Vampires & More! 20 Movie Pack [4 Discs]Vampires & More! 20 Movie Pack [4 Discs]

Retail: $14.98
Our Price:
$11.87
Save: $3.11

Stock Status: No Longer Available!!!

 

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

    Here's a collection you can really sink your teeth into! Includes The Vampire Bat (Lionel Atwill. 1933), The Devil Bat (Bela Lugosi. 1940), Mamma Dracula (Louise Fletcher. 1980) and 17 more on 4 DVDs. Color-b&w/NR.

DVD FEATURES:
  • Number of Discs: 4
  • Screen: Color
  • Audio: Dolby Digital Stereo
AWARDS
  • Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  •     Nominated Best Dramatic Score - 1941 (Edward Kay)
  • Library of Congress
  •     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1999
  • Telluride Film Festival
  •     Film Presented - 2000
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
REVIEWS:
  • Bedlam is a film well worth seeing, especially for fans of producer Val Lewton. It's not Lewton's best film by any means and has any number of flaws, but it's a fascinating example of a genre filmmaker trying hard to both work within and break out of the confines of his genre. Bedlam's biggest problem is that it tries to be both a horror film and a serious sociological tract, and it simply can't fulfill the demands of both genres. That said, it's a very engaging film that contains two noteworthy star performances. Boris Karloff, one of the finest actors ever to toil in the often unrewarding horror genre, is superb as the ruler of the madhouse. Menacing, oily, and duplicitous, he's nevertheless enthralling and even at time sympathetic, and Karloff fills the performances with nuances that add considerable depth to the character and the film. He's well matched by Anna Lee,m who perfectly captures her character's growing social conscience without letting it come across as artificial and forced. The physical production is also noteworthy, and Mark Robson's direction is imaginative. If he is unable to reconcile the horror and sociological aspects of the screenplay, he still does a fine job of playing to the strengths of both. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
  • It is altogether typical of Bela Lugosi's lousy business judgement that he accepted one of his finest film roles for a mere $500 dollars. In the haunting low-budgeter White Zombie, Lugosi stars as Murder Legendre, a shadowy character who exercises supernatural powers over the natives in his Haitian domain. Coveting beautiful Madge Bellamy as his bride, wealthy Robert Frazier is refused her hand in marriage. He enters into an unholy agreement with Lugosi, whereby Madge will fall ill and die, then be resurrected as a zombie-and, implicitly, Frazier's love-slave. This is accomplished, but Lugosi, relishing the hold he has over Frazier, refuses to release Madge's soul. She is ultimately rescued from Living Death by her faithful beau Robert Harron and missionary Joseph Cawthorn (heretofore merely the comedy relief). Few talkie horror films have ever so expertly captured the "feel" of the silent cinema as White Zombie; the film's ethereal, ghostlike ambience enables the audiences to accept even the most ludicrous of plot twists. The producers, Victor and Edward Halperin, use the film's tiny budget to their advantage, evocatively suggesting the horrors that they haven't the financial wherewithal to show on screen. Lugosi is superb throughout, making the most of such seemingly innocuous lines as "Well, well, we understand one another better, now." Long ignored or shunted aside as insignificant, White Zombie can hold its own with any of the like-vintage Universal horror classics. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
  • Often cited as the cream of the crop among independently produced chillers of the 1930s, The Vampire Bat does indeed pack a wallop. Perhaps no longer able to frighten a modern, so-called more sophisticated audience, Frank Strayer's compact little horror treatise is nevertheless so well cast and produced with such élan as to consistently entertain. The physical trappings are entirely comparable to the Universal horror films of the era -- in fact, filmed on the studio lot, The Vampire Bat benefits from several of the famous standing sets -- and the cast is perhaps even better than what the larger studio would be willing to provide. Lionel Atwill adds yet another of his patented devilishly calculating Mad Doctors and Fay Wray is as comely as ever, even if she doesn't scream a single time. Add to that a young Melvyn Douglas as the male ingénue (a major improvement over Universal's tepid David Manners) and such grand genre perennials as Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Robert Frazer, and Maude Eburne, and there is nary a dull moment. Eburne, incidentally, as Wray's hypochondriac aunt, becomes the subject of one of filmdom's funnier closing lines. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
  • Returning to both the theme and locations of his earlier The Vampire Bat (1933), director Frank R. Strayer is at it again but in much more stately fashion. Where the earlier excursion into the macabre zipped by with commendable speed, Condemned to Live takes its sweet old time to get from point A to the inevitable point B, an exercise in tedium that offers a modern audience plenty of opportunity to admire such classic sets as the Hunchback of Notre Dame's bell tower, the famous Castle Frankenstein, the Middle European village and other Universal landmarks, some of whom remain attractions to this very day. The acting and dialogue is early talkie cumbersome and Ralph Morgan amply demonstrates why he never became as popular as brother Frank. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
  • The film that brought one of German cinema's masters to international attention, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is also one of the best screen versions of Dracula, even if the Bram Stoker source received no credit. Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max Schreck's Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck's deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson Welles and Gregg Toland when they made Citizen Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu's air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau's combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred Hitchcock's horror of the everyday and familiar. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
  • The Knights Templar take to the high seas in this third installment in Amando De Ossorio's infamous Blind Dead film series. The production is obviously low-budget -- particularly when you are forced to see the same foggy shot of a Spanish galleon that is an obvious miniature -- but it is still amusing and occasionally chilling fun for fans of the series. While De Ossorio's original film was a scary shocker, the sequels attempted increasingly outrageous tactics to please viewers. For its part, El Buque Maldito combines elements of vampire films with those of The Exorcist, which was released a year earlier and was to inspire dozens of lesser films such as this one. The best is when a meteorological professor suddenly reveals his knowledge of "exorcism" by burning a homemade cross to chase the zombies back into their caskets. The graphic elements have been toned down quite a bit (there's a tame lesbian sequence and very little gore) and the ghouls are not nearly as threatening this time around (hardly any have swords), but the shipboard setting provides an interesting new venue for the Templars. There's also a well-designed shock ending that provides a fitting climax for the galleon's survivors. As with all of his Blind Dead films, De Ossorio comes up with a good concept that is weakened by screenwriting gaffs such as ludicrous plot turns and inane characters who appear unable to think with any degree of logic. Then again, since they only serve as victims for the ghouls, it doesn't make much difference. ~ Patrick Legare, Rovi
  • When George A. Romero, a Pittsburgh-based director of TV commercials and industrial films, persuaded a few buddies to pitch in some money for a case of film stock so that he could shoot a zombie movie on the weekends, he had no idea that he would forever change the American horror movie. With his first effort, Romero shattered the rules of the horror genre; Night of the Living Dead retained many of the iconic elements of the traditional horror movie, but without the emotional buffering of most films that preceded it. In this film, the good guys didn't win, the monsters became only more powerful, the authority figures protecting us were both dangerous and inept, the source of the contagion was both unexplained and unstoppable, and, as friends and families were pitted against each other, no one got away unscathed. The early films of Herschell Gordon Lewis predated it in putting graphic gore on screen, but while Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs seemed almost comical in their candy-colored carnage, Night's stark black-and-white images of zombies feeding on their human victims possessed a blunt and troubling realism that broke new, stomach-churning ground. And while Night's political allegories are more subtle than those of such later Romero films as The Crazies and Dawn of the Dead, its open distrust of authority and depiction of society on the verge of collapse certainly mark it as a film of the Vietnam era; the grim fate of Duane Jones, the film's sole heroic figure and only African-American, had added resonance with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X fresh in the minds of most Americans. At a time when most horror movies took the tack that fear could be fun, Night of the Living Dead offered terror without a spoonful of sugar, and the genre would never be the same again. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Vampires & More! 20 Movie Pack [4 Discs] - Available now from DVDPlanet.com, join our mailing list and receive special offers and promotions.

