Badmovies.org Forum

id have to say digiview they say ditigaly remastered on them and there 88 cents where i shop heck indestructable man and hunchback of notre dame dvds i own from them say colectors edition no special features and bad quality heck the verison of indistructable man on the internet archive is better they did introduce me to carnival of souls though so yeh
so what is your guys least favarite company

Mine is probably St. Clair Vision.
I picked up the Vincent Price collection. It claims to have: The house on haunted hill, The last man on Earth, The bat(1959).
So, when i started The bat, I realized something. This is the original! What was made in 1926. No Vincent Price.Then why the hell is it on the Vincent Price collection? What a ripoff... :thumbdown:

lol
i like there giant monster collection alot of gamera movies

Well yeah, they have some good movie packs (like the Bela Lugosi one, that I own) but this was unforgivable for me. Vincent Price is the man.

Artisan - They looove their Terminator Series, but things that not absolutely everyone knows about such as Waxwork, Fright Night Part II, or The Boys From Brazil they couldn't care less about in terms of extras, image quality, laguage selection, or otherwise...

Anchor Bay - This is sure to be a controversial choice due to Anchor Bay's excellent habit of buying and releasing forgotten gems, but they just can't stop doing the most irksome things! No extras on perplexing films such as Neon Maniacs, or on Return of the Killer Tomatoes (When just about all the crew gladly came together for a special edition for the original), releasing something close to the UK DVD version of Phantasm with only 1/4 the retrospective documentary included in the UK box-set (Concerning only the first Phantasm installment, although there was no documentary on their Phantasm III disc concerning the third), and spontaneously discontinuing sales of films like The Midnight Hour or Nightmares, making them near-impossible to find at a sane price... Oh, and not to mention none of their discs have subtitles!!

Columbia - Done some nice releases on several titles, especially newer ones... But then there are maddeningly skimpy releases such as the cult-favorite Fright Night (Lots of subtitles, no extras but a trailer, which sucks considering most of the cast still seem to be good friends and very willing to put out a better edition of the film http://frightnightfocus.blogspot.com/ (http://frightnightfocus.blogspot.com/)), or the American classic On the Waterfront. Though the DVD of "Waterfront" is a special edition and Marlon Brando was still alive at the time of it's release, I hear neither he nor any of the rest of the living cast and crew, save for Elia Kazan, who did an interview, contributed to the disc (There were some film historians who did a commentary, though I feel it would have maybe been a better commentary if someone who actually worked on the film was included :hatred:)! I find it pretty hard to believe that they would all turn down the chance to comment on such a piece!

Anything released by PRISM, they make alot of cuts.

MGM has infuriated me in the past by not offering wide screen versions of certain movies while doing so for others.  One of the biggest culprits was the original DVD of Child's Play which was bare bones full frame (though a special edition is FINALLY coming out in a month of two).  They also released the 1st Missing in Action in widescreen but only released the 2nd and 3rd films in the series in full frame.

Also, how many more times are Anchor Bay going to release versions of the Halloween or the 1st 2 Evil Dead films?

yeah, i echo the thoughts of a lot of you, with your complaints about anchor bay. they do a great job with extras, but the lack of subtitles is really lame. sometimes i don't want to blast a movie just to hear the characters, so it'd be nice to have some text down there to help me out.

i'm also not so fond of any company that sees fit to release their dvds in those crappy cardboard-and-plastic-hinge boxes. i dunno what it is, because sometimes they actually have a decent amount of extra, but the box just turns me off.

blue underground often comes off as a sort of ambulance-chaser, often releasing sub-par editions of films that anchor bay has just dropped the rights to, with fewer features.

Several years ago  Hong Kong's Mei Ah released a series of terrible transfers of some Akira Kurasawa films, complete with laughable and incomprehensible 'Engrish' subtitles and plot summaries.

Here's their description for SANSHIRO SUGATA:

Kurosawa had successfully portraved an outstanding negative character. A pale and haggard face, plus the fluffy hair, creates a queer murderous look which enhance the deadly atmosphere of the combat.

You can still find most of them on E-Bay for about four bucks.

Funny thing, Mei Ah seemed to eventually realize the humor in their bizarre translations since their release of BIO-ZOMBIE includes subtitles in 'ENGLISH' and 'ENGRISH'. 
:bouncegiggle:

I second that, just got the Beast from 20,000 fathoms from WB (which I've heard has some decent extras), but the papery feel just makes it feel cheap! Why do WB have to do this.!? Films like The Thing from another world, Them!, The Time Machine and Forbidden Planet, that will remain parts of cinematic history for a long time, I think, deserves a more long lasting encasement - NOT a piece of cardboard!! :hatred:

So my contribution to the topic will be WB!

..oh and *shudder* "House of Horror", a piece of sh*t company which released "Flesh for Frankenstein" in a "digital remastered directors widescreen uncut version"....which clearly wasn't ANY of the above except perhaps uncut, plus it didn't even include a menu! :buggedout:

(I can't really agree with the Anchor Bay comments as my spec. edition copies of Re-Animator and Day of the Dead are amongst my favourites(packaging!). Although no subtitles can be a bit annoying.)

