Hideous! (1997)

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) Some reviews naturally write themselves… as long as there are common references. Saying that Hideous! is a middle-of-the-road Charles Band film is enough for those who are familiar with Band, but may be meaningless to others. So, to recap: Band is a low-budget comedy/horror writer-director who has a fondness for puppets. Hideous! plays to his strengths by being concerned by characters stuck in a building with four puppeteered homicidal creatures. What follows is the usual Band brand of low-budget filmmaking. There is, as is often the case, a definite spark of potential here, as the film deals with rich oddity collectors who fall prey to their obsessions. He doesn’t do much with that idea, but things like that help Band remain a cult favourite director among fans with a tolerance for low-end horror filmmaking. Hideous! is not good, but then again it’s not meant to be: it’s supposed to be trashy, ridiculous, off-putting and familiar at once. At that, it succeeds—and remains slightly more memorable than many of Band’s other movies.