The Amicus Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.0

The Amicus Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 8, 2018

The recently reviewed Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros. Years makes an interesting point in passing that, as iconic as Hammer Films’ horror outings undeniably were, there were other studios pumping out product whose features were at least occasionally mistaken for being Hammer productions, when in fact they weren’t. Probably prime among these examples would be Amicus Productions, a British institution that was nonetheless founded by two Americans, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. Rosenberg and Subotsky themselves had a somewhat infamous Hammer Films connection, having (according to Rosenberg, anyway) come up with the project that ultimately became The Curse of Frankenstein, a 1957 opus that was Hammer’s first horror outing in color, Hammer’s first “reboot” of a venerable horror character, and arguably the film that set the tone for what became a decade or more of Hammer’s preeminence in the horror genre. Subotsky and Rosenberg were kind of pushed to the sidelines on the project, receiving no credit, and (again according to Rosenberg) even handing over their meager $5000 payday to Ray Stark in exchange for a promised partnership which never manifested. There was obviously some kind of discord associated with this film, at least from the perspective of Rosenberg (who’s on hand in some archival interviews in this set, disparaging both Hammer in general and Eliot Hyman in particular), something that may have led to Rosenberg and Subotsky deciding to set out on their own when they could hopefully be captains of their own fate.

Kind of interestingly, then, while Subotsky and Rosenberg had gotten into the horror game before the creation of Amicus with the 1960 film The City of the Dead (note that the link points to a British release), their first two outings in their guise as Amicus Productions were quasi-musicals designed to appeal to the teen set, It's Trad, Dad! (directed by none other than Richard Lester) and Just for Fun. While Amicus occasionally varied outside of its largely self imposed horror limits, including with a couple of Doctor Who related feature films, Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks — Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., the studio is arguably best remembered today for its so-called portmanteau features, films which typically included four or five at least tangentially linked stories into one film. The first of these portmanteau efforts was 1965’s Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (note that the link points to a German release, though it’s region free and I personally found the technical merits better than the domestic release from Olive). That film set the portmanteau template for Amicus, where typically some kind of framing story would link the “episodes” contained within the film, and that’s pretty much exactly what one of the films in this new Amicus set (Asylum) does. Kind of interestingly, though, the two other feature films in the Amicus Collection are the somewhat rarer outings from Amicus that offer only one narrative thread for the entire film. Of those other features, one (And Now the Screaming Starts) is the really rare Amicus offering that traffics in what had been Hammer's stock in trade, Gothic horror.

Reviews for the four films (actually three films and a collection of trailers) in this set can be accessed by clicking on the following links:

Asylum Blu-ray review

And Now the Screaming Starts Blu-ray review

The Beast Must Die Blu-ray review

The Vault of Amicus Blu-ray review

The Amicus Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Video quality of each release is assessed in the above linked reviews.

The Amicus Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audio quality of each release is assessed in the above linked reviews.

The Amicus Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Supplementary material for each release is detailed in the above linked reviews.

The Amicus Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Amicus Collection has one film with some technical issues that some fans may be less than pleased with, but Severin has provided an interesting if kind of weird cross section of offerings while also including a number of interesting supplements.