Good To Be Back

Hey, I'm glad to be back after taking a little break for Thanksgiving....
Now, did everyone jump into their Christmas shopping the next day like they were supposed to? Good.


Personally, I avoided the Black Friday crowds, and actually hit the department stores a little sooner.

And what did I find? Well, I found one of my very favorite things at Target: a DVD collection of 25 "horror classics." Yeah. Remember several months back when I wrote about the DVD set my mom gave me that had a mere 15 horror classics? Well, this find is much better because it has, like, TEN MORE movies on it for the same low, low price of just five bucks. That's a bargain!

...Or, IS it???

(My early X-mas gift...to myself.)

Sigh. I'm sorry to say that quantity does not necessarily always trump quality. Yup, the collection of horror flicks that you see above is actually a bit of a let-down. The box art boasts that the disks inside contain films starring such big names as Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and the recently-deceased Leslie Nielson; but the truth is that the productions in question are among the actors' very worst work. In fact, about half of this set's pictures are not really movies at all -- they're just old episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater, which was like the Canadian version of Tales from the Dark Side. There are also several episodes of a long-forgotten 1950s TV show called Tales of Tomorrow. What a jip.

Most notable among the Bradbury episodes is the one starring Jeff Goldblum. It's called "The Town Where No One Got Off." I'll let that speak for itself.


Among the more interesting episodes of Tales of Tomorrow is Ice from Space, starring Paul Newman, and Appointment on Mars, with the above-mentioned Leslie Nielson. I was kind of disappointed to learn that these productions were merely episodes of an old TV series...but then again, when you think about it, getting a whole bunch of them for just five dollars is still a pretty good deal. Hey, this is the kind of thing that a fella could just stick in the DVD player on a lazy Saturday, and leave spinning while he does other, more important, stuff. In some ways, it's even better than regular TV!


So maybe I'm not disappointed, after all...even if the few full-length, feature films included in this set are pretty crappy (White Zombie excluded). Whatever. Here's a list of every feature on the 25 Horror Classics set. If they sound interesting to you, then head over to Target or Amazon and scoop this bad boy up.

25 Horror Classics:

--Disk One, side one.

Dead Man Walks
The Mad Monster
The Town Where No One Got Off
The Coffin
Gotcha
The Emissary
The Fatal Hour

--Disk One, side two.

Little Shop of Horrors
One Body Too Many
Bosom Friends
The Way to Do It
Hijack
There is One Born Every Minute

--Disk Two, side one.

Maniac
Parson's Pleasure
White Zombie
Black Dragons
Frankenstein
The Crystal Egg

--Disk Two, side two.

Completely Foolproof
Swamp Woman
The World Gone Mad
The Beast of Yucca Flats
Ice from Space
Appointment on Mars

So, there you have it. My Thanksgiving and early December watching list, courtesy of the fine folks at Pacific Entertainment. They may use the term "Horror Classic" loosely, but at least this DVD set contains a bit of history.


Perhaps this collection could have lived up to its name more aptly if it had included the film you see below.

The Flesh Eaters (1964)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058101/


Netflix description:
A deranged Nazi scientist (Martin Kosleck) hopes to revive the Third Reich by breeding a new strain of flesh-eating bacteria. But his ultra-private work is interrupted when a movie star, her secretary, a pilot and a beatnik crash the party. B-movie master Jack Curtis directs this forgotten cult classic, which holds the dubious honor of being one of the only horror flicks of its kind to be shot entirely on Long Island.

I had assumed that The Flesh Eaters would be about zombies. I was wrong.

No -- the flesh eaters referred to in this film's title are actually microscopic organisms; viruses, if you will. They straight up devour any creature they encounter. And they're in the ocean!

Our hero is a pilot named Grant Murdoch, who agrees to fly a famous actress to New York for some Broadway play she's supposed to be starring in. Along the way, they run into some nasty weather, and wind up making an emergency landing on a small island owned by a mysterious German scientist. His name is Professor Bartell, and there's something fishy about the experiments he's been doing.

Sure enough, we learn that Bartell is messing around with this horrific, man-eating virus that also happens to be sentient. The virus runs amok in short order, and it's up to our dashing hero to stop it.


You know, The Flesh Eaters was a surprising find. It's hokey in the typical 1950s-60s sci-fi sort of way, but it's also ahead of its time in others. The picture is downright DARK on many levels, and it's also sexy to a degree that would have probably been risky for its era. I LIKED this little gem.

One thing kept bugging me the whole time, though: how could this flesh eating virus be thriving in the ocean waters immediately off the coast of Doctor Bartell's island, and not be spreading all over the world? It's like the microbes just want to hang around this one little area; the filmmakers could have turned this menace into a much more threatening, globally-significant, sort of horror. Instead, the entire film takes place on just this one little island.

Other opportunities are missed, as well. For instance, I mentioned zombies -- at one point, the concept of the virus actually generating zombies IS hinted at, only to be dropped completely. Plus, there's a giant, crab-like monster that we get to see for, like, twelve seconds, who then goes away and isn't mentioned again. What's the deal with THAT? You don't introduce some horrible mutant monster in a movie like this, only to have him disappear after half a scene with no further explanation!

Still, The Flesh Eaters deserves more attention than it's received. This picture stands above other films of its ilk in terms of quality and imagination. I advise all fans of the genre to check it out.

PS -- it's not to be confused with 1985's Flesheater (also reviewed in this blog). Totally different movie right there.

3 out of 5.

b.