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Night Chills is a collection of 10 hard to find, ultra-low-budget horror movies, some of which are themselves anthologies of short films. I’m betting most people have never heard of most of these movies (even if you have it might very well be under a different title), and some of you may come away wishing you had continued to never hear of them.

Still, if you’re reading this you’re probably looking for one title in particular, like I was, or just browsing horror movie collections. Either way you’ve come to the right place to find out what’s what in the world of Night Chills.

The only unifying elements here are the genre (even that is only loosely applied to some of the choices) and the obscurity (which makes me think distribution rights were cheaply acquired). So everything from rating (some are OK for younger audiences, some not so much) to quality of the presentations vary considering the varied budgets and differences in age of the movies (from the 60’s to ’02). If you're looking for high quality presentations you might as well move along now because none of them are particularly good. Even the ones that do offer audio quality above 1.0 mono or a picture that isn't so dark you have to squint to make out the details aren't going to be anything approaching a truly satisfactory presentation.

This is a 5 disc DVD set.

Video:

The ratio may vary here and there but count on mostly 1.33 framing (the TV standard ratio) or at best non-anamorphic widescreen (which will have black bars on all 4 sides on a widescreen TV). The quality varies a bit, too, but I wouldn't say that any of them actually look good - some just look less awful than others.

Audio:

The audio is mostly 1.0 mono, but you might get a 2.0 stereo mix in there a few times. There is even one with a 5.1 option. None of them offer quality that is impressive. At best it's decent, but a few of these have audio quality that is extremely bad.

Packaging:

This is a 5 DVD set for 10 movies, 1 per side of each double-sided disc. The DVD's come in a plastic box that is a pretty good design for this kind of set.

It offers a movie guide on the back although the guide to questionable content is unreliable. For example, they make no mention of nudity for a movie that features full-frontal shots while listing "partial nudity" for a movie whose most revealing scene is a girl's bare back. You can get better details from my guides.

The menus are simple but well done. There are chapter breaks for each movie, too. A lot of times in these budget sets if there are chapters at all they will be randomly placed. This one actually uses logical points such as a chapter break at the beginning of each individual story in Creeptales making navigation impressively easy. A chapters menu is provided.

Extras:

There are no extras for any of the movies.

Movies:

I'll tackle each movie in its own review as I always do and provide you with only a brief summary in this particular guide. They're listed here in alphabetical order rather than how they are presented in the set which seems to be a completely random order.

-Birds of Prey (AKA Beaks: The Movie): An amateurish Birds kind of movie. Birds go nuts and start killing people. Not worth the time.

-Broken Skull (AKA Headcrusher): A slasher flick about a dead guy reanimated and killing people. This is the most low budget looking thing in the set. It’s so bad it’s worth seeing to poke some malicious fun at. It’s heavy on shock value including a guy getting his manhood bitten off. It’s goofy and stupid.

-Creeptales: Short stories of ghosts and monsters. Worth the purchase of the set all by itself. It is full of no-names except for Tom Kenny and is amateurish, but it is great campy fun.

-In the Little Mansion: The ghost of a dead woman comes back to her house and interacts with the still living residents. Mostly boring.

-Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A girl who lives a life of thievery in the city has a stalker that becomes homicidal. Don’t get excited about the big names in this one; it’s slow and dull. The video is dark and the audio so bad I almost couldn’t sit through it. Uma Thurman is the only decent thing about this flick. Steve Buscemi might have been, but he really has nothing more than a cameo.

-Knight Tales: This is a silly slasher dealing with table-top role playing games turning into a bloodbath – somewhat at least, I don’t think they had enough budget to actually include blood. This seems targeted specifically towards role players. I can see most people not really understanding a lot of the scenes dealing with the gaming. It's not great, but as a gamer I enjoyed seeing it.

-Little Corey Gorey: A kid kills his bully of a brother and finds himself forced to cover it up with more misdeeds while dodging angry drug dealers. Not great but not bad if you like dark comedy.

-Machine Head: A science geek of a kid creates his own Frankenstein monster. Tragedy follows. It's weak but enjoyable.

-Slash Dance: A killer lures girls to dance auditions to slaughter them. A hot undercover cop investigates. It has too much focus on dance rehearsals without enough suspense. It's mostly boring.

-Unholy Terror (AKA Crucible of Terror): An unscrupulous artist attempts to lure an art buyer’s beautiful wife into his clutches while someone runs around killing people. The oldest flick here this feels like a black and white movie even though it’s not. It’s slow with terrible picture quality.

Other Editions:

There are none.

Final Thoughts:

With the exception of CreepTales nothing in this set is worth actually getting excited about although there are a couple that I will revisit sooner or later. I’m glad I got it since that one movie is worth the price of admission, but overall I can't recommend it unless you are hunting for one of these elusive titles or have an affinity for odd, low-budget flicks.