"Imagine," Gary Giddins writes, "having only one great film in you, and that film being The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." That Tobe Hooper classic, along with the lesser 1977 Eaten Alive, in which Neville Brand plays a hotel keeper who feeds people to his pet crocodile if he doesn't like what they've written on their comment cards, are now available on handsomely packaged DVDs from Dark Sky, a company that Giddins salutes for doing yeoman's work in the specialized field of retrieving rough gems and striking obscurities from the pop junk pile of half-forgotten and poorly received horror pictures. Dark Sky's catalog includes Trilogy of Terror, the 1974 anthology TV-movie that's legendary for its concluding segment, in which Karen Black, entering the screen-queen pantheon in a tatty bathrobe and a flying cloud of auburn hair, raced around her '70s bacheleorette pad pursued by a spear-wielding Zuni tribal doll with the "Check, please!" name of "He Who Kills." Giddins notes that, as an example of the nifty bonus extras that are a Dark Sky trademark, the Trilogy disc boasts a new interview with Karen Black: "Rolling her eyes in recollection of the filmmaking incompetence, she recalls the spills she had to take while pretending to wrestle the doll and offers her own analysis of the film's cult following: 'Women are afraid of vaginal entry'."
Other Dark Sky discs include Mario Bava's 1966 Kill Baby, Kill, John McNaughton's art-gore shocker Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Curtis Harrington's The Killing Kind (made in 1973 with a cast that includes Ann Sothern, John Savage, Luana Anders, and Cindy Williams), and the unclassifiable Spider Baby, a 1964 film by cult director Jack Hill that makes The Addams Family look like The Brady Bunch. (It features a young Sid Haig channeling Hank Wordern and the star, Lon Chaney, Jr., singing, for lack of a better word, the opening theme song.) Coming soon from Dark Sky: the 1973 Ricco the Mean Machine, described by Giddins as "a Mafia revenge film in which Christopher Mitchum sets out to destroy a mob with his pageboy flip and a few awkward karate chops." An as yet undiscovered influence on Javier Bardem's haircut in No Country for Old Men? Duty compels me to check it out.