3rd August 2009

The Screaming Skull. The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues. Lady Frankenstein. A Shriek in the Night. Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. All films that now exist in the public domain and can thus be obtained very cheaply in box sets just full to bursting with movies as thrilling, innovative and, well, unusual as Naked Massacre (a dull Canadian movie shot in the UK in which a maniac hacks up nurses, mainly in the dark).

Most of these films are out there because the copyrights have lapsed, or no-one is actually registered as owning them. It may be, though, that no-one's actually owning up to them because they do tend to err on the side of the irredeemably terrible. The Beast Of Yucca Flats is a case in point: a thoroughly wretched film so cheap that it was shot without synchronised sound (a mere 33 years after talkies came in) so whole conversations take place without showing the faces of the people talking.

But ploughing through the boxes can reveal the occasional title that's quirkily entertaining, albeit in entirely the wrong way. Maniac is an incredible slice of hammy nonsense from 1934 containing a mad scientist, his mad assistant (a former vaudeville artiste), some of the most demented overacting I've ever seen and a hold-the-DVD-did-they-really-do-that? scene in which the mad assistant gouges out a cat's eye and eats it. Then there's Dementia 13, by the then unknown Francis Coppola, is a gloomy, doom-laden mystery that overall isn't very good but has some oddly effective moments. Or Planet Outlaws, a deranged 90-minute cutdown of the 237-minute serial from 1939, in which everything that isn't action, fighting, chasing or explosions is ruthlessly hacked away and dumped.

There are numerous old vehicles for old-time B-movie legends: Boris Karloff, George Zucco and Bela Lugosi show up regularly. Some of the Vincent Price movies have lapsed as well: The House On Haunted Hill, The Last Man On Earth (both of which have, of course, been done more recently with far bigger budgets though not necessarily to greater effect). Other major genre figures like John Carradine, Fay Wray, Basil Rathbone and either of the Lon Chaneys can be found in all manner of barely watchable twaddle. There's even a very young Robert Englund in the rubbish Slashed Dreams, as a hippie in a shack.

Of course, there are a handful of genuine classic films in there amongst the dross: the original Night Of The Living Dead was famously in the public domain for many years which is how anyone who'd got a print could release it. Horror Express boasts Christopher Lee AND Peter Cushing (and Telly Savalas as a Cossack police officer). Somehow they've also got a heavily truncated version of Deep Red in there as well.

Sure, they're not expensive, and you get plenty of minutes for your money, but it's a purchase weighed very much towards bulk rather than quality. They're all in 4:3 and many seem to be derived from existing VHS sources. I haven't waded through more than a third of these boxes (I have three and I don't know whether I'm going to bother with any more) and while there are mildly interesting discoveries to be made, frankly I don't want to sit through the likes of Scream Bloody Murder and King Of Kong Island again. Ancient B-movies have their occasional charms and it is fun to see them once in a while, but man cannot live by Hercules And The Tyrants Of Babylon alone.

Until the next time.

Richard.

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