Program Your Own Fucking All-Night-Movies with Mill Creek's cheapo 50 movie packs

(Title done in homage to noted punk-rock tour-guide site, Book Your Own Fuckin' Life.)

I should probably hold off on this so I could do a better job on it later, but I'm lazy and not really inspired today but still wanna get my weekly post in, so what the hell. This'll be a sloppy, composed-in-the-blog window mess, but hopefully entertaining and/or informative.

I might've already told ya this, but I am a trash fiend. I was raised on crappy VHS bootlegs and cruddy all-night late movie broadcasts, so while I like and admire video quality, I don't demand it. If I can't find a pristine, beautiful, uncut version of a movie, I'll watch a lousy, blurry, 4th-generation transfer of a splicey, hairy print that looks like it was dragged behind a truck. Depending on the film, they sometimes play better that way; scratches can add atmosphere if what you're watching is some sleazy grindhouse thing. I think you'd lose a lot of that "forbidden fruit" feeling watching Mark of the Devil on BluRay (that's a train I'm still not on, by the way -- I'm holding out hope that the format fails before I have to give up and buy into it).

Well, "the late movie" has become a museum-piece concept. Most stations and networks find it cheaper to just run all-night newsfeeds, Law & Order or Family Guy re-runs, or sell the timeslot to endless informercials for real-estate scams, household appliances, or gutless Girls Gotten Drunk softporn monkeyspank. If you find a movie at all, it's going to be some big-budget mainstream crap no more than 10 years old, not Don't Look In The Basement or Toxic Zombies or Carnival of Souls. They think we'd rather see Joe Dirt or Scary Movie again. If you want skangy old obscure movies -- y'know, something interesting -- you'll have to seek it out yourself.

Mill Creek's here to help ya with that. You can now become your own DIY late-movie programmer without shelling out a whole bunch of bucks. My favorites are the 50 movie packs, but if it's too much trouble to mix-'n'-match those, they also have 100 movie packs and even (holy shit dood!) 250 MOVIE PACKS. Rather excessive, eh wot? O' course not. Prices on these things vary - Deep Discount has better prices on the 100 packs (at the moment) but Amazon has them beat on the 50 packs right now. In any case, it breaks down to less than a quarter a movie. For a hundred bucks or so, you could conceivably run your own TV station for years. And since these things are public domain, you could probably even get away with it. Quality on these is variable, from surprisingly decent to horrifically they-oughtta-be-ashamed-of-themselves skangy, but usually you get your money's worth one way or another. If you're not super-uptight and demanding, you should have fun with 'em.

So, here's a rundown of the 50-movie box sets available and some of the highlights. This won't be super-detailed regarding quality checks and such, but it'll give you an idea of what to look for. Mill Creek's website is also phenomenal, listing movies, descriptions, and even including clips. Also, you'll need to shop around a bit, because the lineups of these 50 packs do vary from set to set. Depending on when you bought it, you might get something they had to later replace with something else due to copyright issues. Mill Creek's sometimes vaguely piratey! But that's their problem, not yours

Box Office Gold - ha ha, yeah, right. I think they're referring to the fact that the stars of these films went on to make better, more noteworthy movies, because the ones included here made no impact at the box office, and in fact a few are made for TV. There's some good (and weird) stuff on here awaiting your discovery, such as Against All Hope, which plays like a film version of one of those Jack Chick religious tract comics. I have almost peed myself watching this well-intentioned-but-horribly-misguided drek, and I bet Michael Madsen (in his first movie) wishes he could round up all the copies and bury them. Madsen plays an alcoholic who replaces booze with God, 'cuz whatever else happens he's gotta be an addict! Angels Hard As They Come and C.C. And Company are pretty good biker flicks (the second stars Joe Namath!), The Cop In Blue Jeans is a great Italian crime flick with Tomas Milian, Driver's Seat is a bizarre psycho-study and the weirdest movie Elizabeth Taylor ever made (she must've been on something to degrade herself that way), Eliza's Horoscope is an utterly-weird hippie freakout with a young Tommy Lee Jones (I reviewed that here once if you want to track it down for more details), Mean Johnny Barrows is badass Fred Williamson blaxploitation, and Twisted Nerve is a great psycho flick that's not on DVD anywhere else. There are plenty more strange, obscure things there, too many to go into in detail.

