I’m not a greedy man, for the most part. I believe in fair play and sharing and liberty for all – if it’s about everyone getting an equal slice of the pie, I’m for it. However, when it comes to DVDs, that whole line of thinking goes right out the window: I want ‘em, sooner and not later, and if they can come by the truckload, well then, bring it on (I get this way about barbecue too, but there’s only so much a man can eat). I’ve been like this since DVDs hit the market, and I haven’t really explored the reasons behind this mania – more than likely, it’s just the obsessiveness I had about VHS taken to new and digitally remastered heights – but all I know is, I like lots and lots of DVDs, and I do what I can to maintain a constant stream of them in my mailbox. Oh, and I’m all about quantity over quality, too. I don’t get my tits in an uproar over anamorphic or Dolby 5.1 or any of the bells and whistles that make most horror nerds moist – just give me a double or triple bill, or even better, a boxed set, and I’m a happy boy. That’s why I’m a big fan of Brentwood’s multi-disc sets, which cram upwards to 15 movies on four discs (yeah, they look like they’ve been stored in brine, but whatever – there’s a lot of them!). But when Anchor Bay dropped these Fright Packs on my door… well, let’s just say that it’s a good thing I don’t have a heart condition, ’cause I was definitely feeling light-headed after eyeballing them.

Here’s the reason for my palpitations: each Fright Pack (which are shaped like a six pack of beer cans and comes with an “easy-grip handle”) contains six discs from Anchor Bay’s vast and impressive horror and exploitation library. That alone should set your blood pressure to spiking, ’cause the fine folks at ABE can count movies by Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, George Romero, and a whole passel of great Eurotrash and forgotten American movies from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s in their collection. And they don’t skimp on the extras, either; I’m a big fan of extras, too, but again, like picture quality, it’s not a breaking point for me when it comes to grabbing up a DVD. But Anchor Bay knows that for a lot of DVD freaks, extras do make a difference, so they fill up their discs with all kinds of supplemental stuff – interviews with the directors, trailers (sometimes you get the American and foreign spots), deleted scenes, the whole shooting gallery. It shows they care, and you know, that’s kinda nice and reassuring: total strangers want you to have a pleasant time. Makes you wish our government took the same approach.

As you can see at the top of this review, each Pack has an appropriate horror-related theme. For my money, the Pack with the most punch is the new Walking Dead set, which compiles three gore-soaked European zombie flicks – Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead (a.k.a. The Gates of Hell) with Jorge Grau’s inventive Spanish effort, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – with two totally entertaining trash pics, Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead (see review) and Umberto Lenzi’s corpses-on-a-tear freakfest, Nightmare City (a.k.a. City of the Walking Dead). Yeah, the set is rounded out with a genuine turd, Dead Heat (with Joe Piscopo, no less), but hey, five outta six is pretty good.

Also worth your hard-earned ducats is The Devil Made Me Do It, which features a sextet of Satanic-themed titles split evenly between American (the underrated Fear No Evil, and Hell Night, with Linda Blair) and Euro movies (Hammer’s final film, To The Devil, A Daughter, featuring an underage Nastassia Kinski giving birth to a diabolical fetus; Michele Soavi’s The Church, with a script by Dario Argento; the Paul Naschy werewolf wild-out Curse of the Devil; and a berserk Exorcist rip-off, The Antichrist). The other Packs, Man’s Worst Friends and Campy Classics, are somewhat hit-and-miss: you’ll get Argento’s Cat O’ Nine Tails, Fulci’s The Black Cat, and the looney-tunes slasher Sleepaway Camp, but you’ve also got to accept the fact that you’re now the proud owner of Slugs*, Parasite, Transylvania 6-5000**, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (okay, the last one, that’s not such a burden).