Dynasty Of Fear

You know that you're in for a bad time when the BEST cover you can find is this one, and it has the BEST TITLE to boot. Things don't go uphill from here, guys, sorry to say. This is only going to be a one way trip, and it's going to lead straight to hell. By the way, before I continue, I wanna point out that this entire post wouldn't have been possible if not for VHS Collector, whose domain is slapped over these images, because they provided all these photos and a lot of information, so yeah, if you like what I do (or hate what I do but wanna see someone else do it) go check them out. Anyway...

...First of all, this is a great title for a movie. Secondly, this is a pretty cool cover. You've got a well dressed woman with a smoking rifle standing in front of a victorian looking home, like she's about to hunt you for sport. Alas, that would not be the case. While the artwork is fantastic, there's still a lot of flaws, and most of them have to do with the back of the box. However, there is one thing on the front that I want to draw attention to before we get to the back, and that is the tagline, which reads "when she's good, she's very good, but when she's bad, she's murder..."

This is a stupid fucking sentence. Like, I'm not even gonna pretend it's not. Not only does it not really parse well, but it just doesn't make sense. According to this tagline this woman only operates under two moral laws; extremely good or fucking murderer. There's no middle ground. And frankly, and you may feel differently, I'm just gonna say that if you're a fucking murderer, you're probably not very good, so there's no way this works one way or the other, or together. There's definitely grey areas when it comes to murder. Self defense comes to mind. But this doesn't strike me as self defense. This woman looks like she's gonna hunt you down with foxes and then hang your severed head over her fireplace.

But alright, stupid ass tagline aside, let's get to the back of the box, which is the real issue here. Not because it's bad, it's just...nonexistent. There's NOTHING THERE. It's a goddamned wall of text on a beige background. Whereas some boxes gives you very little information to go on, this one tells you the entire goddamned plot of the film. You may as well have just read a murder mystery novel. And surprise surprise, it's not at all what the cover lead me to believe, or at least lead me to hope it would be. I wanted a hot lady in a foxhunting outfit chasing people down in the woods. That's not what this is. This seems to be a rather run of the mill murder thriller romance film with absolutely nothing really unique about it, outside the sort of cool box art on the front obviously.

Now, while this would end right here, this is where VHS Collector came in, because see, I had to chop those pictures at the top together into one coherent image for this post. A singular front and back boxart of this one specifically didn't exist, so I had to make it exist. And then I discovered something a little...unusual.

Look at this screencap I took of their website.

So, okay, I see this and I immediately think to myself, "This must be a trilogy". Except that assumption is quickly thrown out by the fact that they all have the same release year. So I think "okay, I guess a lot of bad movies just have the word 'fear' in the title." And then I clicked through to them, because I still found the same release year thing a bit too coincidental. Guys. These are ALL THE SAME MOVIE. Don't believe me?

Here's the box art for "Honeymoon Of...Fear", the title of which only has ellipses on the front for whatever goddamned reason. In fact, there's so many ellipses on this entire packaging, I feel like it's being read by William Shatner and his dramatic pauses. And this is an EVEN WORSE box art than the one we started with! That's right, I started you off with the BEST, because while this one is even worse, there's one even worse than THIS. But let's examine this one. It's got a horrid disjointed front design where they try and smash both female leads together, but then they also just used the same photo for one of them as the main photo on the back, because I guess this company's MO was just "fuck it". And whereas I found the first box's tagline to be bad, this one has one that's also somehow worse.

"You just got married...RUN. It's your honeymoon...RUN. He's trying to kill you...RUN. And no one believes you...RUN."

What the fucking hell am I supposed to do with this? Like, it tells you to run right after you've gotten married. What kind of advice is that? And then to run away from your honeymoon? Like, realistically the only real time you should start running is the whole "he's trying to kill you" part because, yeah, run away from that, that's bad. I can't believe I have to say this but yes, if someone is trying to kill you, you should run away from them. And this is your classic clamshell box art, it's boring and poorly designed and the color scheming is ugly and hell even the font couldn't manage to give a shit. And apparently someone at this company wants to have babies with ellipses. There are 12 ellipses on this box. I know. I counted. But oh, you think this is as bad as it gets? Well then...

Feast your eyes on YET AGAIN THE SAME FUCKING MOVIE. And this one suffers from the same problems as the first two! Nothing on the back except text and a crappy image on the front. Also the font on the spine is just...boy is that of the decade. The funniest thing to me about this third one is how the back blurb reads more like a movie review than an actual informational piece about the movie. It sounds like they lifted it right off the newspaper or something and just pasted it right here. Okay, so she's got a shotgun, again, there's always a gun on these boxes, and she looks kinda terrified, but no real reason why from what we can see on the front. To be honest, these alternate boxes are so bad, I'm not even sure which is arguably worst than the other. And I expect to find alternate boxes for the same movies, that's nothing new. We've learned that a few times on this blog, actually. But it's pretty rare, in my experience, to find multiple boxes that are ALL BAD for the same movie that all have DIFFERENT FUCKING TITLES.

None of these have the same title! They couldn't decide on a singular name, of course their box art's gonna be shit!

So, as usual, I went to Wikipedia for some help. I should probably, after this post, also seek professional help, because this whole situation has broken me. What am I greeted with when I hit the Wikipedia page for this movie?

Yet ANOTHER goddamned image for this movie. I've seen so many different images for this film that I feel like I've SEEN the film at this point. Seems like, according to the wikipedia, "Fear In The Night" is the end title they went with, which is just...it's a downright crime when you have a title like "Dynasty of Fear" sitting right there waiting for you! Come on, man! So some quick tidbits about this film, since this post is already running really long:

• It had a budget of 141,000 pounds.
• It made 835,000 pounds.
• Yes this thing made 700,000 something pounds.
• We really allowed this to happen.
• Then we allowed it to be released multiple times
• Each time worse than the last
• With different titles

It was also written, produced and directed by one man named Jimmy Sangster, which is, I mean, that's a mob gangster name if I've ever heard one. And boy, if you thought this ride was over, think again baby, cause here we go.

Sangster was a pretty prolific screenwriter, turns out, and has a lot of credits to his name. It's a little weird that I'm making fun of this movie when he's in fact the guy who also wrote horror classics "Dracula" and "The Mummy" for the Universal Pictures company back in the 1950s. Yeah. Same guy. He also wrote "The Curse Of Frankenstein" for Warner Brothers. This guy was a pretty heavy hitter in the world of classic horror movies. But my personal favorite under his screenwriting credits is that he wrote "The Crawling Eye". That's right folks. The man who gave us this movie is also the man who gave us "The Crawling Eye". The man, the myth, the legend, Jimmy Sangster.

Turns out he also wrote a handful of books, including one with the title "Your Friendly Neighborhood Death Peddler" which just might be the best book title of all time, really. Sangster died in 2011 at the age of 83, but no cause of death is mentioned on his bio on wikipedia. I'm going to assume, because of his clearly mobster name, that he died during a prohibition raid.

And! You'll be happy to know that this movie is still being released! Two different companies, Shout Factor being one of them, have re-released it on Blu-Ray just quite recently in fact. So this movie, and the man behind it, have a really weird varied life. But at least it's over. At least we've run down the history of "Dynasty of Fear", because I refuse to call it anything else, and boy, lemme tell ya, it left behind a Dynasty of Fear. Now we can all sit back and relax, happy to know that any future releases will at least come with quality decent box art, because graphic designers of today have learned from the mistakes of the past.

That...that's the Blu-Ray cover?

God dammit.