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Creature Features Collection
[Elite]
2005; b&w and color
Directed by Gerald Cailliat, Thomas Briat & Pierre-Henry Salfati
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Back in the day, a wee impressionable Bunny Fontaine would wile away many successive Saturday afternoons with her grandpa, watching a thing called Creature Double Feature while he knocked back round after round of Tanqueray and tonic. It was also during these afternoons that she was taught how to shuffle cards, play card games and cheat at card games; and, by the way, in reality this portion of my childhood was a lot more innocent and lot less Bukowski-ish than it sounds. Anywhoo, when we got this DVD in the mail that UHF show (possibly shown on Channel 48, as immortalized in the Jukebox Zeros song of the same name) was the first thing that came to mind after I saw the title. Sadly, this Creature Features Collection is nothing like the Creature Double Feature of my youth - despite the fact that both entities are essentially dedicated to the celebration of horror and science fiction films. What we have here is three documentaries, produced by and for the Bravo Network, that do a good job of draining all the fun out of their respective subjects. Far from giving the audience the history of the greatest movie monsters of all time, this is really more of a scholarly (and by scholarly I mean boring) social commentary on the portrayal of death by monster in modern and classic cinema; narrated by a guy who sounds like a parody of the parody Eric Idle does of the Nick Broomfield-esque documentary filmmaker on the Simpsons. Honestly, two of the three offerings (the machines and the dead) literally put me to sleep and I think I only lasted through the other one (the beasts) because it happened to be first and I was multi-tasking while watching it. (To elaborate, I folded some laundry, organized a stack of mail that had been left on the bed from earlier in the day, and painted my toenails.) I mean, what else is there to say really? Although while we're here I would like to publicly state that this is the first and only time the BMB will ever EVER acknowledge a documentary segment on cinematic portrayals of the wolfman that does not mention Paul Naschy! (This one didn't even mention El Hombre Lobo!!) Maybe this would play better in the seven-minute, between commercial, segments it was intended to be shown in.
—Bunny
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