Six man against nature (sort of… Cat O' Nine Tails doesn't really fall into that category, neither does The Black Cat so much, but hey!) films all digitally restored on DVD and reissued in a cool package that looks like a six pack of beer at one low price point? I'm all over this…

PARASITE: Paul Dean (Robert Glaudini of Chameleon and The Alchemist) is a scientist in a post apocalyptic world on the run from the Merchants, a sinister government organization, that want the parasite living inside of him for their own evil purposes. He ends up in a small backwoods town, checks into a hotel, and hopes to be able to quietly conduct his research so that he can not only get rid of the monster growing inside of him, but also prevent the parasite from spreading.

When a gang of local thugs breaks into his van and steals his research material and equipment hoping to find some narcotics inside, the only other parasite (besides the one living inside Dean) is let loose on an unsuspecting town.

With the help of Patricia (played by a very young Demi Moore) and some of the other locals, Dean is off to get rid of the loose parasite before the Merchants can get it, and somehow figure out how to get rid of the one living in his stomach, all the while trying to keep the body count to a minimum.

While the film does have some really fun spots and a couple of creepy moments, there are definitely a few drawbacks to it. First of all, it was originally composed and shot for a 3-D presentation. While I'm sure it would have been great in the theater when all sorts of stuff starts flying at the screen for no real reason other than to pop out at the viewer, here, where it's presented in 2-D, it comes across as pretty silly.

In addition to this, Band seems to have decided that he should end every scene with a fade to black, which almost gives the film a made for TV look, as every time it happens, you expect there to be a cut to a commercial.

Add some thoroughly bad performances from pretty much everyone involved in the film and some low budget and unconvincing effects, and you're left with a goofy rehash of Alien set in a Road Warrior-like environment. In the films defense, it moved along at a decent pace and somehow managed to hold my attention throughout its entirety

ZOLTAN – HOUND OF DRACULA: When a team of soldiers inadvertently unearths a tomb during some excavations, Dracula's servant, Veidt Smith (played by Reggie Nalder of The Man Who Knew Too Much) rises from the grave along with his dog, Zoltan. Apparently they need a new master to serve or they'll die, so they travel across the world to California to track down the last remaining descendent of the Dracula family played by Michael Pataki (Halloween 4, The Return of Count Yorga) as Michael Drake, who's getting ready to take his wife, two kids, and many dogs on a camping trip in the remote woods.

Controlled by Veidt, Zoltan converts some dogs in the camp area to vampires, and mauls a few random campers, as they hunt down Drake.

Luckily for Drake, Inspector Branco (played by Jose Ferrer of The Swarm and The Evil That Men Do) has been following Veidt and Zoltan from the start and, with the help of friendly neighbors and the clownish local authorities, is able to track down the Drake family just as they're getting ready to head out of the woods after strange things start happening in and around their mobile home. Drake and Branco take it upon themselves to stop Veidt and Zoltan from converting Michael into a vampire and spreading the curse across the world.

Albert Band's (director of I Bury The Living) Zoltan – The Hound Of Dracula is one of the most unusual takes on the ever-popular Dracula mythos, and also one of the worst. The movie has so many plot holes that it's actually pretty funny. Despite the presence of some interesting second-string actors, the performances are unremarkable.

Then there are the so-called special effects – both visual and audio. When Zoltan, and his small army of vampire dogs get agitated, their eyes start to glow in the dark, and while probably intended to be scary, it comes across as ridiculous. When the dogs attack, obviously fake 'doggie paws' tear through car roofs, shacks, and anything else that gets in their way, making the spider attack scene in Fulci's The Beyond look pretty good by comparison. And not only does Veidt seem to sound like a monkey whenever he's in pain, but whenever one of the dogs attacks, the same tape loop of barking and howling is played over and over again to the point where it too becomes absurd.

The only reason that this movie scores the way it does is because it's so bad that it becomes quite entertaining in it's own right. Zoltan – The Hound of Dracula is a definitive example of 'so bad it's good filmmaking.'

THE BLACK CAT:Patrick Magee plays a psychic professor named Robert Miles who has a talent for communicating with the deceased. He's also able to use his amazing mental abilities to control his large black house cat to exact his revenge on those who cross his path. In short, he's a bit of a nutcase.

One day a pretty photographer named Jill Trevers (played by Mimsy Farmer) takes a job working in conjunction with the local police (headed up by two notable Eurocult leading men, David Warbeck and Al Cliver). It seems that there have been quite a few murders in the area as of late and as she goes around taking her pictures of the victims for the police records, she notices that many of them bare some obvious scratch marks on them – scratch marks that could have come from… a large cat! Trevers heads over to Miles' humble abode to question him, police in tow, but things of course do not go easily or even remotely as planned and the cat is still prowling around, up to no good.

