Top Five Worst DVD/Blu-ray
Finds
A month ago, I looked
at some of the best finds I have made in my time as a DVD/Blu-ray collector.
Now, it’s time to look at the scams and the disappointments that sometimes come
with the territory of collecting…
5. Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend: a dark
secret (2013)
If you read my previous CCC list (or are at all familiar
with my blog), you know I love dinosaurs and any movies with dinosaurs. In my
hunt for films featured in the documentaries I watched as a kid, there was one
that eluded me for many years, the 1985 family film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. For its time, it had revolutionary
animatronic effects, bringing to life massive long-necked dinosaurs in the
African jungle (the premise is based on the cryptid Mokele Mbembe), including a
young member of the species whom the human explorers in the film refer to as
Baby.
I had actually rented the full film from the video store one
time, but saw it at such a young age, I couldn’t remember anything specific.
For years, I searched, but could never find a copy anywhere.
Sometimes, DVDs pop up in the most random stores. In 2013 I
happened across a 3-movie collection at a local office supplies store, of all
places. It had two throwaway family movies with it, and was $ 9.99, so it
wasn’t a case where buying a value pack made for a better deal. But it had Baby, and that’s all I cared about. It cost
ten bucks, but I was sure it would be worth it. I had finally found this
legendary dinosaur flick!
Turns out, it was a very unfortunate case of all the good dinosaur
footage was used in the documentaries I had seen, which amounted to a few
minutes, at best. The majority of the animatronic dinosaur scenes are clunky
and unremarkable. The rest of the film is dull, plodding, and generic. It
wasn’t a huge loss, from a financial standpoint, but after all those years of
wondering what the full movie would be like based on that small amount of
footage, it was a colossal disappointment.
4. Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo and Ants: two bug movies that bug me (2008)
Any DVD/Blu-ray collector will tell you that stopping in at
Walmart during Boxing Day is a must. In my early days of collecting, I found a
DVD two-pack of killer animal movies for five dollars. What a deal! I thought.
They looked old, and indeed they were, both having come out in 1977, but what I
didn’t know was they were both made-for-TV.
It turned out Ants
(alternately known as It Happened At
Lakewood Manor) was filmed at a location very near where I lived—as I
discovered when my mom walked in to the room while I was watching it for the
first time and she remarked she knew where the hotel in the film was. She also
remembered when they were making the actual film, because back in the day, it
was a big deal to have a movie shooting in such a quaint place.
Ants is
straight-up one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It appeared in a very
early CCC list (#15), Top Ten Worst Direct-to-DVD Films. Though Ants wasn’t made as a direct-to-DVD
feature, I included it anyway. It has absolutely no redeeming values.
As for Tarantulas?
I was so disheartened after watching Ants,
I never got through it all, until I forced myself to watch it years later for
Clayton’s Creepy Cinema: Animal Mayhem and reviewed it. I’d put it on about the
same bottom-of-the-barrel-level as Ants.
That’s probably why they were paired together in the first place.
3. Alien vs. Predator: Blu-ray vs. DVD (2012)
The two Alien vs.
Predator films are not very good, especially in comparison to the original
films in their respective franchises, but in all honesty, I still enjoy them
simply for the action-packed B-movies that they are.
In 2012, I decided to re-visit all of the Alien and Predator films, because Prometheus
had come out that summer, and up to this point, I only had the movies on DVD,
but I was already well into buying Blu-rays at that point, so I decided it was
time for an AVP upgrade. I paid
twenty bucks for both AVP movies on
Blu-ray—not that expensive, I reasoned—and was pleased to find they included
the unrated versions of both. Often, a standard Blu-ray release lacked the
special features of the collector’s edition DVDs (in the case of the AVP movies, I had collectors versions of
both).
Another thing that often happens with cheap Blu-ray releases
is the image gets copied and plastered on a Blu-ray disc, but it isn’t upgraded
to full 1080 P HD. That’s what happened with these blu rays. This means nothing
to the average consumer, but I was extremely pissed off when I put on the
Blu-ray, then put on the DVD right after, and found the picture quality was
practically identical. I paid more money for nothing.
This is the only time that something like this has happened
to me, but it’s not the only time it’s been done. The Hills Have Eyes Blu-ray reviews on Amazon were weirdly low,
averaging 1 or 2 stars. Surprise: they re-released the DVD version on Blu-ray, without any upscaling. If you already owned
the DVD, it was as good as owning the Blu-ray. Another instance of this was
with The Terminator, which I waited
out until they re-released a Blu-ray that was actually advertised as
“re-mastered”. A low-brow money grab, is all it is, and I learned about it the
hard way.
2. Spider-Man 2.1/The Villains of Spider-Man 3:
wasn’t worth the .1 (2007)
Prior to the release of Spider-Man
3 (which I was beyond pumped for), Spider-Man
2 was re-released on DVD, but this was no ordinary re-release. I discovered
it at Walmart for 30 bucks, which seemed like a steep price, but it was called Spider-Man 2.1. What did that mean? Well, it seemed to indicate
this was an extended version, with more action! Whoa! Cool! And what really
sold me on it was the bonus disc it came with: The Villains of Spider-Man 3, a sneak-peek documentary! That was
it. I had to have it.
I was really into DVD special features around this time. To
me, it was still a relatively new concept, to have behind-the-scenes footage
and filmmakers explaining how they achieved the movie magic that had mystified
me for so long. I popped in the Villains
disc first and was awe-struck by the explanation of how they created Sand Man,
and Goblin, and Venom—though Venom was still being kept secret, they weren’t
showing him as much as I wanted…Then the screen faded to black.
It’s over? Already?
That can’t be right.
I looked at the DVD. In small print at the bottom of the
cover—which I must point out, was blocked by the cardboard packaging enclosing
the two DVDs—said, Total run time: Approx. 13 minutes.
Wow. Had I been scammed or what?
Not only did the documentary reveal next-to-nothing about
the new movie, Spider-Man 2.1 wasn’t
even a superior director’s cut. I liked the original version better! The added
action moments were minimal and unnecessary, and every other addition was
silly. Ten years later, and I’m still pissed. Re-releasing a movie at an
unreasonably high price is one thing, but false advertising is another. Since
this infuriating incident, I’ve been very cautious when it comes to buying
re-releases of my favourite films.
1. Alien 3000: easily 3000-times worse than
I expected (2014)
Remember that CCC list I mentioned? Worst movies released
direct-to-DVD? Guess which movie was #2 on that list?
I remember talking about Alien
3000 at the pub with a friend. He asked if I had seen it. I knew about it,
I had seen the DVD at the video store many years prior, but never rented it,
though was curious to see it, based on the title and cover alone. I knew it
would be a rip-off of Alien, given
how the creature on the cover looked, but it did look cool. “Oh no,” my friend warned, “it’s sooooo bad.”
Even after this conversation, which I recall with perfect
clarity, I still bought it—only because there was a video store selling out and
I needed one more movie to fulfill the 10 movies for 20 bucks deal. So I paid
two bucks for Alien 3000, how bad
could it really be?
It wasn’t worth two dollars. It wasn’t worth any amount of
currency, in any form.
Alien 3000 is not
only one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, I found it offensively bad—the
kind of bad where you can tell the filmmakers were just laughing because they
knew they would fool some lame fans into watching it and paying money for it,
when in reality it was a total piece of shit. It was like a giant middle finger
on screen for 90 minutes. Instead of reiterating everything I hate about it,
I’ll just copy and paste some of what I said in CCC List #15:
Scene after scene, I
kept saying to myself: “Ok, it can’t
get any worse than this...” and every
time, I was proven wrong. The plot is about this invisible alien that hides
gold in a cave, which a team of marines are trying to get. What bothered me the
most were the characters. These “marines” are the most incompetent people I
have ever seen in a movie ever. They actually shoot at the alien with a giant
paintball gun which allows them to see it. Every line of dialogue spewed from
everyone’s mouths made my ears want to seal shut.
The funny part is, I later told that same friend from the
pub that I bought it from the video store, and it turned out that was the very
copy he had rented years earlier.
Enough about Alien
3000. It’s without a doubt the worst movie I have ever purchased. I just
hope I don’t accidently buy something that tops it someday.
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