Long after Creature Feature and before Mystery Science 3000 was Movie Macabre, a B-Movie TV theatre program, hosted by a comical, low-rent, Valley Girl-accented 'Mistress of the Dark' named Elvira (Cassandra Peterson). Shortly after it first premiered on local Los Angeles TV in the early 1980's, it became a bonafide hit nationwide on syndication, transforming Elvira into a pop culture icon.

Now she has released some of Movie Macabre's many film showcases into double feature collections, now available on DVD. The one reviewed here features the films Gamera, Super Monster and They Came From Beyond Space.

Gamera, Super Monster is a 1980 Japanese giant monster movie. Keiichi (Koichi Maeda) is a boy who loves turtles. He especially loves Gamera, the giant turtle monster who defends the Earth from monsters and is "friend to all children".

A spaceship known as Zanon arrives on Earth with a mysterious alien leader (Osamu Kobayashi) planning to conquer Earth. Trying to stop him are a trio of alien superwomen disguised as Earthlings, named Kilara (Mach Fumiake), Marsha (Yaeko Kojima), and Mitan (Yoko Komatsu).

Soon enough, Zanon unleashes all of Gamera's monster foes to destroy the Earth, with alien superwoman Giruge (Keiko Kudo) also dispatched by the leader to oversee their progress. Now it's up to Gamera to save the Earth once again from what may be his greatest threat yet.

They Came From Beyond Space is a 1967 British science-fiction film, based on the book The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard. In Cornwall, England, strange alien beings arrive in an asteroid crash. They soon possess a team of scientists and everybody in the town, locking their brains into a comatose state.

Dr. Curtis Temple (Robert Hutton), an American alien expert, has a metal plate from a head injury in a car accident, making him the only human being not possessed. After he trying to evade the aliens, he goes aboard on a rocket in a farm that takes him up to the moon.

There, Temple comes face-to-face with the aliens' leader, known as the Moon Master (Michael Gough). Now it's up to him to stop the Moon Master and his alien subordinates from abducting the human race for their own purposes.

Like many double feature collections, these two movies, despite their similar themes of alien invasion from foreign countries, are still a bit mismatched. Despite managing to surprisingly be rather fun and sweet with a touching score by Shunsuke Kikuchi, Gamera, Super Monster has all the hallmarks of a B-movie at its absolute best. It has low-tech special effects, an often logic-lacking script, and stock footage abound from previous movies in the Gamera franchise, as well as, oddly enough, various TV anime to boot.

However, the movie is ultimately way too juvenile when juxtaposed against the slightly better They Came From Beyond Space. However, while the story