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| The front cover of Mill Creek's Chilling Classics, a 50-movie boxed set. |
Let me tell you about the first time I saw Venus Flytrap, the Japanese-made monster movie known under a variety of titles and widely believed to have been written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. I caught up with this movie in 2009, which is several lifetimes ago by internet standards. Way back then, my friend (and fellow film fanatic) Craig J. Clark maintained a simple but informative blog called A Stuffed, Legless Duck Production in which he would briefly review a different film pretty much every single day of the week. That blog introduced me to a lot of titles I might otherwise never have heard of, and Craig always brought a unique perspective to the material he covered.
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| This boxed set kind of changed my life. |
One of Craig's pet projects was making his way through a 50-movie boxed set from Mill Creek called Chilling Classics (originally released in 2005). If you're not aware, Mill Creek Entertainment is a Minnesota company that specializes in no-frills, "el cheapo" boxed sets containing public domain films—not just horror movies but sci-fi flicks, Westerns, crime thrillers, war films, and comedies, too. The transfers are usually atrocious, but the sets are so cheap, you can't really complain. I don't know how Mill Creek has been faring since the death of physical media, but their boxed sets used to be everywhere, even turning up in grocery stores and drug stores.
Well, after reading some of Craig's Chilling Classics reviews and becoming significantly intrigued, I decided to buy a copy of the set myself. It set me back a whopping eight bucks. I wanted to follow his lead and review each and every movie. At the time, I was a very active participant at a website called The Four Word Film Review, so I posted my reviews to that site's message board. The resulting thread is a true epic that I still remember fondly. If you like this blog, I recommend that you read through the entire thread. Not only did I review all 50 of the movies in the set, I held a mock awards ceremony and even posted some song parodies based on the films.
As you have probably guessed by now, Venus Flytrap is one of the movies included in that Mill Creek collection. There, it is presented under its best-known title: The Revenge of Dr. X. The print is an absolute disgrace—blurry, washed-out, and barely watchable. Unfortunately, no better print of the film has yet surfaced. Mill Creek refers to the movie as a 1970 release, and that's the date I've assigned to it as well. Today, the IMDb calls the film Body of the Prey and says it was released in 1967. While I'm not sure where they got that information, I don't necessarily dispute it.
I devoted the summer of 2009 to reviewing every movie in Chilling Classics. I decided to start with the movie with the lowest IMDb rating, Richard Ashe's Track of the Moon Beast (1976), and work my way up to the movie with the highest IMDb rating, Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975). My reasoning at the time was that the movies would gradually improve as the project went along. Since Revenge of Dr. X was one of the lowest-rated films, I got to it early. In fact, it was the twelfth film I reviewed! Only 11 films out of 50 were considered worse. Here's what I said about Revenge of Dr. X at the time:
This was the one supposedly scripted by Ed Wood, and it seems plausible that this is his work. For one thing, there's no one called "Dr. X" in this movie, and nobody gets "revenge" on anyone. Instead, a grouchy NASA scientist needs a vacation, so he decides to spend it on a mountaintop in Japan where he performs bizarre botany experiments involving the crossbreeding of carnivorous plants. The result of his work is a lumbering, flesh-devouring plant monster who goes on the prerequisite rampage. Pretty much a Frankenstein ripoff, complete with a "creation" scene, a hunchbacked assistant, and villagers wielding torches. When the movie takes a brief detour into sexploitation territory, it does so the Ed Wood way: randomly and with a certain naivete. Here, the mad doctor's plant-finding research is aided by topless scuba-diving nymphs, though nothing remotely sexual occurs. The plant monster itself is quite a creation, a whimsical-looking thing who would not be out of place in a Sid & Marty Krofft TV show.
Thirteen years later, I basically stand by those words.
I mentioned holding an awards ceremony near the end of the thread. I called it The Chillies, and in addition to the usual categories (Best Actor, Best Picture, etc.), there were also categories like "Best Use of a Slumming Celebrity," "Most Boring Picture," and the coveted "Best Nudity." One category was called "The Edward D. Wood Memorial Award for Enjoyable Incompetence." The Revenge of Dr. X was nominated in this category, but the prize actually went to something called The War of the Robots (1978), which I vaguely remember as an Italian Star Wars knockoff. Yes, Ed Wood was out Wood-ed in his own category!
This may all seem incredibly trivial to you, but reviewing that Mill Creek boxed set was a major breakthrough for me as a writer in 2009. It was an endurance test, and I proved I could go the distance. In retrospect, that led me to reviewing the stories in Blood Splatters Quickly, Angora Fever, and When the Topic is Sex individually years later. Actually, Chilling Classics may have been one of the inspirations for the entire Ed Wood Wednesdays project, which I started in 2013. In the very first post in the series, I posted some pictures of my fledgling Ed Wood DVD and VHS collection. If you look very closely, you can see that Chilling Classics boxed set, peeking out from behind Necromania.
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| Can you spot the Mill Creek boxed set in this picture? |
I had no idea back then what I was getting myself into. I still don't.