Today's review is just in time for the spookiest time of the year! I'm willing to bet most of you are familiar with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: or at least I hope you are. For the uninitiated, Elvira is the alter ego (of sorts) of the actress Cassandra Peterson, who got her showbiz start back in the 1980s by hosting late-night horror movies on a small, independent TV station in L.A. Clad in a soaring beehive wig and a vampy dress that leaves little to the imagination, she deftly skewers oodles of B-grade horror and sci-fi movies (and C-grade, and D-grade...), making corny jokes and gags. Think MST3K, but with your goth-y best friend enamored of bad vaudeville jokes.
Curious? There's more after the cut.
Now, Movie Macabre's heyday was back in the horror-obsessed 1980s, but featured lots of films from prior decades. We're talking dozens of B-grade horror and sci-fi (most the former, though) here, although some of them are cult classics; many of the Edgar Allen Poe movies starring Vincent Price were featured in the first few seasons! Elvira would make jokes during the show and perform skits during the intermissions. Although she gained tons of notoriety, and the show became very popular, it ended in the late 1980s. Then about six years ago, Movie Macabre was rebooted and ran on syndicated TV, but with all public-domain films, some of which she had previously featured on the first run of Movie Macabre. The box set we're looking at today is from this second run of Movie Macabre; to the best of my knowledge, most if not all of the first run never made it to home video.
The second run of Movie Macabre ran on syndicated television from 2010 to 2011, with twenty aired episodes and six unaired episodes. All were released by E1 Entertainment in a mixture of single-feature, double-feature, and quadruple-feature DVDs. I should note that these movies were edited for length and content in order to be shown on television, and the home release contains the edited version. If you're interested in the movies for their own sake, you'll have to track them down elsewhere. (Some of the movies shown were also aired on MST3K. It's oddly fun to watch the Movie Mac version and the MST3K version and see the different time edits made.)
The movies included in this set are:
Night of the Living Dead, I Eat Your Skin, Satanic Rites of Dracula, Werewolf of Washington, The Terror, Eegah!, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Manster, Scared to Death, Tormented, Lady Frankenstein, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Beast from Haunted Cave, Untamed Women, The Wild Women of Wongo, Hercules and the Captive Women, The Wasp Woman, The Giant Gila Monster, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Teenagers from Outer Space, Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, A Bucket of Blood, The Killer Shrews, Manos: The Hands of Fate and Don't Look in the Basement.
I want to emphasize that this release is a repackaging of the earlier double-feature releases. They are pretty much the same discs, nothing added, so if you already purchased those, there's really no reason for you to buy this. What this does provide, however, is all 26 episodes of the new Movie Macabre in one package, for a much cheaper price than if you bought the 13 double-feature releases. Even if you pay closer to MSRP (MSRP is $100, but this set is usually offered for $50-70 on average), you are still saving money. I managed to pick this up on Amazon during an Amazon Warehouse special deal; I paid a little over $36 for the set, with free shipping.
The special features are minimal: there are four short featurettes, plus a collection of promos for some of the other Movie Macabre episodes. Since this is a repackaging of the earlier single releases, the special features are the same on each disc. It would have been more appealing, in my opinion, if the earlier single releases had had different features for each movie...but I suspect that the relaunched Movie Macabre might not have had the biggest budget available...
The coffin case is pretty small, maybe less than an inch taller than a standard DVD case. But it still doesn't fit nicely on a standard media shelf. I will probably end up hopping onto eBay to pick up one of those multi-disc DVD cases, so I can have a way to actually fit this onto my shelves. As you can see from the pictures, the coffin case is a very simple tin. Once you pry the lid off, you can get at the discs, which are stacked on top of each other and wedged into a foam holder. Definitely not a fan of this, considering how easy it is to scratch these. This was probably the cheapest way they could figure to package and release these, while adding in a gimmick (the tin coffin) of sorts to entice fans who hadn't pulled the trigger on the singles.
For those curious about Movie Macabre but not willing to fork out the $$ for this set, you do have some more budget-friendly options! There are two smaller collections of some (but not all) of the Movie Macabre collections. There is a 4-movie "Bloody Madness" set available for anywhere from $10-15, and a 12-movie "Mega Movie Marathon" set available for a price range of $20-35. Both are great ways to dip your feet into the franchise without costing too much. If you want to get an idea of what Movie Macabre is like, their Youtube channel has lots of promos and other videos so you can get a sense of Elvira's humor.
In all, this is a great way to collect all of the recent Movie Macabre series at once, in a way that's easy on your wallet, but has some presentation and storage drawbacks (that are, technically, due to the cheaper price).
Miss Scarlett suggests: Elvira fans should definitely scoop up this complete set of her most recent works; fans of bad movie riffing are also encouraged to give this a try!
