As a Netflix subscriber, I probably
shouldn’t poop on the conveniences of the Internet age. As a retro geek,
nostalgia nut, and middle-aged guy, I still can’t help but pine for those days
when I’d walk out the door with friends and walk to our local seedy video shop
to rent some crappy movie in the pre-Blockbuster © eighties. On the back wall
of those holes cramped with shelves stacked with bulky VHS boxes (the tapes
were always safe from shop lifters behind the counter) was the real junk:
the B-horror and science fiction flicks with the most garish covers in sight
(the most garish of all belonged to the porno tapes kept behind a curtain in
their own closet-sized section).
One of the tapes that could be found on the back wall circa 1986 was Horrible Horror, a compilation of
B-horror and sci-fi clips and trailers hosted by the original B-horror king and
all-around cool ghoul Zacherley. It was the kind of tape you might run
during one of those parties when your parents are out of town and forgot to
lock the liquor cabinet. The video and sound quality were poor and Zach’s jokes
were cornier than the bags of stale popcorn you’d munch in between swigs of
horse-piss flavored MGD. Pure heaven.
In an age of home-delivered Blu-rays of incomparable quality
and hand-held video devices seemingly invented to make us as alienated as
possible, Legend Films’ reissue of Horrible
Horror is a bit anachronistic. It looks and sounds as crappy as an old VHS
and it certainly isn’t much fun to watch by yourself on an iPhone (is
anything?). That’s what makes it such a welcome reissue. There’s something
inspirational about this DVD. If I didn’t already throw a Halloween
party every year, Horrible Horror might make me want to start throwing them. Its swollen 164–minute length (about an hour longer than the 1986 edition!) makes it the
perfect disc to toss on in the TV room for guests who’d like to slip off for a
toke while everyone else is drinking and grooving to my patented Halloween
playlist in the main room.
As for solo viewing, there are some pluses to the Horrible Horror Special Edition as long
as the fast-forward button on your remote control is in tip-top shape. For the
most part, the trailers and clips aren’t too revelatory. There just aren’t
enough interruptions from Zacherley, though a great bit in which he dangles a hubcap
from a fishing rod during Plan 9 from
Outer Space almost makes up for his absence elsewhere. However, there are a
lot of neat-o extras sprinkled in among the expected public domain film clips.
Outtakes from Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein run throughout the disc. A tribute to Bela Lugosi section has
an uproarious staged interview and a supoib sketch in which he appears as Dracula with
a sexy live action Betty Boop (Quoth Lugosi: “You have booped your last boop!).
There’s also a full extra disc of bonus stuff, but the only valuable
items are a fabulous Gumby spoof of The Blob
and a really short clip of Zachereley’s appearance on a 1965 episode of “What’s My Line?” Otherwise
there are three minutes of behind-the-scenes footage of Zacherley from 1986
marred by a bizarre AIDS joke that gets a huge laugh from Zacherley and the
crew for some reason and some Zach-less public domain material: an episode of the
mystery series “Lights Out” and the awful feature film Frankenstein’s Daughter, which only goes to show how often a
thirty-second trailer is all you really need.
