The rule of thumb is that you can’t buy fan flicks, because then you’re making money off someone else’s copyrighted characters. Well, most of the time time. There’s a few professional DVDs that bravely circumvent this taking a different route: They feature characters that everyone knows, but which aren’t copyrighted. (The PPS Group) is one of those discs, but all that’s getting ahead of the point, however.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, millions of families had their trusty Super 8 home movie cameras at their side for every trip to Disneyland, the World’s Fair or Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house. For plenty of horror movie-obsessed teens, however, that camera was a portal to another world, as evidenced by the contents of this disc: Dozens of fun, goofy homemade spectacles. Hardly a famous movie monster doesn’t appear here—you get everyone you’d expect, like Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman and others, including a variety of aliens, freaks and last men on Earth.
Are they hokey? Yeah. Are they horrific? Not in the slightest. Still, there’s a lot to be gained from seeing these little epics, admirable as much for the patience and brazen self-belief of their creators as for the finished creations themselves. There’s amazing stuff in here, from clever stop-motion animation of dinosaurs to a prehistoric beast: The Box Monster, a deadly, ferocious animal that, er, is a cardboard box.
As a bonus of sorts, it’s a looooong disc—over two hours! You won’t want to digest it all in one sitting, but if you’re a fan film fan, there’s bound to be something you’ll enjoy in this time capsule before the age of video, CGI and editing on your PC.
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