BROWSE BY GENRE

NOW PLAYING

Drive (2011) Thing (2011) Transformers: the Dark of the Moon 3d Big Year

 

 

 

 

 

Specials

TOP 10 Last 2 Weeks

  1. Three Outlaw Samurai – $16.99
  2. Count of Monte Cristo – $15.38
  3. Man in the Iron Mask (1939) – $15.35
  4. Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 – $21.14
  5. World on a Wire – $25.34
  6. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World – $13.73
  7. New Tricks Season 6 – $24.64
  8. Lady & the Tramp – $29.14
  9. Lady & the Tramp – $24.14
  10. Drive (2011) – $18.99

 

TOP 10 PRE-ORDERS

  1. Harold and Maude – 02/21/12 – $9.11
  2. Reds [25th Anniversary Edition] [2 Discs] – 02/21/12 – $10.64
  3. Nashville – 02/21/12 – $9.14
  4. A Place in the Sun – 02/21/12 – $10.23
  5. To Catch a Thief [Special Collector's Edition] – 02/21/12 – $10.04
  6. Three Days of the Condor – 02/21/12 – $8.24
  7. Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy – 02/21/12 – $10.04
  8. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express – 02/21/12 – $8.24
  9. Stalag 17 [Special Collector's Edition] – 02/21/12 – $10.34
  10. Romeo and Juliet – 02/21/12 – $9.14
Find us on Facebook
Become an Affiliate



My Account
 Login
 Register
 Order History
 Wish List
 Shopping Cart
Information
 Help
 Contact Us
 Shopping
 Shipping Policies
 Returns and Exchanges
 Privacy statement