I'm going to guess those complaining about Anchor Bay and Blue Underground haven't sampled much product from PD labels.  So there's a lack of extras, even the major studios release bare bones DVDs, but as the alternative is to NOT HAVE THE MOVIES AT ALL I'm going to say this is hardly a reason to call a DVD company to mat in a thread with a title "worst dvd company to buy from".  While the St. Clair Vision multi-movie packs are pretty bad (they're the ONLY label I've ever returned a multi-movie pack to the store due to the video being unwatchable and put on my NEVER BUY FROM AGAIN list) there's been far worse out there.  People like to dump on Mill Creek, but at least I've not had to return any of their product for being unwatchable!  Besides they have great customer service.

You want something to complain about buy something from . . .

Saturn/ Passion Productions/ Miracle Pictures/ 1st Miracle Pictures/ Peacock Films/ et al -- The Czar of shady labels.  They started out as Saturn/Passion Productions and their DVDs, which were flea market staples and even managed to pop up in bargain bins in outlet stores and strip malls, were very hit or miss.  Not just in quality but on whether the discs would even PLAY.  Even their latter product, which seemed to improved on the manufactoring end, was still spotty on video quality.

Digiview (Digivue) - I've seen discs carrying the "Digivue" name at flea markets that look almost identical to the Digiview discs carried by Wal*Mart and Target but never bought any.  I'm not sure if those are just misprints sold as remainders or what but, of the few Digiview discs I have most are VHS dub quality or ports (?) from commercial DVDs.  (See my review of Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-qzcELew6frWBZspks_7SsnUuv9VNTUA-?cq=1&p=319).)  That may sound great but Digiview releases sanitized versions of movies, meaning they're edited for content.  Which they don't disclose.

East-West DVD - You can often find these DVDs at flea markets and Goodwill stores.  They're a budget bin product that, often, squeezes two movies to a SS DVD.  Video quality varies from "filmed through a window smeared with the contents of a baby diaper" to even worse.  How bad?  See my review of Romulus and Remus (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-qzcELew6frWBZspks_7SsnUuv9VNTUA-?cq=1&p=274).

Double D Distribution - These hit the dollar stores a year or two back.  They're essentially the same quality as East-West product.

Ground Zero Entertainment - Responsible for quite possibly THE WORST quality martial arts releases you'll ever find, by which I mean you get video drop out and tracking lines running through the image from the VHS source they dubbed from.  What makes this label especially egregious is the fact certain B&M retailers stocked them and charged FULL RETAIL prices for what are essentially budget bin DVDs.  Picked some up at Big Lots last year.

kester, you're probably right about our anchor bay gripes. they're perhaps over-stated.

another thought- i think that it's important to note that "digitally re-mastered" means "transfered to a digital medium". it doesn't mean that it was cleaned up or improved in any fashion.

"...something new every day!"  :teddyr: Seems a tad unnecessary to spell it out on a DVD, but I guess it works since people like me didn't(note, past tense) know better...

My vote goes to a company called Eclectic DVD.  A few years ago I bought 3 movies from this company:

* THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE
* VAMPIRE'S NIGHT ORGY
* THE EERIE MIDNIGHT HORROR SHOW

They all look like below average VHS quality transfers and from time to time the pictures jump because the source material obviously had a few frames of film missing (probably damaged and spliced back together).   I haven't watched them in a few years, but I also seem to remember that one or more of these movies is a full-frame version, even though it says "LETTERBOXED" across the front cover.  BOO!

yeah but that doesn't help my "collectors editions" of hunchback and indestructible man!

I bought q $5 copy of "The Brain the Wouldn't Die" that stated "digitally Remastered" and it was obviously taking right from archive.org!

some of manga video's releases are totally s**tty. they may have released a newer, better-looking version since i saw the last one, but i remember watching a dvd of the original vampire hunter d, and it was just crappy. all dark, and muddy. you could barely tell what was happening in some scenes.

Did I miss it? Did no one mention ALPHA? Alpha releases some true crap, some of the movies they release are of a worse copy than you can find on a Mill Creek 50 pack and some of those are pretty bad.


If I find a some obscure film and I see it's a Alpha release, I'll skip it and find a release from someone else, as most of their stuff is public domain anyway.

i'm conflicted about including these guys, because some of their products are really fun, but 5minutestolive.com (http://5minutestolive.com) offers some pretty poor-looking stuff. granted, they're just DVD-Rs with generic labels printed on them, and sometimes this'll be the only place you can find a region 1/0 version of a movie they offer, but they never include optional subtitles, and often when they do offer a film with burned-in subtitles, they often look horrible.

for example, i once bought godspeed, you black emperor from them, and you could hardly see the subtitles because they were white, against a black and white film, and the disc was taken from a really washed-out 3rd or 4th generation vhs. they grade their films for image quality, and this one got a "B", but i simply don't agree.

to their benefit, at least they stop offering films when they become available commercially. at one point they were the only game in town if you were looking for the garbage pail kids movie, but now that it's been released by a major company, it looks like they've stopped.

i hate to say this but the mill creek manos the hands of fate is pure crap compared to the alpha one the m c one looks like a old vhs part of the picture is choped off and the film ble
bleeds so alphas not that bad