For the last two months, I've been watching one of these awful movies every day for my other blog - The Pit of the Pendulum - and I'm now pleased to say that I've finished the first box. Just in time for the world ending too! Yeah, like that's really going to happen.
It wasn't the first time that I've watched these movies as I skimmed through them when I first bought "Tomb of Terrors" back in 2008. A lot of the movies were also shown by Zone Horror in the UK before I moved so I've unfavourably reviewed a couple of them before.
I thought that, given a few years, some of these movies might improve a bit, but I was wrong. As entertaining as they are due to their ineptness, they are all amateur drivel which you have to have something mentally wrong with you to prefer over real mainstream horror. I gave each one a fair chance and tried to be objective, but a bad movie will always be a bad movie even when you are looking for something positive to say about it to redress the balance.
Some of the standouts which are sort of okay are the comedies. For a horror pack, "Tomb of Terrors" has an abundance of comedies with no less than 14 actual comedies and several more which qualify unintentionally. The best of these is "So Mort It Be" (2004) although "Reanimator Academy" (2002) also tickled me. I'm not a big fan of comedy except for "Laurel and Hardy" anyway since I have no sense of humour.
There are also a lot of "crime" movies in the pack which don't contain any horror whatsoever. The ratio isn't as bad as Mill Creek's "250 Horror Movies" pack which has less than 100 horror movies in it once you ignore all the sci-fi, sword and sandals, and ancient serial plays, but it's still annoying even for the original $5. Now that "Tomb of Terrors" costs over $30 in some places, it's really not worth the money if you are a horror fan.
Out of the "real" horror movies, the best ones (in order) are "Siege of Evil" (2005), "Soul of the Demon" (1991), "The Traveler" (2005), and "Inexchange" (2003). The final one barely qualifies, but it's quite a struggle to find any that do.
For those with slightly less discernment and a lot of patience, "Abberdine County Conjuror" (2005), "Massacre" (2002), "Strange Things Happen at Sundown" (2003), "The Vulture's Eye" (2004), and even "Gorno" (2003) aren't entirely awful for no-budget nasties, but they're still pretty bad.
There's no innovation or originality in this pack so "indie horror" fanatics can suck those stupid claims right up. Most of these movies borrow the formulas from more famous movies and then completely wreck everything by not having the talent to do anything with them. Homages and blatant rip-offs abound.
Some to just skip straight over are "Flesh Eating Ghouls from Outer Space" (2004), "Kill Them and Eat Them" (2004), "The Lunar Pack" (2004), "Nightmare Museum" (2006), and "The Woodland Haunting 2" (2005) unless you really like infantile YouTube videos.
As for the rest of the titles, it's all down to how many "pretty" girls you want to fast forward to see. In some cases, checking out the insides of other people's houses which are on show is even more fun than looking for "girl next door" types. Bear in mind that sub-porn movie acting and very softcore porn scenes abound depending on what you allow yourself to be sucked into.
I don't recommend "Tomb of Terrors" unless you can get it for the bargain price that I did. Even then, I still don't really recommend it.
