3 out of 5

Director: Individual per episode

Briefly about the episodes, but more specifically about the collection: Volume IV is well sequenced, starting with Miike’s up and down ride, Imprint, which takes a good start and premise and falls prey to the series’ plague of purposeful overkill, rather tarnishing the viewing experience, then on to the really stupid and really un-horror-y Homecoming.  So if you’re watching at this point and you’re not a fan of the brutal torture in ‘Imprint,’ you are, at this point, disgusted and then insulted by Homecoming’s dumbness.  Thankfully, if you keep going, Haeckel’s Tale comes to the rescue – a pretty standard zombie piece but with a lot of great elements, and then if you can manage to view ‘Chocolate’ as a thriller and not horror, it’s actually quite good.  (But if you can’t, it’s way disappointing.)  So the balance leans toward this being a so-so collection.  The look of it is stunning – despite the extras being trimmed to just commentaries – which I can understand not wanting to give away all the goodies packed on the individual releases to encourage purchase of those, but then we’re owed BD versions there, BECAUSE of how much more gorgeous these eps look in HD.  The colors pop, the music is crisp, and in all of the bits except Dante’s, the visuals are really well composed, deserving of the higher resolution.  If you don’t care about the extras and like at least half these episodes, the disc is definitely worth it.