Chilling Classics - this is probably my favorite of the 50 packs, all horror flicks, many of which are great. You've heard me gush about Messiah of Evil before, and it's here, as well as some of my other favorites like Silent Night Bloody Night, Bell From Hell, Horror Express, Blancheville Monster, the Jodorowsy-related Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon, and several really hard-to-find-anywhere-else things like Witch's Mountain, Naked Massacre (a disturbing obscurity based on the Richard Speck killings), Driller Killer, Haunts, Funeral Home, Legend of Bigfoot, Land of the Minotaur, Demons of Ludlow, Murder Mansion, Panic, Revenge of Dr. X, and absolutely-classic trash like I Eat Your Skin, Cathy's Curse (funniest Exorcist rip-off ever!), I Bury The Living, Horrors of Spider Island, Track of the Moon Beast, Scream Bloody Murder (the first film to be called "gorenography") and Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory! And more! Contents vary widely on editions of these, but they're all great and a good place to start if you want to give these a try.

Combat Classics - 50 war movies, some old black and white stuff and others obscure foreign flicks and such. Includes things like The Black Brigade (a made-for-TV blacksploitation film with Richard Pryor), Commandos (Lee Van Cleef, motherfucker!), Desert Commandos, Hitler's SS (this is actually a miniseries, so since it was a two-night event it's like getting a bonus movie), Gung Ho! (a hilariously-jingoistic but not-actually-all-that-bad anti-Japanese WWII propaganda-drama; watch for the scene where a guy says he'd be good for the team because "I just don't like Japs."), Yellowneck (a Civil-War desserts lost in the swamp movie I love... color prints of this also exist, but I've always seen it in black and white), Sundown (Gene Tierney is insanely beautiful; seeing her in this movie got me a bit obsessed with her), and Go For Broke! (a good tale of a Japanese-American battalion, probably to make up for some of the stuff that was said in Gung Ho!). If you like war movies, this is worth yer bucks.

Comedy Kings - I don't have this one 'cuz I'm not huge on comedy, but there look to be some good things here if you're into that.

The Western collections - There are a bunch of these, and most of them consist of old B-westerns, with the occasional color flick or Spaghetti Western mixed in. I love 'em, but B-westerns are an acquired taste (one that I didn't always have - I used to hate 'em!), so you may want to dip your toe in before loading up on these. The sets include Cowboy Legends, Frontier Justice, Gunslinger Classics (less B-westerns on this one), Western Classics, Western Legends, and The Way West.


Crime Classics - lotta old B-mysteries, with a few oddities thrown in. You get the *great* The Red House (I fucking love this movie, "farm noir" with amazing atmosphere and a creepily-unhinged Edward G. Robinson), The Poppy Is Also A Flower (a very weird semi-documentary on the heroin trade), Prison Train (kinda like a dry run at Narrow Margin), and The Hoodlum (scary-ass Lawrence Tierney being scary-assed!)



Drive-In Movie Classics - along with the Chilling Classics box, this is one of my faves. There's so much good, fell-through-the-cracks stuff here that it's just beautiful. Black Hooker! Jive Turkey! The Guy From Harlem! (you have to see this, you'll never believe how awful it is, seriously. I could tell you but you'd think I was exaggerating). Don't Look In The Basement (one of my favorite movies ever). Horror of the Zombies (a Blind Dead movie!), Rattlers!, Slave of the Cannibal God, Invasion of the Bee Girls, Unsane (yeah, Dario Argento! It's a cut version of Tenebrae, but for a while it was the standard VHS release), and white-trash country sleazefests like Country Blue. Monster trucks in Twister's Revenge! Kung fu in Breakout From Oppression! And the nightmarish travesty that is Voodoo Black Exorcist!

Family Classics - pretty mild stuff, but those used to come on at 3 a.m. sometimes, too. Has some classics like Buster Keaton's brilliant The General, and W. C. Fields' Fatal Glass of Beer.

Horror Classics - This'll be a cornerstone purchase if you don't already have films like Nosferatu, Carnival of Souls, Dementia 13, Night of the Living Dead, Phantom of the Opera, Last Man on Earth, Killer Shrews, Nightmare Castle, Screaming Skull, Vampire Bat, White Zombie, The Terror, Tormented, Attack of the Giant Leeches, etc. in your library already. Almost everything here is essential, and their copy of Atom Age Vampire is one of the only full-length copies you'll find anywhere. A desert-island set.

Legends of Horror - okay, I have to quibble with 'em on this: these are some good films, but many of them aren't really "horror." There are a whole lot of early Hitchcock films here. Suspense, yeah, horror, no. There are also a lot of repeats from other 50-movie sets to pad it out, so Mill Creek was just trying to get a "new" product out there when they didn't have enough material to compose one. There are some good things here, like old Todd Slaughter flicks and such, but if you've already got some of the other horror 50's, tread carefully here.

