Just when you thought that DVD was only about putting a movie on a shiny plastic platter and charging schmucks 36 bucks a pop for the pleasure of missing three more hours of their life, along comes something different to take your mind off the real world and send your brain into a state of blissful distraction.

Flixmix is a capital idea of themed film clip compilations on DVD. This is the perfect medium to allow instant access to specific clips, jump to extra features and generally to discover many films at once, all in a high quality user friendly fashion that even your good old granny with rheumatism in her hands could enjoy.

Boogeymen is the first cab off the rank in this series, and it is a one hour compilation of some of the the supremo bad guy yuckheads from horror films over the years. It focuses mainly on the more well known baddies (with a few lesser known ones thrown in), most of whom have probably made many a young adolescent lad squirm in his sleep and many a girlfriend worry about what her boyfriend gets up to late at night in front of the telly.

In playback order, this DVD features the following characters (and films):
Pinhead – Hellraiser
Freddy Krueger – A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wishmaster – Wishmaster
Leatherface – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Ghostface – Scream
The Leprechaun – Leprechaun
Chucky – Child’s Play 2
Candyman – Candyman
Simon Cartwright – The Ugly
The Fisherman – I Know What You Did Last Summer
Camilla – The Guardian
The Dentist – The Dentist
The Tall Man – Phantasm
Blade – The PuppetMaster
Norman Bates – Psycho
Jason Voorhees – Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
Michael Myers – Halloween

Watching this DVD is an entertaining way to cut out the excess flab and get right to the juicy bits of each movie. Yet you should take note that this DVD could give away some plot for the relevant movie and wreck the experience of watching the actual film for you. Then again, many of the films featured aren’t available on DVD in region 4 anyway, so you’ll probably have to chase them up on video if this whets your appetite for a bit of horror shenanigans. Not only that, but if you're not usually into this sort of thing, and only picked it up off the rental shelf because you thought it would distract your ten year old kids for an hour while you were on the Internet browsing for porn without them catching you, then you should also note that it can get a little gruesome and bloody and might not be suitable for the youngsters.

This is not an easy one to summarise, as being a compilation means in this case you get a mix of pan and scan and letterboxed images and none of it 16:9 enhanced. The best way to put it is that the picture for the actual clips looks average at best, but easily acceptable for what it is. Sharpness varies, as does shadow detail and colour, there is some aliasing clearly visible and the source images aren't always in the best nick. But keep in mind that we're not watching the actual films here, and you'll be right. Besides, you'll probably be too fixed on whats happening to worry about how it looks.

The sound comes as DD 5.1 and DD 2.0 stereo. There's not a great lot of difference between the two, with the 5.1 mix sounding slightly more open, but not making much of an impact with the rear speakers. Everything that happens is clear - the screaming, the shouting, the slashing and the bleeding all sound fine, just not as exciting as it all would on the full-blown movie release.

Extras have been fairly well catered for. There are 12 theatrical trailers which covers most of the films, plus one more for the next DVD in this series (Ultimate Fights), biographies for 11 of the boogeymen characters on the disc and a separate bio for Robert Englund. Flixfacts Animated Trivia is a subtitle track which displays trivia about the film while the clip plays. The audio commentary is by horror aficionado and Freddy Krueger actor, Robert Englund. As far as commentaries go, it’s a so-so effort, with some interesting tidbits and some not so interesting comments. The animated game Name That Frame has you guessing which film the frame onscreen comes from. Give it a whirl once, you’ll probably play it for three minutes and then never again. Last is the Easter egg which hides an extra clip for the film Jack Frost 2 (see our Easter Eggs section for info on how to access it).