Monsters: 20 Movie Pack [5 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Fay Wray stars in The Vampire Bat, (1933), Susan Cabot stars in The Wasp Woman, (1960), Boris Karloff stars in The Ape, (1940), Vincent Price stars in The Bat (1959) and 16 more. 4 DVDs. Color-b&w/24 hrs/NR.

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 5
• Audio: Dolby Digital Stereo
• Screen: Black and White, Color

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Haruyasu Noguchi, Frank Strayer, Sam Newfield, Dan Milner, Elmer Clifton, Roger Corman, Monte Hellman, Victor Halperin, Allan Dwan, Ray Kellogg, Noriyaki Yuasa, Coleman Francis, Arch Hall Sr., Nicholas Merriwether, William Nigh, Crane Wilbur, Bernard Kowalski

• Producer:

  Hideo Koi, Philip Goldstone, Sigmund Neufeld, Dan Milner, Jack Milner, Max Alexander, George M. Merrick, Roger Corman, Barry Sandrew, Susan Olney, Cliff Broughton, Edward Halperin, Harry Joe Brown, Darryl F. Zanuck, Ken Curtis, Hidemasa Nagata, Anthony Cardoza, Roland Morin, Arch Hall Sr., Nicholas Merriwether, Yonejiro Saito, Scott R. Dunlap, William T. Lackey, C.J. Tevlin, Gene Corman

• Screenwriter:

  Iwao Yamazaki, Ryuzo Nakanishi, Edward T. Lowe, Pierre Gendron, Martin E. Mooney, Lou Rusoff, Arthur G. Durlam, Charles B. Griffith, Robert Ellis, Leo Gordon, Victor Halperin, Howard Higgin, Rollo Lloyd, Rian James, Sid Silvers

• Play Author:

  Ralph Spence

• Screenwriter:

  Jay Simms, Fumi Takahashi, Coleman Francis, Ray Kellogg

• Screen Story:

  Arch Hall Sr.

• Screenwriter:

  Bob Wehling, Yonejiro Saito, Richard Kraft, Richard Carroll, Curt Siodmak

• Play Author:

  Adam Hull Shirk

• Screenwriter:

  Crane Wilbur

• Play Author:

  Avery Hopwood, Mary Roberts Rinehart

• Screenwriter:

  Fred K. Myton

• Cinematographer:

  Muneo Keda, Ira Morgan, Robert C. Cline, Brydon Baker, Eddie Linden, Jacques Marquette, Jules Cronjager, Harry Neumann, Arthur Martineli, Arthur J. Feindel, Edward J. Cronjager, Wilfrid M. Cline, Akira Kitazaki, John Cagle, Vilis Lapenieks, Julian C. Townsend, Nobuo Munekawa, Joseph Biroc, John H. Greenhalgh, Jr., John M. Nickolaus, Jr.

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  David Chudnow

• Composer (Music Score):

  Albert Glasser, Ronald Stein, Fred Katz

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Lee Zahler

• Composer (Music Score):

  Abe Meyer

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Abe Meyer

• Composer (Music Score):

  David Buttolph

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  David Buttolph

• Composer (Music Score):

  Emil Cadkin, Harry Bluestone, Irwin Nafshun, Al Remington, Jack Marshall

• Songwriter:

  Arch Hall, Jr.

• Composer (Music Score):

  Henri Price

• Songwriter:

  Wes Farrell

• Composer (Music Score):

  Edward Kay, Louis Forbes

• Musical Arrangement:

  Louis Forbes

• Composer (Music Score):

  Alvino Rey, David Chudnow, Alexander Laszlo

• Editor:

  Otis M. Garrett, Holbrook Todd, Dan Milner, Jack Milner, Charles Henkle, Jr., Angela Scellars, Byron Robinson, Carlos Lodato, Douglas Biggs, Allen McNeil, Aaron Stell, Coleman Francis, Don Schneider, Ross-Gaffney, Tatsuji Nakashizu, Russell Schoengarth, William Austin

• Production Designer:

  Charles Hall, Jane Huizenga, Jack Bohrer

• Art Director:

  Daniel Hall, Paul Palmentola, Daniel Haller, Leigh Smith, Lewis H. Creber, Richard Day, Hank Aldrich, E.R. Hickson, Dave Milton, Fred Preble

• Executive Producer:

  Gordon McLendon, Roger Corman

• Set Designer:

  Ralph Black, Louise Caldwell

• Costume Designer:

  Gwen Wakeling

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Roger Heman, George Leverett, Earl Snyder, Al Overton

• Makeup:

  Perc Westmore, Kiva Hoffman

• Special Effects:

  Akira Watanabe, Ray Mercer, Kazafumi Fujii, Ralph Hammeras, Wee Risser, Yonesaburo Tsukiji

• Production Manager:

  Ben Chapman, H. Duane Weaver, Jack Bohrer

• Short Story Author:

  Lawrence Williams, Dorys Lukather, Fred McConnell

• Technical Director:

  David D. Martin

REVIEWS:

• 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
• Often cited as a poor, low-budget entry in the then-popular The Cat and the Canary-style thriller cycle, The Monster Walks, from fly-by-night company Action Pictures, is certainly low-budget, but it is also heaps of fun for those able to overlook some extremely racist comedy featuring Sleep 'n' Eat (aka Willie Best). That, however, remains a difficult task for modern audiences who may quite correctly be alarmed by such "bits of business" as Best blithely considering a resemblance between himself and Yogi, the film's monster ape (actually a chimpanzee). Just like its most famous predecessor, and obvious inspiration, The Cat and the Canary, The Monster Walks is written tongue-in-cheek, but acted fairly straight by an august cast that includes Mischa Auer (who at one point plays a decidedly off-key version of Brahms' Lullaby), and, as the inevitably skulking housekeeper, Martha Mattox. The latter basically repeats her performance from Cat. Rex Lease and Vera Reynolds (who was the wife of the film's screenwriter, Robert Ellis) are fine in the ingénue leads, although the latter is a bit long in the tooth to play naive, and director Frank R. Strayer does what he can within the limited budget. Best's uncomfortable moments notwithstanding, The Monster Walks is actually a great deal more enjoyable than its tattered reputation. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
• The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues is a movie that film students should look at closely -- the rest of us may enjoy it for what it is, a supremely low-budget sci-fi thriller, but would-be filmmakers could learn something from this picture, even at this late date. This was only the eighth movie (and only the third sci-fi film) to be distributed by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, through what was then called American Releasing Corporation (which later became American International Pictures). It was paired with Roger Corman's better (and better known) The Day The World Ended -- indeed, as a kid this reviewer used to get it mixed up in his memory with Corman's similar (but lower budgeted and more inventive) Monster From The Ocean Floor (1954). The double-bill of two science fiction thrillers turned a tidy profit that put the fledgling Arkoff-Nicholson company on a path of success that would last for 20 years. As Nicholson and Arkoff were under-capitalized at the time, however, the two producers allowed Jack Milner and Dan Milner, two brothers they knew, who were film editors and eager to go into production, to raise the money and produce the picture for them. The movie is peopled by the usual coterie of aging second-tier lead actors, including Kent Taylor, Cathy Downs (spelled "Kathy" in the credits), and Michael Whalen, and good inexpensive younger talent (Phillip Pine). Some parts of it -- especially Pine's scenes -- are handled sharply, and certain attributes, such as the scoring by Ronald Stein (who sounds at times like he was emulating Bernard Herrmann's work on Hangover Square), are as good as any comparable elements in more expensive movies; but a lot of the movie also looks like it was shot by an editor, as opposed to a director -- there is no sense of style in most of it, and the viewer comes away with the conscious sense that a lot of first takes were used. That isn't a always a bad thing, as the cast is sufficiently professional to work competently, and the little elements of roughness give the movie an offbeat tension that helps carry it across 80 minutes of screen time. The major deficiencies are the monster itself -- one of the sillier looking rubber-suit jobs of the period, resembling an inflatable beach toy in distress -- and the attempt at a montage to depict the creation of the monster. The makers simply didn't have the effects budget to pull that part of it off. But assuming that one can get past that flaw, this isn't a bad little movie -- it's more interesting than any number of major studio dramas of the period, and moderately entertaining within the context of cheap 50's cinema. Curiously, Cathy Downs and Michael Whalen were to turn up together again four years later in Richard Cunha's Missile To The Moon (1959). Jack Milner and Dan Milner were later responsible for From Hell It Came (1957), about the killer tree-stump from hell. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• Coleman Francis's debut directorial/production/writing effort The Beast of Yucca Flats runs under an hour -- 53 minutes to be exact. But, oh, are those a long 53 minutes, especially if one is trapped in a theater watching it. Francis seems to have had a general idea for a story -- and not a terrible one -- and no talent at all for writing dialogue, directing actors, or working with a crew. The results is a delightfully, almost comically chaotic mess of a movie that feels a lot longer than its under-one-hour running time -- and not in a good way. The grotesque cheapness of the shooting and the overt amateurishness of the technique and technical values on display make this a movie almost an abuse of the audience -- but the shortcomings are so far over-the-line as to set a new standard for ineptitude; where Edward D. Wood, Jr., with whom Francis is frequently compared, would at least make mistakes within an explicable frame-work (that is, one usually could deduce what Wood was trying to do), Francis's movie is filled with impossible-to-explain dialogue, action, plotting, and directorial decisions. The result is that where watching a Wood movie like, say, Night of the Ghouls is akin to looking at a multiple car wreck in slow-motion, watching The Beast of Yucca Flats is closer to looking at an act of random natural disaster -- such as an avalanche -- in slow motion (very, very -- excruciatingly -- slow motion), with little but one's knowledge of natural law and physics to guide one's assumptions and expectations. And, assuming one has the patience, that, in itself, is a kind of achievement, if not the one that Francis was aiming for. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• Obese general store owner Bruno Ve Sota is married to sluttish teenager Yvette Vickers, who is cheating on him with his best friend, Michael Emmet. The trio ends up in the swamp, Ve Sota literally hunting down the adulterers with a shotgun. That situation alone should have made for an interesting tale, a sort of humid James M. Cain for the beat generation. But this is a Roger Corman production and into the mix are thrown a couple of stunt divers wearing what appears to be small ponchos with tentacles, the leeches of the title, and a hunky game warden (Ken Clark), who displays a disconcerting ignorance of alligators, the game he is hired to protect. The results are uneven at best but the swamp locations, filmed at Pasadena's Arboretum of Tarzan fame, are certainly picturesque and the cave sequence, photographed, according to co-star Yvette Vickers, at the old Charlie Chaplin Studios, at least somewhat creepy. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
• The idea of a giant, fire-breathing flying turtle might sound silly - and even fans of the Japanese monster-movie genre tend to consider it so - but viewers might be surprised by how serious and occasionally intense the original version of the first entry in the Gamera series is. Gammera The Invincible, as it was known to American viewers, was watered down with new scenes featuring English-speaking actors and laughable dubbing for the Japanese parts. As such, it's a bit of a misfire. However, the original, unedited Japanese version plays like a fairly effective riff on the first Godzilla film, using moody black-and-white photography and presenting a scenario in which the world is terrorized by the mysterious giant monster of the title. The script is mostly standard stuff for the genre but spices things up a bit by having scientists be the heroes instead of villains or kooks. The actors mostly blend into the background but Eiji Funakoshi does solid work as the film's scientist hero and Yoshiro Uchida stands out for playing one of the most annoying and insane kiddie characters in monster movie history. However, the real attraction is the monster-suit carnage and director Noriaki Yuasa handles it well, delivering the many setpieces with enthusiasm and using the black-and-white photography to bring a spooky edge to the scenes of distruction. Some the effects really show their age (particularly the scenes with model planes on strings) but the majority of the effects showcases play nicely, boasting a gee-whiz sense of comic book excitement that will appeal to the viewer's inner kid. All in all, Gammera The Invincible is a solidly-crafted, engaging monster mash - just make sure you see the original Japanese version. ~ Donald Guarisco, Rovi
