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These six titles are enough to make horror fans feel like they're sixteen again.
I remember the drill every Friday or Saturday night - after 9:00 or so on USA or TBS or any of those basic-cable stations, you could catch an endless marathon of slasher movies on weekend evenings. Chopping Mall, Slumber Party Massacre II, and Troll? Done. A Sleepaway Camp 1-3 festival? Wonderful. Sure, they were edited for content and therefore not quite as grisly (and fun) as they could be, but they sure made for a hell of a time, eating all the microwave popcorn out of mom's cupboard and getting stomach aches from drinking too much Coke.
Sleepaway Camp, the leaps-and-bounds champion of this batch of six Anchor Bay titles, still stands as one of the better dumb-idiots-get-mauled-in-the-woods Friday the 13th rip-offs that ever came around. As our reticent camper with a secret (pssst - don't call her Glen or Glenda) mopes around, figuring out a way to go all the way with her dreamy boyfriend without him learning her taboo truth, we get a ton of horny camp leaders trying to get busty debutante female counselors in the sack, a bunch of good ass-crack jokes, and a bawdy overall sense of good times while a handful of unlucky souls get offed. I recommend putting this one on later in the evening - it's good enough to rescue you from some of the other titles here.
Transylvania 6-5000 isn't so much a slasher movie as it is a goofy satire of Hammer horror films, and while it worked for me when I was a kid - it was on HBO every five minutes for a while, and I caught it every time - watching it again today was an unabashedly dubious task. Jeff Goldbum's Beetejuice -era shtick is enjoyable enough, but the ridiculous special effects and the film's overly exaggerated and overcooked sensibilities make it a hard one to sit through. Pass on this one.
Return to Horror High, though, will definitely inspire with its buckets of gore and welcome, gratuitous nudity (because who wants to sit through a movie like this without a topless scene?) and impressive body count, even if its movie-within-a-movie cheekiness often wears thin. Most valuable asset: George Clooney - oh yes, that George Clooney - getting disemboweled about twenty minutes in. Good times.
Vamp, the Grace Jones vehicle with pretentious interpretive dance aims and obtuse, allegorical slasher film intentions, is far and away the film to nap through here. The idea of a vampire in an urban setting is a fun one (who doesn't like Vampire in Brooklyn with Eddie Murphy? Oh, yeah, everybody) but while Jones makes a deliciously freaky stripper/performer, everything else in this picture is either too oblique to appreciate or too outright dumb to believe.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is more fun. With knockers as grandiose as the night sky and more eye makeup than Tammy Faye, this self-proclaimed queen of late-night drive-in monster movies approaches her eponymous film with equal parts levity and determination, and the results - while varied - end up giving Mistress of the Dark a nice, dark sheen. Yeah, its plot line is ludicrous and one wishes that Elvira wouldn't buckle down and play by the structural rules as her happy ending comes around, but this one's definitely a good one for the time capsule.
Last, but not least, we have the infamously bad Return of the Killer Tomatoes, one of the stupider and, therefore, more shamelessly enjoyable pseudo-horror flicks of the eighties. A sequel to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (surprise), this one amps up the in-joke humor and reflexive ìis it a movie or isn't it?î reality of its scenario, but nevertheless knows its audience. Its biggest send-up is a fake movie about big-busted women going to the beach and taking their tops off - there's even a song about it.
The Video: How Does The Disc Look?
Sleepaway Camp has the same 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer from its box-set DVD release a few years ago. From Peter M. Bracke's review of that set:
ìBlacks are nice and deep on each, with solid contrast and surprisingly good shadow delineation. Colors are well saturated and clean. Compression artifacts and edginess are not apparent, and these transfers are a cut above and once again testament to Anchor Bay's commitment to quality on even the most negligible of flicks!î
Transylvania 6-5000 also looks pretty good - while the color contrast and fine detail quality aren't quite as solid as other titles here, things aren't too bad. Return to Horror High also has a surprisingly clean transfer print and some nicely textured black levels to it, even if there are similar inconsistencies in its content. Vamp is the most visually arresting movie here, but its transfer doesn't do its relatively avant-garde color scheme and visual motifs justice - black levels fluctuate wildly and color boundaries are way out of whack.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark actually has an impressive presentation - while black levels and fine detail quality aren't exactly top-of-the-line, there's a fluidity to the elements of her transfer that stand tall among the other entries in the set. And last, and, well, least : Return of the Killer Tomatoes gets a full-frame transfer and that sucks. Its transfer print is quite dirty, too. Boo!
The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is the only title here to get a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, and while it's nice that the film has a little more audible room to move in, surrounds and separation are hardly exploited for any greater good. Some of the film's musical cues have an added heft and boom to them, but mostly this is moderate polish on a passable-at-best sound mix.
Everything else here gets the mono treatment, and that's fine. Dialogue quality fluctuates wildly, but that's the case with movies like these, and where some musical cues are nice and firm (Sleepaway Camp), others are rusty and overly tinny (Transylvania 6-5000).
Also included are English Closed Captions.
Supplements: What Goodies Are There?
There are a handful of screen-specific audio commentaries here - one with director Robert Hiltzik, actor Felissa Rose, and horror expert moderator Jeff Hayes on Sleepaway Camp; a track with writer/director Rudy DeLuca and visual consultant Steve Haberman on Transylvania 6-5000; and thoughts from writer/director Richard Wenk and actors Chris Makepeace, Dedee Pfeiffer, and Gedde Watanabe on Vamp - but none of them really add up to much. Vamp's track is most interesting; the banter among the actors and their director give the impression that while the film itself bears the brands of age in perhaps not the most noble way, it was a hell of a good time to shoot.
Transylvania 6-5000 also comes with some TV Spots, some storyboard art and a photo gallery; Vamp 's package has some TV Spots, rehearsal footage, a blooper reel, a Dracula Bites the Big Apple short film and some still galleries; and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark comes with a Cassandra Peterson bio.
We also get trailers for every film on each respective DVD.
Exclusive DVD-ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?
Not a thing.
Final Thoughts
Sleepaway Camp is the one film of these six Anchor Bay titles to really recommend - the Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit, featuring all three SC movies is well worth finding - but even if the other movies here don't stand up all that well, they'll make for a good evening of brainless, gory fun. None of the transfers or mixes here are noteworthy, though, and only Transylvania 6-5000 and Vamp have particularly notable extra features. But is this entire set plus a cool 6-pack packaging worth the price? You can't beat this for the campy horror summertime blues.
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