Disk Jockey

As I hinted at a few reviews ago, I have finally gotten the Tomb of Terrors 50 “horror” movie pack. I put horror in quotes there because, as I discovered with the very first movie in the collection, not all of them have anything to do with the horror genre at all.

This collection was a bit of a departure from the two that I had up till now (Horror and Chilling 50 packs) in two potentially important ways. One, it was put together by a different company, and two, rather than collecting a bunch of older out of print films, it instead collects a bunch of modern films that were just too small time to make it onto their own DVDs (this one, for instance, is so obscure that it doesn’t even appear on IMDB). Neither of those feels like a positive change (at least with the other sets you can be guaranteed 4 or 5 actual classic films in the mix), but at least they started out with an okay film.

What’s nice about this film is that the makers of it realized that they were never going to make a legitimately great film, and so just tried to make it as goofy as possible. When the main character, a white gangsta boi trying to hunt down a girl possessing incriminating evidence about him, gets flustered and stops time to talk to the camera like Zack Morris, you know this isn’t going to be the most normal film. When it just goes for broke on the silliness, it generally does work pretty well, the high point for me being a randomly slow motion fist fight between the gangsta and a group of women. Its short length (57 minutes) is also a plus, as it knows when to duck on out (at one point toward the end, he yells at his partner that they have to hurry up and get the girl, because the movie is only an hour long) before it really wears thin.

However, on the technical side, there are some pretty glaring flaws. There are a number of sound errors, such as the complete lack of an actual gunshot noise the first time someone gets shot. The biggest screw up in this vein comes towards the end, as the sound goes off sync with the video, and we spend the last ten minutes or so of the film hearing the characters lines a second or two before their lips move. I get that this was done on the cheap, but come on now. There’s also the pretty glaring problem of the soundtrack, which insists on blaring electronica music throughout the entire film, regardless of the appropriateness of the scene. It may have worked in Run Lola Run, but that doesn’t mean you can just throw it in anywhere, you know?

Overall though, this was not a bad introduction to the collection. At its price, I’m basically paying about fifty cents per movie, and this one was definitely worth at least that much. I’m sure there will be plenty more down the road that will make me regret this purchase, but they can wait for another day.

Rating: **