Martial Arts - oh hell yeah buddy, kung fu movies! Most of them are the real-deal Chinese things, and there are a few blacksploitation titles and things snuck in. And a few really weird things, such as The Impossible Kid, which you have to see to believe; it's a James Bond rip-off starring an extremely small Fillipino midget named Weng Weng. Absolutely crazy shit, this. Then there's the weird bestiality classic, Tiger Love, and a couple of Sonny Chiba's ultimate-badass Streetfighter films.



Classic Musicals - not my thing, but if you're into that, check 'em out.

Mystery Classics - lots of old programmers, but those were late-night staples, too. Bulldog Drummond and Dick Tracy and Sherlock Holmes movies, along with some good noirs like He Walked By Night, Quicksand, Suddenly, and Detour.

Night Screams - lotsa goodies here, from obscurities like Anatomy of a Psycho, Night Tide, Frankenstein 80, The Embalmer, Bloody Pit of Horror, Dungeon of Harrow (how to turn fifteen dollars worth of cardboard sets into unrelenting creepiness!) and The Vampire's Night Orgy to old B-mysteries and strange things like Son of Ingagi (an all-black-cast monster flick!)

Nightmare Worlds - nice mix of low-budget sci-fi and horror flicks, some pretty hard to find elsewhere. Alien Contamination (an Italian take on Alien which got preoccupied with the chest-burster scene and decided that was plenty -- just re-create that over and over and you've got a movie!), All The Kind Strangers (made-for-TV horror in which a bunch of orphans try to force passersby to be their parents, and if they refuse... ), Attack from Space & Evil Brain From Outer Space (hilarious Japanese "Starman" trash! If you've never seen a Starman movie, I can't even describe what you're missing), Beast of the Yellow Night (Phillipines-made horror with a cannibalistic were-monster), Embryo (Rock Hudson tries to grow himself a girlfriend), The Manster (two-headed monster classic!), The Severed Arm (a fave of mine), some Paul Naschy werewolf stuff, and more great stuff.

Sci-Fi Classics - another essential one, although several of the titles aren't actually sci-fi but Italian musclemen flix and such. There are Gamera films on this, First Spaceship on Venus, and even the Wild Women of Wongo!

Suspense Classics - ah, man, there are some beauties here. Ya got The Death Collector, which is like a poor man's version of Mean Streets, complete with Joe Pesci in one of his earliest mobster roles. Dominique is Dead (odd horror), Born To Win (great portrait-of-a-junkie-loser flick), Cat O' Nine Tails (early Argento), Escape From Sobibor (great Holocaust flick), Five Minutes to Live (Johnny Cash playing a psycho!), Julie Darling (a teenage girl has a thing for her daddy and is willing to kill to keep him to herself), Master Touch (Italian crime drama with Kirk Douglas), Mitchell (Joe Don Baker crappy-cop movie that MST3K got one of its best episodes out of), The Manipulator (aka B.J. Lang Presents - a movie so insane that I can't even describe it. You won't believe Mickey Rooney agreed to this!), Paper Man (weird 'n' creepy TV movie in which some college kids decide to create a false identity as a credit card scam... but then the guy they made up takes on a life of his own), and The Seducers (god, I love this one... Sondra Locke and Coleen Camp terrorize a guy in his apartment. Absolute craziness, with maybe the stupidest ending of any movie ever). All-around great stuff.

Warriors - all Italian muscleman peplum, Hercules 'n' shit like that. Most of the prints look pretty bad, but it's still an amazing collection for peplum fans, especially since there's not a lot of that stuff on DVD.

The Pendulum Pictures packs -- so far there are 4 of these collections of homemade, shot-on-video cheapshit horror flicks, titled Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares, Catacomb of Creepshows, Tomb of Terrors, and Mortuary of Madness. Most of these movies are made by idiots who have no idea how to tell a story, are obsessed with gore but don't care about doing the effects so they just splash fake blood around, and try to make up for it by having a lot of girls you don't wanna see get naked... get naked. A lot of 'em seem to just want to impress you with how sleazy they can be, and have no talent beyond a willingness to debase themselves and their friends. The titles scattershot and mostly good for the curious. There are a few movies on each that might entertain you a bit, but many of 'em are tedious or even might want to make you kick the shit out of the filmmakers (such as Bill Zeebub, who I used to like when I was reading his Grimoire of Exalted Deeds metal 'zine, but who I now think is a racist, talentless scumbag). If you're patient and curious about the kind of films private citizens can make in their backyards with a video camera for little or no money, then you may want to check a couple of these out. Just don't expect any Blair Witch Projects or Paranormal Activities among these amateurish things.

Anyway, that's what Mill Creek's got on the market right now. There are also 20 Movie packs that show up in Wal-Mart's $5 a lot, and those are worth getting, especially the Spaghetti Westerns collection (fucking essential!).