driller Killer - Initially I thought this would be good. An artist flips out and runs around killing people in NYC because a punk rock band practices in his building all night long, day after day until he just can't take it anymore!! The problem is both the band and the artist are some of the most irritating characters to ever grace a bad film. Supposedly the film stars Abel Ferrara (?), but there's no such listing in the actual film credits. Prepare to be annoyed.

Oasis of the Zombies - Another one that I thought might be decent turned out to be a dud. This is an hour plus of kids running around trying to find some secret treasure and 15 minutes of similar looking kids with mud on their faces moving very, very slowly. You may turn into a zombie from watching this crap!

This is just a sampling of what you get. If you like fun low budget films with mild gore and brief nudity then this is an easy decision: get it.