Tromatic Special Edition: Frightmare/The Horror Star (1983) - Reviewed

on
Images courtesy of Troma Video

In March of 2016, Vinegar Syndrome teamed up with Troma Team Video to publish a handful of titles including Luther the Geek and Frightmare also known as The Horror Star.  Now in 2018 as part of an annual Halloween themed month of horror dubbed 31 Days of Hell I took a look at that disc after binge buying a ton of Vinegar Syndrome titles which you can read here.  A goof on horror movie star power and a group of your usual horny teenagers who get their long awaited just desserts, it was a fun little horror flick featuring German character actor Ferdy Mayne who himself once played a vampire in Roman Polanski’s film The Fearless Vampire Killers as well as a French general opposite Ryan O’Neal in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.  No stranger to horror as Mayne played the nefarious vampire Count Von Krolock in the Polanski film, Mayne has the look of Vincent Price by way of Sean Connery or Terence Stamp and in Frightmare aka The Horror Star it plays to those strengths and resemblances. 

 
While you can still nab the Vinegar Syndrome disc on Amazon as there still appear to be some copies left, in recent months titles such as Severin’s release of The Last Horror Film with Joe Spinnell which got a standalone 4K disc as well as the Vinegar Syndrome releases of Luther the Geek and Frightmare have been reverting the rights back to Troma Video.  Their latest forthcoming Tromatic Special Edition for Frightmare is basically a port of the same 2K scan done for the Vinegar Syndrome disc with the same subset of extras including archival audio commentaries with the director and two of the stars and the Hysteria Continues podcast, but there are also some DVD intros with Lloyd Kaufman and Debbie Rechon that all but canonize this as a fully Tromatic Special Edition disc release.  Now, the question becomes is the double dip worth it?  If you already own the prior Vinegar Syndrome release, there’s no reason to get this.  But if you don’t own it, the Troma disc is cheaper and is more or less the same transfer across both releases.

--Andrew Kotwicki