Horror Collector's Set (DVD, 2009)

Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

It was a few years ago that I first discovered these DVD collections and I couldn’t have been more excited. I probably grabbed as many of them as I saw in only a few days. I mean 4 horror movies, with actual stars you’ve heard of--some of them even had movies I’d heard of like the original PROM NIGHT--and for only $5? It was win-win. After all, surely they couldn’t ALL be terrible movies. And even if they were I’d have fun ripping them to shreds in my review.

Over time I would go on to collect nearly 60 of these sets--some with 4 movies, some with 6 or 8, a couple with 20 movies, and I currently have 4 sets with 50 movies each that I haven’t even looked twice at yet. But this particular set, containing Mortuary, Memory, Bloody Mary and Salvage (not listed in database, reviewed on Amazon) was probably one of the very first, if not THE first DVD set I picked up. I’ve already reviewed the movies individually, but I wanted to say a little something about the set as a whole.

Echo Bridge Entertainment was the distributor of this particular set and their slogan is “The entertainment alternative for what the world wants to see.” I gotta say…no it’s not. Most of the DVD sets I’ve got are Echo Bridge compilations and of the handful I’ve seen so far, I’m not finding much here that could be considered “what the world wants to see.”

I’m not even sure all of the movies are going to be “horror” movies. This set claims it’s a “horror four pack”, but the Billy Zane movie “Memory” was only barely a horror movie, more mystery/suspense than anything. Hell, maybe even a little science fiction thrown in. But it was only barely horror.

And I think it a very sad state when the lowest budget movie on the set, the movie that not only looks the cheapest in terms of production value but from a film quality standpoint as well (SALVAGE) is the best movie on the set, when the competition includes a movie directed by Tobe friggin’ Hooper, and another starring Billy Zane and Dennis Hopper. Those guys couldn’t make a better movie than SALVAGE? My laptop probably cost more than that movie. But it was still the best one on the entire set.

That’s good news for SALVAGE, but it’s not so hot for Tobe Hooper or Dennis Hopper’s movies.

I’m still grabbing these sets when I see them, but after so many it’s difficult to remember which ones I already have and which I don’t--I have 1 or 2 duplicates--even though my experience so far hasn’t been the best. Even with bad movies, I think $5 is a hell of a deal. In fact, I like it when the movies are bad. But this is where we get into a grey area, because there’s good bad and just bad bad. SALVAGE and BLOODY MARY, even though they’re bad movies, are good bad. But MEMORY and MORTUARY, movies that probably had aspirations of being good movies, made by people with decent track records (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT, and did I mention Dennis Damn Hopper?), are just plain terrible movies that show no spark of the creative energies behind them.

I appreciate what Echo Bridge is doing in flooding the market with cheap DVDs filled with movies that most of us, let’s face it, would never have heard of, let alone been given a chance to see at all. But you have to be careful when just grabbing any- and everything on the shelf, as this set proves.

It wasn’t money wasted, because BLOODY MARY and SALVAGE are good bad enough to be worth the mere $5, but if this had just been a 2-movie set with only MEMORY and MORTUARY, man I would have been REALLY disappointed. Based on the 1 and 2 stars I gave those movies, the only way this set even receives a decent rating is based on the strength of the 4 stars I gave SALVAGE. While it does average out to only 2.25 stars, I’m going to round this up to 3 because I really did get a lot of movie for only $5, and that works in the set’s favor and gives it another .75 stars.


Recommend this product? Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older