If there's one word that can be aptly used to describe this very, very, very loose Edgar Allen Poe adaptation from the proclaimed Italian master of splatter Lucio Fulci, it's goofy. Patrick Magee overacts with such wreckless, scenery chewing abandon that at times his performance also seems to be intentionally comedic. The fact that he's surrounded by numerous Italian actors trying to pretend they are English, with middling results, and the sole American in the film (Farmer) to make it more marketable to North American audiences simply adds to the rampant confusion that so dominates this film.

Those expecting injury to the eye motifs, gut munching zombies or shotgun blasts to the head (the type of material that is more often than not associated with the late, great Lucio) would do well to check out Zombie, Contraband or The Beyond instead as The Black Cat is an almost completely gore-less affair. However, if you're into films with lots of atmosphere (which this one has) and don't mind logic jumps that could fill the Grand Canyon (which this one also has) and you can appreciate the antics of Mr. Magee the psychic professor, there's a lot to enjoy in this uniquely Fulci-esque psuedo-gothic mess of a film.

SLUGS: From Spanish auteur Juan Piquer Simon, director of the horror masterpiece that is Pieces (It's exactly what you think it is!) comes the best movie of 1988, Slugs! Well, maybe not the best movie of 1988, but certainly one of the most amusing.

Our story begins with a health commissioner named Mike Brady (Michael Garfield) who works out of a small backwoods town – normally a sleepy area where not a whole lot goes on. He wakes up one morning to find that the local Sheriff (John Battaglia) needs him to help get a drunk named Ron Bell out of a home he's being evicted from. When they arrive, the find the home empty save for Ron's corpse, which appears to have been eaten by some sort of animal. When Mike returns back to his office he's asked to come out and check out a problem with a backed up sewer. He and Don Palmer (Philip McHale) head out to the scene to make sure nothing is awry and Don decides to head on down into the sewers to see what's up. He starts cleaning out some debris when suddenly something grabs his tools out of his hands while he's working, sending him screaming to the surface.

Calling it a day, Mike decides to head home to his wife (Kim Terry). When he gets there, she shows him a strange discovery – their garden is full of abnormally large slugs! When Mike gets his hand in close to take a look at one of the weird little critters, it bites him and draws blood. He brings one of the slugs to a scientist he knows on the other side of town who does some testing on the subject, where it breaks loose and makes a snack out of a nearby hamster. The scientist ascertains that the slugs have mutated into flesh eaters and Mike starts to put it all together – they've been breeding in the sewers and are now showing up all over town, eating everyone that they come into contact with.

Amazingly ridiculous, Slugs starts off fast and keeps up the pace right until the end. Filled with some of the most retarded set pieces in horror movie history and plenty of completely gratuitous gore scenes, this is one for the books. Yeah, okay, slugs themselves aren't scary which kind of makes this one hard to get into if you take things seriously but just give it a chance. Simon's slimy slugs will win you over easily enough once you start getting into it. Characters show up only to serve as slug fodder, there's a fantastic bedroom scene, and for some reason no one seems to be able to run away from or simply stomp on the slugs but it all just comes together into one wonderfully bizarre and completely stupid movie that is about as enjoyable as they come. I love Slugs and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

RATS – NIGHT OF TERROR: Bruno Mattei is a name often times associated with quality filmmaking, and this Italian-French co-produced killer rodent/post apocalyptic jumble stands as one of his crowning cinematic achievements.

Set in the all too close future of the twenty second century, a few years after the atom bomb has laid waste to the world as we know it, Rats tells the story of a gang of Mad Max style road warrior/biker trash barbarian guys who hang out at a bar and drink a lot. Their world is turned upside down when giant rats, mutated by the nuclear radiation, move in on their turf and start chowing down on them. That's about it as far as the plot goes – there are a few moments where tensions arise between gang members and a love scene or two but they really don't matter much. This one is all about the radioactive rats (which are, in reality, guinea pigs dyed black and with bad ass glowing red eyeballs and not rats at all).

Rats is a terrible, terrible, terrible film. That's right, I used three terrible's to describe it but I'll be dyed black and called a rat if it isn't an endlessly entertaining exercise in wanton stupidity, and it works in much the same way that Slugs does except on an even more insane level. To give the movie that authentic post nuclear holocaust feel, Mattei has named his characters with titles such as Video and Lilleth. It doesn't work. The sets are as cheap as they come and look like leftovers from other, better films. The acting is terrible, the dialogue even worse and the effects are, well, not very effective.

