Ma Barker's Killer Brood

Bill Karn's Ma Barker's Killer Brood (1959) comes to DVD from Alpha Video in a clean, well-mastered edition that not only looks and sounds surprisingly good but comes with the original trailer! This is as close to an authorized release as Alpha has ever issued -- there are some horizontal scratches adjacent to some of the edit points in the cleanest reels, and the middle reels have some vertical scratches as well, but the picture is always sharp and the source is otherwise as good as a lot of authorized releases of independent movies of the era. This 91-minute movie may be the most ambitious production ever issued by the producers responsible for such masterpieces as The Astounding She-Monster. The six chapters standard to Alpha's DVDs are not remotely adequate to breaking down the plot of this fairly complex movie, which not only runs long by the standards of its time and genre, but also has a plot that moves through several layers of flashback, albeit all linear.