Completed Collection: Savage Sickos

With the advent of cheap home video cameras, filmmaking became cheaper and easier than ever before. With the arrival even digital home video cameras, filmmaking became even cheaper and easier than ever before.... one didn't even need real editing equipment to assemble a movie!

Starting in the late 1990s and continuing through the 2000s, horror and thriller fans were "treated" to a tsunami of cheap and badly made movies as everyone with some spare time and a few friends tried their hands at filmmaking.

The six-movie set "Savage Sickos" offers a sampling of such amateur films, a sampling that ranges from so-so to absolutely awful. It's a set for aspiring filmmakers to check out so they can see what NOT to do when making their movies. (Half of the films in the set are from Ryan Cavalline, a writer/director who made an earnest go at making real movies... between the years of 2002 and 2008, he wrote, produced and/or directed eight horror films.)


Savage Sickos Collection: 3/10 Overall Rating

Dead Body Man (3/10)

Demon Slaughter (3/10)

Disk Jockey (4/10)

Skyggen (1/10)

Slaughtered (0/10)

When Heaven Comes Down (3/10)

(Click on the titles to read reviews on the various Cinema Steve blogs.)

Completed Collection: Drop Dead Gore-geous

This is another one of those budget-priced packages that gives you exactly what you pay for: You pay a cut-rate, you get four cut-rate movies.

The main attraction in this set, as well as the best film in the bunch, is "Kiss Daddy Goodnight." It's Uma Thurman's first film role... and while it may be the best out of the four, it's still pretty damn awful. There's nothing to recommend this collection, since every film in it is also available in much larger sets where you'll actually get a good movie or three along with the crap.

Drop Dead Gore-geous: 3/10 Overall Rating

Birds of Prey (1/10)
Kiss Daddy Goodnight (3/10)
Little Corey Gorey (4/10)
Slash Dance (2/10)

(Click on the titles to read reviews on the various Cinema Steve blogs.)

Completed Collection: Psychotic Connections

This set features three horror movies on a single disk. The films are united by a shared theme of psycho killers and psychic phenomenon (or, at least, the appearance of psychic phenomenon). The quality varies widely with "Gothic" being the only picture here that is truly worthwhile (and even it might not be to the liking of many dedicated horror fans).

Click on the titles of the included movies to read reviews of each.

Psychotic Connections: 4/10 Overall Rating
Chiller (1985) 3/10
Gothic (1986) (7/10)
Maniac (1934) 3/10





When I got my copy of this set several years ago, I paid $3.95. That price is far closer to the right one than the present going rate. "Gothic" is the only worthwhile film here--aside from the curiosity value that "Maniac" has for those with an interest in the horror genre--and it's available in other, far more worthwhile collections.

Completed Collection: Icons of Adventure

This four movie set presents two pirate movies and two "Yellow Peril"-type thrillers made by good old Hammer Films in the 1960s and distributed in the United States by Columbia Pictures. Each is a lot fun, with "The Stranglers of Bombay" and "The Devil-ship Pirates" being down-right excellent. Even the bonus features (previews, a funky animated short, and the first chapter of the "Adventures of Captain Kidd" matinee serial are worth checking out.)

Christopher Lee fans will be particularly interested in this set, as he stars in three out of the four movies.

Click on the titles to read full reviews at the Cinema Steve blogs, and click on the Amazon.com link at the bottom of this post for more information on the set in general.

Icons of Adventure: 7/10 Stars Overall Rating
The Devil-ship Pirates: 7/10
Pirates of Blood River: 7/10
The Stranglers of Bombay: 7/10
The Terror of the Tongs: 6/10

The Completed Collections

I tend to pick through the many DVD multi-packs I own the way others go through boxes of fancy chocolates: I watch a movie here, watch a movie there... but the end result is that sometimes it takes me forever to finish a given set. Sometimes I never do, because one or more discs go missing in the pit that is my office.

This new series of posts will be a catalog of the DVD multi-packs I've actually managed to watch every movie in. It may not be much of an achievement, but I take my ego-boosts where I can find them! (Plus, it may save someone from buying a dog of a collection.)

Eventually, this post will be an index the posts indexes the reviews in the completed set. Each link here will provide a rating for the set generated by averaging the films in it.

The Completed Collections Index
Drop Dead Gore-geous (Horror Films and Thrillers from the 1980s): 3/10 Stars

Icons of Adventure (Adventure Period Films from Hammer in the 1960s): 7/10 Stars

Psychotic Connections (Horror Films from the 1980s and 1930s): 4/10 Stars

Savage Sickos (Horror Films and Thrillers from the 2000s): 3/10 Stars)