• Attack Of The Monsters is one of the lesser Gamera entries. It's obvious the filmmakers had a smaller budget with this entry because it recycles scenes from other films in this series and features some atypically shoddy rear-projection effects. The kid-friendly focus of the film is taken a bit too far, making the film sickly-sweet at times, and it doesn't help that young star Christopher Murphy is a terrible actor. That said, completists may still want to check Attack Of The Monsters (known in Japan as Gamera Vs. Guiron) for a few reasons. The first is villain Guiron, who has a unique design - his head and nose are shaped like a giant knife blade. Guiron is probably also the most violent of Gamera foes: a startling scene has him using his razor-sharp noggin to chop up a rival monster he has just killed! The film's plot also has some surprising fairytale-like elements, with the two humanoid aliens that drive the plot kind of acting like the witch from "Hansel And Gretel" towards our kid heroes (right down to wanting to use them as a food source). Ultimately, the mix of saccharine kid-movie elements and often surrealistic monster movie shocks will not be to everyone's taste but monster movies might find Attack Of The Monsters to be an amusingly campy entry in the Gamera series. ~ Donald Guarisco, Rovi
• Bela Lugosi fans and Ritz Brothers fans -- two groups that do not necessarily intersect -- are likely to be the only ones who really get much out of The Gorilla, a not very successful remake of the "old dark house" chestnut refitted to suit the "comic talents" of the sibling team. Lugosi is indeed a treat, playing a supporting role that gives him ample opportunity to both spoof and play straight his sinister persona. Indeed, the actor seems to be having a fine time playing this undemanding part and gives it much more than it deserves. The Ritz Brothers are decidedly a more acquired taste, perhaps best appreciated by those who find the antics of The Three Stooges to be of too high an order of wit. Most modern audiences simply stare in puzzlement at the Ritzes, but it also must be said that for some there is a strange appeal to them -- almost as if the failure of so many of their efforts at comedy produces a meta-comic result. If you fall in the latter camp, Gorilla is definitely your cup of tea. There's also a solid performance from Lionel Atwill and some shameless scenery chewing from Patsy Kelly, which still can't distract from the baldness of some of the plot machinations or from the fact that many of the comic moments are shoehorned in with little rhyme or reason. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
• Considering the strange and terrible fate of the lead actress -- Susan Cabot apparently lived her own nightmare and was eventually killed by her increasingly browbeaten son -- The Wasp Woman takes on an added poignancy that obviously wasn't intended by the film's cheapskate producer-director, Roger Corman. Here is yet another creature flick hampered by a ludicrous monster costume -- nothing more than a Halloween mask, really -- not quite as bad as it could have been but not very good either. Cabot herself does well enough as the youth-obsessed heroine/villainess and the film does attempt to address both the increasing paranoia regarding aging and science run amok. But the cheesy special effects (if you can call a rubber mask and a couple of claws "special effects") and lack of any kind of budget betray the good intentions. Typical of Corman, the supporting roles are well cast (including the stunning Lynn Cartwright as a Brooklyn-accented secretary) and an attempt to turn modern office life into a sort of Grand Guignol melodrama works at least part of the way. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
• Despite the title and the presence of horror-meister Vincent Price, The Bat is actually a murder mystery rather than a horror film. While it's all done in a by-the-numbers manner, there's more than enough here to entertain whodunit fans. Those looking for deep meaning or surprising characterization will need to look elsewhere; the plot takes center stage in The Bat, and surprises are relegated to its many twists and turns. Fortunately, the screenplay is very well structured, if a trifle confusing, and while it's "scare quotient" may be fairly low, it does keep the viewer interested. Crane Wilbur's direction is fairly static, although he does make effective visual use of the deep dark shadows that are part and parcel of these "old dark house" stories. He also gives his cast free rein, allowing Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead to take the performing ball and run away with it. They're frequently over-the-top and occasionally campy, but so committed to what they're doing that they create a palpable sense of fun. The supporting cast is not as impressive, ranging from adequate to poor. Despite the efforts of the stars, the film lags in many places; the mechanical nature of the script and Wilbur's insufficiently imaginative direction drag it down. Still, The Bat is a diverting way to spend a stormy evening at home. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi