Filmgore

Released by: Full Moon Entertainment
Released on: December 6, 2011.
Director: Ken Dixon
Cast: Cassandra Peterson
Year: 1983
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The Movie:

'Directed' by Ken Dixon and 'written' by none other than Forest J. Ackerman, Filmgore, hosted by Cassandra Peterson as Elvira, is a collection of snippets from a few well known and fairly notorious horror films. So yeah, the only original material you really get here are the hosted segments, which Peterson does in her typically enjoyable fashion, cracking corny jokes and showing off some impressive cleavage.

But rad titties or not, there's really no way to get around the fact that this is a collection of highly condensed horror movies. Not just a clip reel or a collection of kill scenes done party tape style but opening, middle and ending segments for each of the movies featured here. Back when this was made almost thirty years ago and this stuff was maybe a bit tough to track down, okay, it was probably cool to see. Now that you can order any one of these movies off of Amazon or check half of this stuff out instantly on Netflix though? Time has not been kind to poor Filmgore and you wind up asking 'why?' more than anything else.

The collection starts off with way too much footage culled from Blood Feast - almost twenty minutes worth, which is a good chunk of that short film. From there we head west from Florida to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to spend a quarter of an hour's worth of quality time with the Sawyer family. The odd pick of the bunch, Driller Killer, takes us back east to the sleazy streets of early eighties New York City for ten minutes or so before we start getting into more condensed clips from Drive-In Massacre, The Astro-Zombies, Carnival Of Blood, and Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon Of Death - none of which run more than ten minutes or so, though honestly, I wasn't sitting there with a stop watch. From there we hit the home stretch with eight minutes taken from Fiend, eight more minutes from a second run to the well of H. G. Lewis with Two Thousand Maniacs and then, last but certainly not least, the Findlay's most infamous film, Snuff!

There's no historical context here, no reason to want to watch this over the longer feature versions of the movie, save for Elvira and her world famous jugs. The puns she throws overtop are as hokey as anything Ackerman ever wrote and delivered by Elvira with a noticeable lack of interest or enthusiasm while the editing choices seem pretty much completely random outside of a focus on gore. Hence the title one could assume. Filmgore. Yep. Filmgore. It's two hours of poorly edited footage you can easily see elsewhere and in far better quality than you can see it in here. Oh sure it's bound to give some a nostalgia rush, and for that reason it's hard to really hate it, but there's no way you can describe it as good, or even really all that interesting.

Video/Audio/Extras:

The fullframe presentation, with all of the original cropping intact, has been sourced from a VHS tape that has seen better days. The image is soft throughout and there is color fading aplenty. Macroblocking pops up fairly often as do random compression artifacts. The picture is generally pretty murky looking.

The audio is slightly better than the video. Though the Dolby Digital Mono English language track on the DVD is somewhat flat and prone to background hiss, at least most of the dialogue is easy enough to follow and understand. No alternate language options or subtitles are provided.

Extras include an introduction from Charles Band, a promo spot advertising the Full Moon Direct Grindhouse line, trailers for a few other Full Moon Entertainment properties, menus and chapter stops.

The Final Word:

Given that every single one of the movies featured here is readily available on DVD and/or Blu-ray at this point, the appeal of Filmgore lies in the fact that Elvira hosts it and that it will provide those who remember when some of these movies were legitimately hard to see with a certain sense of nostalgia. It's fun for those reasons, but outside of that, time has not really been very kind to it.