But still, you can't beat that price

I love Mill Creek’s 50 Movie Packs. It’s a problem. Not that they have nothing to offer, mind you (hell, the Martial Arts set is worth it for The Impossible Kid alone). It’s just that the sheer number and variety of them couples inauspiciously with the fact that -- as I’ve just recently realized -- I am prone to purchasing them indiscriminately regardless of content.

This often occurs when I need to add a few dollars to an Amazon order to get free shipping. In the moment, the idea that I can get both free shipping and fifty more movies for just a few extra bucks seems like a deal too good to pass up, even though thirty to forty of those films will ultimately go unwatched. Not that I don’t try to justify the purchase with an initial, heroic effort to watch as many of them as I can -- a forced march that ultimately sees me consuming otherwise prohibitive anti-films in defiance of any notion I might previously have held of dignity or aesthetic standards (for instance, no other circumstance, short of brute coercion, would have lead to me sitting through The Dungeon of Harrow). For someone with any kind of obsessive-compulsive tendencies at all, one of these sets is like the ribbon you tie around the tail of a caged animal in the hope that it will exhaust itself chasing it.

Anyway, as I was saying, it was only recently that I realized that, under the circumstances just described, I would be prone to buying even the notional 50 Movie Pack pictured above. “Hmm, ‘Pure Crap’”, I would think. “Sounds dire, sure, but when you think about it, it breaks down to only pennies per film!” In honor of this sad admission of helplessness, my good friend #lowdudgeon whipped up the cover graphic above . God help me, I’m already wishing it was real!

But most importantly, readers, now that we have this hypothetical beauty, which mottled denizens of the public domain ghetto do you think should compose its hypothetical contents? I think a nice caveat would be if the inclusion of a title in the Pure Crap 50 Movie Pack would constitute a form of banishment, excluding it from appearing on any other set henceforth. (For instance, I’d love to put God’s Gun on there to prevent it from sullying any future bargain bin Western collections I purchase). But I’m not going to impose limitations on things, because limitations are not in the spirit of… well, of crap, I guess. Your suggestions welcome below.