Charles Band

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2021) At some point, I will go back in my archives and trace the arc of my changing opinions about Charles Band’s Full Moon films. What’s not up for discussion is the fact that he goes for low-budget sensations: Horror movies with intriguing premises hampered by terrible plots and acting, but with some fun and nudity in its execution. Petrified, which seems happy simply riffing off the traditional Mummy tropes (albeit with a thoroughly unconvincing science-fictional rationalization), is very much of the same cloth: As the mummy kills and kills again, we find the action moving to a clinic for… nymphomaniacs. Yes, really. But not really if you’re expecting wall-to-wall nudity and suggestive situations: While the film is thoroughly dedicated to the male gaze, Band doesn’t do much with the possibilities of his own premise in that area. Which is how much of the film goes: Despite some potentially interesting elements here and there, Petrified’s shoddy script doesn’t know what to do with its own ideas, and is just as likely to grind the action to a halt (within a can’t spare-any-moment 71 minutes-long film!) to half-develop something than to go digging into its own potential. It’s a bit goofy fun if you don’t expect much, but it’s frustrating under almost any other point of view. It does strike me that when Full Moon Pictures succeed at being entertaining, they almost do so in spite of themselves — not out of a master plan, but because all the elements seem to pile up in a slightly more entertaining way. The problem with that is that if luck ends up being the main determinant of what succeeds, there’s just as many chances for the pieces to fall down badly, and that seems to be the case with Petrified.

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) You get no points for guessing that Evil Bong is not a good movie. No points at all. You would even get negative points for hoping that it’s any good even after seeing that notorious schlockmeister Charles Band of Full Moon Features fame wrote and directed the film. Taking place deep into stoner humour subculture, Evil Bong begins once a nerdy young man moves into an apartment featuring, what else, an evil bong. The title device ends up being a portal to another dimension filled with demonic strippers and that’s probably all you really need to know about where it’s going. To be fair, there’s quite a bit of disarming silliness to the result: it’s a film about filmmakers indulging their id on behalf of a very specific audience, and it sort-of-works if you’re in an adjacent category. I’m at the opposite end of the stoner spectrum, but I find nearly anything with nudity and silly comedy to be tolerable, and I wasn’t expecting much more from the film’s pedigree. It is most assuredly not a horror film — despite the gore, the creatures are an unthreatening mix of rubber and CGI and the tone of the film is closer to Cheech and Chong (the latter of which even having a cameo here) than anything truly unsettling. If you’re not part of the stoner subculture, I’d probably suggest watching Evil Bong while doing something else: It’s borderline irritating as a full-attention kind of thing, but just interesting enough to be worth a quick look in-between other activities. There are now more than six sequels, but I’m not in a hurry to see any of them.

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s something halfway interesting about low-budget horror film Dead Man’s Hand, with a young man inheriting a run-down casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas. As a setting, it’s intriguingly creepy—while Vegas is about the glitz and the fancy destination hotels, there’s something unnerving about the unseen, unlucky, unglamorous underbelly of the city filled with (as the expression goes) broken dreams and bankruptcies. But there I go finding far too much promise in a premise, because Dead Man’s Hand quickly takes a turn for far more conventional material. As our young protagonists get to the casino, we don’t get much more than a take on the haunted house theme: There are vengeful spirits in the casino, and they take aim at anyone who steps in. (Never mind their flimsy motivations or tenuous connection to the protagonist and even more so his friends.) Perfunctory characterization isn’t enough to get us to care, and the schematic nature of the film quickly betrays the limited creative ambitions of shlockmaster director Charles Band. Feeling long even at somewhere around 80 minutes, