Savage Weekend/Bloody Birthday/Student Bodies & Jekyll & Hyde - Together Again
(1979/Cheezy Flicks DVDs/1981/Severin Films//81/82/Legend Films Blu-ray Double
Feature)
Picture:
C/B-/B-/C+ Sound: C+ Extras: D/C+/D/D Films: C-
From
Cheezy Flicks we have Savage Weekend,
a horror movie from 1979 that is without a doubt a product of its time. Despite this very '70s tone, there are aspects
that can be attributed to the emerging slasher genre as well, but don't go in
expecting another Halloween, or even
Black Christmas for that matter. This is little more than a time waster for the
horror fan who's on a mission to see and experience everything that the genre
has to offer. If this doesn't describe
you, then side-stepping this one won't cause you to lose any sleep.
In Ed
Hunt’s Bloody Birthday, three
children are born at the same time during a solar eclipse. Naturally, this means they're not going to be
normal, well-balanced adults, but rather murderous killers devoid of souls or
conscience. You've seen this story done
before, and better, too. While I didn't
find it to be completely without merit, it's nothing worth getting excited
over, and another one for only the most dedicated horror fanatics. There are a couple of decent interviews, and
the featurette A Brief History of Slasher
Films, which has also been included on the DVD of Nightmares, another Severin title recently released.
Paramount had previously teamed up with
Legend Films to bring out several genre offerings to DVD that weren't deemed
worthy enough of being released directly through the company. Now they're presenting some of them as two
disc Blu-ray double features. While not
everyone will see these titles as fit enough to be given the high-def
treatment, the addition of more oddball stuff to the format is appreciated.
Student Bodies is the first of the two titles,
and is an interesting curio, as it's prototypical of the Scream and Scary Movie
series. With Scream 4 out recently, this re-release doesn't come as too much of
a surprise – but as so many of the jokes have aged poorly and are largely
irrelevant now, it's hardly worth anybody's time.
The
second half of this set is Jekyll &
Hyde – Together Again, a spoof that can be seen as a take-off of Mel
Brooks' Young Frankenstein, by way
of Airplane!. In it, Mark Blankfield plays the good doctor
who stumbles onto a formula that turns him into a crazed party animal. Comedy takes on the classic Robert Louis
Stevenson story have been done before and since, but this doesn't rank among the
best of them. I got a few chuckles here
and there, but ultimately I'd say to skip this one unless you're truly
dedicated to this specific sub-genre.
Savage Weekend is presented in a 1.33:1 full
frame image that looks okay, though I do believe that since this release,
better-looking editions have been released which maintain the film's original
aspect ratio. Bloody Birthday is in anamorphic widescreen with a 1.66:1 frame and
a Dolby 2.0 Mono soundtrack. The disc is
sourced from a new HD transfer from original elements, and is an improvement
over the previous edition covered elsewhere on this site. The Legend Films double feature presents both
movies anamorphically with a 1.78:1 frame. They look and sound good, but aren't anything
you'd want to test your equipment by.
- David Milchick