Search - The Beast Collection on DVD

A box of cheese

mrliteral | 12/14/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I like a good trashy movie, and when you want that sort of movie, you can't go wrong with one that features Bigfoot. The Beast Collection features seven such movies (when you include yetis in the mix) along with a few other cheapo monster flicks.



"Bigfoot Terror" has four wonderfully awful movies. The Capture of Bigfoot takes place in a snowy wilderness where a greedy, scene-chewing maniac plans on capturing the creature to make tons of money. Shriek of the Mutilated has four college students accompanying their professor to a remote island to hunt down a yeti. The twist can be seen a mile away by most viewers (hint: always be suspicious of "special" meat dishes that don't appear on the restaurant menu). Search for the Beast is more than low-budget; it's a practically zero-budget film with little in the way of plot, poor editing and a monster that's laughably fake. The Legend of Bigfoot is a "documentary" about a search for Bigfoot. The few minutes of "incontrovertible" Bigfoot footage is padded with a lot of semi-interesting nature footage.



"Sasquatch Horror" has three more movies in this genre. Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot, is kind of an early version of The Blair Witch Project, with the characters trying to find proof of the creature. Snow Beast is a made-for-TV movie with obviously the best budget of any of these films. Not only are there some familiar (albeit third-string) actors like Yvette Mimieux and Clint Walker, but also a screenplay by Joseph Stefano of Psycho fame. It makes little difference; it's still pretty awful, an obvious rip-off of Jaws that doesn't even give you a good look at the monster. Finally, The Snow Creature is a Poverty Row-style film from 1954 which is a little like King Kong (kind of like how Pauly Shore is a little like Laurence Olivier).



A third DVD has the sci-fi double feature of Zontar, Thing From Venus and The Eye Creatures. Both deal with alien invasions. Zontar is slightly better, in that it has a villainous alien that at least is slightly threatening. The Eye Creatures, on the other hand, are so dumb they walk off cliffs and are killed by bright light. This latter movie actually was given the ultimate "bad movie" honor: it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.



The final DVD is a reminder that it's not only Americans who make bad monster movies; the Japanese are expert at it too. The Giant Majin Collection has two movies: Majin, Monster of Terror and Return of Giant Majin. The two movies have almost identical plots, in which a legitimate ruler is overthrown and his heirs appeal to Majin, a god who usually is a statue. It's more-or-less Seven Samurai with a giant living statue.



Yes, these are bad movies. These are not only not Oscar-caliber, they're not even Razzie-caliber. But they're fun to watch (at least most of them are; a couple are rather tedious). Maybe "quality" is a bit overrated."