Made by Hallmark Entertainment — yes, the greeting-card company — in the VHS heyday and sold at its stores nationwide, Creepy Classics is one of many B-movie trailer compilations to emerge at the time. This one stands out for three reasons, only one of them good: that the legendary Vincent Price hosts. Not as positive is the 30-minute running time, although that keeps the proceedings from dragging; we’ll get to the remaining reason in a sec.

Among the previews our “Master of Scarimonies” (groan) introduces are the Amicus anthology Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Jack H. Harris’ Dinosaurus!, Freddie Francis’ The Day of the Triffids and Gorgo. (You know Gorgo, right? She’s the prehistoric sea monster whose baby is captured by “reckless skin divers.”) Price even touches on two of his own films, The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum, both directed by Roger Corman. Every flick featured is from the 1950s and ’60s, except Oliver Stone’s The Hand — a decidedly odd outlier.

As promised, the tape’s third and final distinction: It came packaged with a 10-question trivia quiz on a single card; the idea was to tackle it after the show came to a close to see if you were paying attention. It would tax no one. No classic of compilations, Creepy Classics is for Price completists only. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Shot on video in Baltimore, “Unitied States,” Scary Tales achieves 50% accuracy with its title, in that more than one story exists — three of them, in fact — yet none of what writer/director Doug Ulrich presents is even remotely frightening, except perhaps the men’s dated haircuts.

The opener, “Satan’s Necklace,” is about “no ordinary necklace — it’s Satan’s necklace!” Despite such a devilish pedigree, the cursed jewelry is found with a run-of-the-mill metal detector by a guy with more pockmarks than this movie has words. “Sliced in Coldblood” is your very basic tale of a husband going full-on nutso upon learning he’s being cuckolded; one of the victims of his resulting murder spree is a beer-swilling, Foodtown cap-clad schlub on whose cavernous belly button the camera dwells in increasingly nauseating close-up, yet blessedly not always in focus.

Finally, like The Lawnmower Man on $1.98, we enter “Level 21,” in which a man obsessed with a new video game (whose screens we are not privy to) gets sucked into it. The fantasy world of the game looks like a neighborhood greenbelt, but populated with a dwarf, an orc in a bald cap and one “dark overlord” clad in a purple cloak and sporting the widow’s peak made famous by Eddie Munster.

The less said about Scary Tales, the better — not because its narrative paths are laden with surprises aplenty (quite the opposite), but because at all of 68 amateurish minutes, it is too inconsequential to merit much discussion beyond saying what it is. Hey, I remember trying to make a Creepshow-style horror anthology with a VHS camcorder, too; my excuse is that I was 12 years old. I’m willing to bet my dialogue was better than “Hey, that Raisin Bran’s pretty good! Get a box,” but Ulrich does have one thing on me: the per-the-credits participation of “Dundalk Taco Bell.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.