That being said, the film is so completely manic and has such an enthusiasm for what it is that you can't help but love it. Unlike the overly long Hell Of The Living Dead or some of his recent shot on video fare like Snuff Trap, this one is just plain fun, made even more so by the goofy but way too cute little guinea pigs that are supposed to instill mortal fear in the viewers. For the more intense stunts where guinea pigs might be harmed, Mattei wisely chose to substitute large lumps of black fur to threaten our band of heroic biker trash. You can imagine how well that turns out…

CAT O' NINE TAILS: The real saving grace in this package, the one film that can be enjoyed on a serious level and not for it's camp and/or schlock value alone, is Dario Argento's 1971 Giallo, Cat O' Nine Tails.

Someone, for some reason, has broken into a research facility where experiments were being conducted on human chromosomes in hopes of finding out what triggers reactionary and violent behavior in human beings. The cops don't know who did this and there's no obvious motive for the crime, as nothing so far as they can tell, has been stolen. While the suggestion of industrial espionage is raised, it's quickly dismissed and the police are at a standstill – the only one who was there, the night watchman, got whacked on the head and remembers nothing of importance.

Across the street from the research facility lives a retired, and blind, newspaper man named Franco Arno (Karl Malden) along with his young niece, Laurie (Cinzia De Carolis). Franco heard something that night, but being blind, he was only able to imagine what had happened in his head and not really see it. He heads across the street the next day to check out the scene and it's here that he meets a reporter named Carlo (James Franciscus) who is writing a story on the events that took place there the night before.

What the cops and the reporters don't know is that there is one sole man who is able to piece it all together for them – Dr. Calabresi (Carlo Aligherio). He knows the motive and he knows what's missing but, as he explains to his lady friend, it's better for his career if he keeps his mouth shut. Of course, that proves to be his undoing and he soon finds himself the first victim of a murderer on the loose. Franco and Carlo team up to try and stop him from killing again with some help from the police, but this murderer seems to know more than they do about many things, even themselves!

While a little slow in some spots, Cat O' Nine Tails is a slick and extremely well photographed Hitchcockian styled thriller in the grand Argento tradition. Plenty of wild and fluid camera work and expertly photographed murder set pieces make the film an excellent feast for the eyes and a few fun twists in the storyline keep you guessing through to the end. Performance wise, this one is above average for an Italian Giallo, Malden and Franciscus holding their own quite nicely, but nothing really shines here in that department. Ennio Morricone's score is perfectly suited to the film and while some of his later collaborations with Goblin might be more recognizable, with their pounding rhythms and strange keyboards, this lower key and more toned down music plays nicely against the determined pacing. Not as gory or over the top as some of the film that Argento made before or after it, Cat O' Nine Tails is still a top tier thriller from a man who, at one point, was the best in the business.

The DVD

Video:

PARASITE:The film is presented in it's original aspect ratio of 2:35:1 and it is enhanced for 16X9 TVs. Again, since the film was shot for 3-D (and since it's not presented on this disc in 3-D due to technical limitations), there is grain throughout the movie, which I'm sure is due to the source material. However, colors and skin tones are represented nicely, and the film is still quite watchable, and seeing it in wide-screen is a bonus, as the last DVD version was full screen.

ZOLTAN – HOUND OF DRACULA:Anchor Bay has done quite a remarkable job on the video presentation. The 16x9 enhanced widescreen presentation looks terrific. There are one or two short scenes where some grain is evident, but overall, the transfer is exceptional. Colors and skin tones are perfect and almost all of the blacks during the night scenes are deep without being murky. Having only ever seen the movie before on late night TV, AB's brilliant video presentation does serve to make the film more watchable.

THE BLACK CAT: Fulci's film is treated to a very nice 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that works nicely with the film. The black levels stay strong and deep and don't break up, there are no problems with mpeg compression artifacts and only mild edge enhancement. Print damage is never worth complaining about as the picture stays clean throughout playback and aside from some very mild film grain in a few scenes, everything looks very, very nice on this DVD.

SLUGS: This bad boy gets a very solid 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that makes the movie look far good than it really ever needed to. The color reproduction is dead on, black levels are strong, there are no compression artifacts present at all and edge enhancement is only slight when it is even there at all. Print damage is held firmly in check and aside from some softness and moderate film grain inherent in the source material, Slugs looks great.

RATS – NIGHT OF TERROR: The 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen image is much better than you'd expect for a low budget Bruno Mattei film. The dark scenes loose a bit of the detail that the lighter scenes exhibit but the black levels don't break up and there are no mpeg compression issues to report. Some slight edge enhancement is noticeable in a couple of scenes and there is some mild film grain but overall, this is a nice transfer.

CAT O' NINE TAILS: The 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer on this DVD is excellent. Color reproduction does justice to Argento's odd pallet and the black levels stay strong and deep. Some mild print damage shows up in the form of a few specks here and there but that's as bad as it gets and film grain, while present, is never distracting or annoying at all.