The Boneyard Collection – review

Director: Edward L. Plumb

Release Date: 2008

Contains spoilers

"A who’s who of B movie-dom," I guess that is what you could call this. The film is a budget portmanteau piece and the official blurb suggests it is made up of four short films. It isn’t. Her Morbid Desires is the piece we will look at and Cry of the Mummy is a surreal piece about a mummy (strangely enough). However the Devil’s Due at Midnight is nothing but a fake trailer and Boogie with the Undead is a fake trailer/music video.

The actual film starts with an extended credit sequence where it lists the significant participants with pen picture bios. This takes upwards of seven minutes.

Forrest J. Ackerman as Dr. Acula

The wraparound is more a series of introductions handled by Dr. Acula (Forrest J. Ackerman, Dracula Vs Frankenstein, Scarlet Moon, Vampirella & The Dead Undead) and his two ghost assistants Aurora (Danielle James, True Blood) and Electra (Dena Wilkinson). It is low rent stuff, not really anything to write home about.

Romantic Adventures of Count Dracula

The segment starts off with a group of women circling Jennifer (Kandis Fay) urging her to join them and to die and to live forever. Jennifer is far from convinced. In steps Dracula (Ronn Moss) and continues her seduction. Jennifer swoons at his supernatural touch and he promises the other women that they, the vampires, will feast well that night. There is the call of “cut” and we are on a film set. Indeed there are no vampires in this section of the film, but the film being made is a vampire film.

Robert Loggia as Bob

The film follows Freddi (Erica P. Hanson) whose Aunt Gloria (Tippi Hedren) has got her this gig as the lead actress in the Romantic Adventures of Count Dracula. When we get the next scene in the Court of the Vampire Queen ( Molly Murphy), at the end of the scene we have an actress (Shawna Baca) doing a death scene that turns out to be for real. This causes the director (William Smith) to quit – he is then replaced by Bob (Robert Loggia, Innocent Blood). However the plot of actresses dying is not as satisfying as it should be.

behind the scenes

Essentially the film concentrates on showing us scenes from the movie being filmed – not enough to offer a consistent story for the film within the film, but there are some actually quite nicely shot moments – and so shows us absolutely nothing about the murder mystery. Indeed some of the non-film scenes are absolutely pointless, such as the film’s producer, Gerry Shah (Seth Marten), meeting the author whose book has been adapted. This was just an excuse to give a role to Barbara Steele and, unfortunately, added nothing of substance to the proceedings.

Cassandra Peterson as Elvira

Eventually, after 3 deaths and four directors, the film is made and Freddi goes to the wrap party intent on unmasking the killer (who she has detected through woman’s intuition alone and who fesses up at the first chance). The wrap party has cameos from, amongst others, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson, the Ketchup Vampires & the Ketchup Vampires 2), Ray Harryhausen and Brinke Stevens - Freddi gets Brinke’s help with getting the villain.

fangs

So, all in all, the vampire scenes look nice for the main but it is a movie being shot and has no coherent story for us. The murder mystery, which makes up the actual story, is lacking in story, clues, detectives and anything else that would make it interesting. It is a fair parade of B movie/genre favourites and watchable but not worth a high score. 2,5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.