Rent The Phantom Creeps (1939)

Abysmal DVD of a very minor movie - The Phantom Creeps review by Count Otto Black

I couldn't be bothered to watch very much of this. I knew in advance it was going to be a primitive no-budget serial from 1939, but sometimes that kind of thing can be fun. However, I had a nasty feeling as soon as I got to the chapter menu and saw that the producers of the DVD couldn't even be bothered to correct a howling typo like "THE MENCAING POWER", and sadly I was right. The slapdash transfer from poor-quality video to bargain-bin DVD (which is obviously what they did, since the picture is cropped to fit a TV screen) results in a horrible viewing experience, and the disc is so shoddily produced that one stereo channel on the soundtrack doesn't work, diminishing the amusement and nostalgia factors far below the point where it's worth sitting through four hours of migraine-inducing flickering with sound you can barely hear just to see Bela Lugosi hamming it up like a bacon factory on overtime. If a much, much better version was available, this might be reasonably amusing in a retro kind of way, but this one's for obsessive-compulsive Lugosi fans only.