I’m a sucker for classic monster movies. I recently binged my way through all 30 films in the classic Universal Monsters collection. And when I ran out of Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, Invisible Man, Mummy, and Creature films, I found myself desperately looking for more.

Enter Shout! Factory’s horror label, Scream Factory, and its Universal Horror Collection sets.

Somehow, I’d missed the first four (!) installments in the series, but when Volume 5 landed on my desk, I didn’t delay. I dove right in.

If the classic monsters named above are the extent of your knowledge of Universal’s catalog, well… I’m not sure if I should pity or envy your ignorance. The big-name Universal monsters are undeniably the best, and they had the best films (even though some of the sequels are quite bad).

But Universal Studios had a decades-long reputation for horror, and many of the films it produced have been mostly forgotten by time.

Scream Factory is looking to change that by reissuing some of these long-forgotten B-movie schlockfests. However, by a fifth set of four films, it’s not a stretch to say we’re scraping the bottom of an already questionable barrel.

Volume 5 includes four films that, thematically at least, belong together: The Monster and the Girl (1941), Captive Wild Woman (1943), Jungle Woman (1944), and Jungle Captive (1945). The first film stands alone, but the other three actually form a trilogy about Paula the Ape-Girl (yes, really).

All four films are essentially Frankenstein stories. They deal with mad scientists who, for one reason or another, are bent on human experimentation and long to turn people into apes… or apes into people… consequences be damned.

I won’t lie; the films aren’t very good. Honestly, it’s not worth the time it’d take to go into plot summaries here. They’re all rather thin on plot, aside from the allure of attractive women who become… ape-girls.

But you shouldn’t let that stop you. They’re still fun as heck if you’re a fan of old-school horror or B-movie cheese; just temper your expectations. They’re hardly anyone’s definition of high-quality cinema.

They’re also just barely horror, even by the classic Universal Monsters standard. All four are quite short (just a smidge over an hour each), and the ape-human-ape transformations don’t occur until at least halfway through. There’s a lot of set-up for not much payoff. (Captive Wild Woman and Jungle Woman are set in a circus and include an impressive number of lion/tiger taming scenes. Any by “impressive number” I mean “entirely too many.”)

All four films are presented in 1080p with DTS-HD mono audio, and they each (except for Captive Wild Woman) received brand-new 2K scans. There’s not much in the way of extras, but each includes a feature-length commentary by a film historian if you’re interested in going a bit deeper into the background and context of the films, actors, filmmakers, and studio.

The Universal Horror Collection, Volume 5 is available now (and check here for the first four sets). I’ll certainly be checking them out…