George Clooney would rather forget the killer tomatoes. Kim Cattrall doesn’t mention her tussle with a DNA spliced man/shark monster on her CV. And someone must have made Goodfella Paul Sorvino an offer he couldn’t refuse to get him to fight frozen yoghurt on screen. Horror B-movies have long been the place where jobbing actors turn a fast buck, a shady grey zone where budding actresses strip and future leading men battle rampaging fruit (or vegetables).
Lining up a dozen titles, this cobbled together boxset has no love for such movies or their fans. It’s mostly just a barrelscraping exercise, milking the last drops of cash from crappy titles well past their sell-by dates. Now that’s exploitation cinema at its most mercenary. You pays your money, you get ripped off.
There are only two genuine classics here. First up is Night Of The Living Dead (5 stars, 1968) a movie that needs no introduction as the granddaddy of the zombie flick. It’s colourised but adjust your set to monochrome and you’ve got a bona-fide masterpiece. ’Nuff said.
Next up is Larry Cohen’s underrated The Stuff (4 stars), a gloopy ’80s satire about a sinister new junk food that looks suspiciously like Haagen-Daaz. “Are you eating it... or is it eating you?” asks the movie, earning itself a place in the subversive subtext hall of fame.
Elsewhere, it’s simply Attack of the Crappy B-Movies. Eighties beefcake Roddy Piper enjoys himself immensely in cult apocalyptic wasteland outing Hell Comes To Frogtown (3 stars), sporting an electronic chastity belt and battling mutant frog people. Before he was famous Clooney headlines the much duller B-parody Return Of The Killer Tomatoes (2 stars) and only survives the first 13 minutes of atrocious horror-com Return To Horror High (1 star).
Meanwhile, male viewers of a certain age will raise a chuckle at the inclusion of Elvira: Mistress Of The Dark (2 stars), starring the buxom, B-movie loving TV horror hostess. It’s crap but we’re thankful for the mammaries... sorry, memories.
The other half of this boxset lets you pick your creature feature poison from a selection of crud by bottom-feeding production company Nu Image. Killer molluscs slime a poorly paid naked actress alive in Slugs (1 star); blurry killer CG rodents crawl out of the sewers in Rats (1 star); and an even dodgier killer CG arachnid crawls off a space shuttle in Spiders (1 star).
Things pick up marginally when a phallus-headed sharkman stalks Kim Cattrall in TV movie Creature (2 stars), based on a novel by Peter “Jaws” Bentley. Then we’re back to the grindstone with embarrassingly bad SFX in Crocodile (1 star) and Octopus (1 star). These aren’t B-movies, they’re VHS/DVD filler. But then naming your boxset “The Straight-To-Video Clag Collection” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it...? Extras unavailable at press time.
Verdict:
This milks the last drops of cash from titles past their sell by dates
