Wade Williams is an entrepreneur who owns a theater in Kansas City.  In the last few decades, he has obtained the rights to a lot of bad SF films (along with a few good ones) and then gets a copyright on the film in his own name.  There's nothing really wrong with that, but Williams has used misleading advertising to promote the movies that he owns, displaying scenes from entirely different films along with a movies synopsis and sometimes stating out and out false claims in his promotional material.  (In his ad for Immediate Disaster he implies that it's a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and that's it was never released in the US, neither of which is true.)

If that's not bad enough, in a move that sends chills down the spines of all film conservationists, he sometimes alters the movies that he owns by re-cutting them and, at least once, even adding in new scenes that he's filmed.  (He did this with Rocketship XM.  Williams also made significant changes to Invaders From Mars.)  By purchasing the prints of the original works in circulation he not only corners the market for the rental fees of the films that he owns but also ensures that the original version never sees the light of a projection bulb.  Ironically, his publicity releases says that he is saving these films.  (It is also rumored that he refused to lend his prints out to aid in film restoration efforts.)

Image has been releasing films in the Wade Williams catalog on DVD for a while, using the prints that Williams owns.  The latest in this series is a horribly bad low budget film Gallery of Horrors.  (Originally released as Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors (1967).)  This anthology film contains five mundane tales that qualify as horror in only the most broad definition of the word.  Though the cover of the DVD boasts the both Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine star in it, both actors were way past their prime and turn in pathetic performances, along with the rest of the cast.  Not only is the film itself bad, but the print that was used is the only thing that qualifies as a 'horror'.

John Carradine hosts these five tales of ennui, and even appears in the first one, The Witches Clock.  In this opening story a couple purchases a 400 year old castle in New England.  (If they had only changed the location to Europe, the story would have made a lot more sense.)  In the dungeon (of course) they discover a clock that, when started, causes a witch (Carradine) to appear and ruin the couple's lives.

King Vampire does take place in Europe, London to be exact, where a vampire has been on the loose, and the police can't capture it, nor can they get the citizens to help them.

We reach the half way point with Monster Raid, where a scientist is betrayed and killed by his assistant who wants to claim an invention for himself, but the senior scientist comes back from the grave for revenge.  (Yawn.)

Spark of Life features Lon Chaney Jr. late in his career as a doctor who agrees to help a pair of students bring a corpse back from the dead.  Taking place "in the mid 1800's" there is a scene where Chaney is called away and he has a conversation on a telephone.  Didn't anyone in the cast or crew catch that error???

At last we reach the end of the film with Count Dracula.  A retelling of the Dracula story in about 15 minutes.  Mr. Harker travels to Transylvania to sell some British property to "Count Alucard" (Dracula spelled backwards. The same name that Lon Chaney Jr. had in Son of Dracula.) The ending to this tale is laughably bad.

This movie is unspeakably bad.  It was rushed out to cash in on the popularity of the British anthology film Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965.)  Not only do they steal the format and title, but even one of the characters in this mess is named after the star of House of Horrors, Peter Cushing.

The tales in this film are dull and uninteresting but even worse, the production values are almost nonexistent.  According to actor Ron Brogan who appears in the second story, the movie was filmed at an incredibly fast pace.  He received his script at 8 am, and his story was finished by the end of the same day.  Actors flub their lines often, boom shadows are easy to see, and some props don't work correctly but they don't bother to waste time on retakes.

The acting is as bad as the stories themselves.  The two stars walk through their roles with Chaney looking especially old and tired but the rest of the cast is equally bad.  No one gives any emotions to their lines and the entire film sounds like people are reading the script for the first time, which many of them were.

The film does have some camp value, but with some of the stories not making any sense (the stone castle burns down at the climax of the first story, but then a new couple move into it in the last scene) and others not having much of a plot at all (Monster Raid) it's hard to enjoy this film on any level.

Audio:

The two channel mono soundtrack was pretty bad.  There was a constant background hum and distortion was present, and even the cleanest sections were muted with the dialog sounding muddled.  This is a disc that is significantly below average, even for a film of this age.

Video:

This film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1.  Unfortunately, that's the best thing that can be said about this DVD's image.  The disc is not anamorphically enhanced, something that I could understand 6 or 7 years ago when widescreen TVs were rare, but in this day and age there's really no excuse not to enhance a movie for 16:9 televisions.

Notice not only the line across the top of the image, but the way the sheets on the furniture change color near the bottom of the screen.

The picture itself is really awful.  The print that was used was wretched, with constant scratches, lines, and dirt marring the picture.  The colors were faded, the contrast was rather poor and details disappeared in dark areas.  This one of the worst DVDs I've seen in a while.  Another spectatcular Wade Williams disc.

Extras:

This is a bare-bones disc.  Nothing extra was included.

Final Thoughts:

With faded colors, constant scratches and dirt and muffled sound, Gallery of Horrors describes the quality of the disc more than the movie.  This disc is just plain bad, and the film itself in no better.  If the quality of the print that was used was a little better, some may be able to enjoy this film for the camp value.  As it is, this was hard to watch.  A lousy film with lousy audio and video quality, I don't feel a twinge of guilt when I recommend that people Skip it.