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Like so many of its old, public domain peers The Vampire Bat has enough various releases to drive a person batty. But which ones are worth the price tag?

There's a huge number of stand-alone DVD's and at least as many more various combo packs with other old horror movies. I found one Blu-ray combo pack.

I'll talk about the 50 pack of “Horror Classics” version.

Video:

1.33: There is no widescreen version. The picture has a lot of noise. This is common for old movies, but this one has even more than usual especially in the darker scenes. It also skips occasionally.

Audio:

1.0 mono: The sound mix is not great although for the most part everything is clearly understandable. There is a lot of white noise and pops, though, and the sound gets out of sync with the picture in at least one spot.

Packaging:

This particular disc is housed in a cardboard sleeve contained in a Velcro-fastened box. You can read about the set as a whole in great detail in the Horror Classics (50 pack) guide.

Some comments make claim to an hour and a half long version although there is some evidence that it is listed incorrectly and that a version that long doesn’t and never has existed. Who knows for sure? The most commonly listed run time is right at an hour. The printed Horror Classics length says it’s slightly over 1 hour 10 minutes, but in actuality it’s almost exactly an hour. So is this the most complete version? I don't have any idea, and I have yet to run across anyone that does. The longest official run time I've seen attached to the movie is 65 minutes, but I'm certainly no expert on the matter.

Extras:

There are no extras of any kind.

Other Editions:

So do any of them stand out among the others? Not a single one. Even the “Special Edition” lists nothing that makes it actually special. I can't even give you a recommendation based on listed run times because they vary from barely over an hour to 3 hours long. I'm relatively certain that there is no 3 hour cut of the film so these listings are clearly unreliable.

None list any details other than what I've already talked about, and none list any extras.

The Ultimate Horror Classics Blu collection seems to be part of a slowly growing trend (or perhaps attempt at a trend) of using Blu's storage capacity to fit a lot of movies on a single disc. 18 public domain films (some very common, some fairly rare) reside on a single disc in standard 480i definition (no HD here). The best I can say for these is that they seem to occasionally present the original image ratios and may be very slightly improved quality over some of the cheaper DVD budget packs. Otherwise they offer nothing special aside from being exceptionally self-space friendly. They offer no extras and can be somewhat hard to find.

Final Thoughts:

The quality of the Horror Classics 50 pack is not great, but there is no guarantee that any other version offers anything better. Every comment I've seen that bothers to mention the quality, regardless of the release, speaks of its weakness. Don't spend much on it and be disappointed when it lacks. At least with a bargain pack like the 50 Horror Classics you get a low cost per movie.