Horror Collector's Set, Vol. 2 [2 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

This deliciously creepy collection features horror icons Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and even Jack Nicholson in four spooky, classic films, including the cult-classic masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead.

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 2
• Screen: Color
• Audio: Dolby Digital Stereo

AWARDS

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1999

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Bela Lugosi - Dr. Paul Carruthers
       Jack Nicholson - Lt. Andre Duvalier
       Dave "Tex" O'Brien - Johnny Layton
       Dick Miller - Stefan
       Dorothy Neumann - Old Woman
       Donald Kerr - "One Shot" McGuire
       Ed Mortimer - Martin Heath
       Gene O'Donnell - Don Morton
       Alan Baldwin - Tommy Heath
       John Ellis - Roy Heath
       Arthur Q. Bryan - Joe McGinty
       Hal Price - Chief Wilkins
       John Davidson - Prof. Raines
       Billy Griffith - Coroner
       Wallace Rairdon - Walter King
       Barbara Yu Ling - Chin Yang

• Director:

  Alan Gibson, Roger Corman, George A. Romero, Jean Yarbrough

• Producer:

  Alan Gibson, Roy Skeggs, Francis Ford Coppola, Roger Corman, Karl Hardman, Russ Streiner, Jack Gallagher, Susan Olney

• Screenwriter:

  Don Houghton, Leo Gordon, Roger Corman, Jack Hill

• Screen Story:

  George A. Romero

• Screenwriter:

  George A. Romero, John A. Russo

• Screen Story:

  George Bricker

• Screenwriter:

  John T. Neville

• Cinematographer:

  Brian Probyn, John M. Nickolaus, Jr., Alfred Taylor, George A. Romero, Arthur Martineli

• Composer (Music Score):

  John Cacavas, Ronald Stein

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  David Chudnow

• Editor:

  Chris Barnes, George A. Romero, Holbrook Todd

• Production Designer:

  Vincent Survinski

• Art Director:

  Lionel Couch, Daniel Haller, Paul Palmentola

• Associate Producer:

  Don Houghton, Guy V. Thayer, Jr.

• Executive Producer:

  Barry Sandrew

• Set Designer:

  Harry Reif

• Costume Designer:

  Marjorie D. Corso

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Claude Hitchcock, Farrell Redd

• Makeup:

  Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman

• Special Effects:

  Tony Pantanello, Regis Survinski

• Production Manager:

  Melville de Lay

• Presented by:

  Johnny Legend

• Technical Director:

  David D. Martin

• Production Director:

  Jane Huizenga, Jane Huzienga

REVIEWS:

• As a cinematic experience, The Terror is third-rate at best, a long-winded fable that limps in circles, too haphazard to be great art and not outrageous enough to be great trash. Still, the true student of B-movie mythology may want to spend an hour with it anyway, notorious as the film is for being one of low-budget director Roger Corman's classic rush jobs. After wrapping up his humorous horror free-for-all The Raven early, Corman had two extra days left of Boris Karloff's contract that he was loathe to waste. So, instead of tearing down the sets, Karloff was walked through a series of hastily prepared scenes with co-stars Jack Nicholson and Richard Miller. Corman then subcontracted the direction of remaining exteriors and connecting sequences to various assistants, including Francis Ford Coppola and future cult filmmakers Jack Hill and Monte Hellman, with even Nicholson helming a few shots. With more directors than some omnibus films and no time for a proper script, The Terror was bound to baffle, and its slippery story eventually becomes too sluggish to bother deciphering. While the film is worth little more than an amusing anecdote in Corman's colorful legend, he got lots of mileage out of this patchwork monster. Five years later, Corman again found himself owed two days' work by Karloff, so neophyte director Peter Bogdanovich was offered 20 minutes worth of footage from The Terror to use if he could incorporate it into a new feature for the horror icon. The result was the taut, fascinating Targets, which cast Karloff as an aging horror star whose personal appearance at a drive-in is interrupted by a deranged sniper; of course, The Terror is the program onscreen during the mayhem. Corman productions continued to cannibalize chunks of The Terror in years to come, usually in self-referential spoofs like the silly but enjoyable 1976 comedy Hollywood Boulevard, which featured Richard Miller relaxing at a drive-in and enjoying his own performance from 13 years earlier. ~ Fred Beldin, 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