Hello!

As long as we’re reporting arcane collector Blu-ray announcements, we have one guaranteed to please fans of Z-movie madness … another Film Masters pair of attractions from the waning days of drive-in double bills.

We’ve dutifully followed Film Masters path of destruction series of Sci-fi/horror releases from the late 1950s. The discs offer a remastered main feature followed by a slightly lesser item, although most of the ‘2nd features’ on the discs look equally great. There’s the McLendon double bill  Giant Gila Monster/The Killer Shrews (October ’23) and three Roger Corman ‘Filmgroup’ duos,  Beast Haunted Cave/Ski Troop Attack (October ’23’),  The Terror/The Little Shop of Horrors (December ’23) and  Creature from the Haunted Sea/The Devil’s Partner (January ’24).

Come this November 12 Film Masters will once again be dipping into Corman history. Produced with his brother Gene Corman are a pair of their last Hollywood-made B&W shock show titles, filmed under the company flag ‘Balboa Productions.’ These creature features have long been Public Domain eyesores.  Ugly graymarket VHS dupes of Attack of the Giant Leeches and Night of the Blood Beast to be nearly unwatchable, and the old DVD of Blood Beast we reviewed wasn’t much better. Were the movies any good?  It wasn’t easy to tell.

We’re hoping that this Bernard L. Kowalski double bill will be closer to the positive experience we had with  The Brain Eaters from a few years back … part of the fun is figuring out ‘how did they achieve this much with so few visible production frills?’

Even Film Masters calls them cheap and tasteless. But Blood Beast throws in a stack of ‘icky’ body horror elements that wouldn’t go mainstream for at least ten years. And Leeches has Yvette Vickers, an asset that compensates for monsters seemingly constructed from plastic garbage bags. The presentations will be accompanied by Tom Weaver- produced audio commentaries and a new Ballyhoo video, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson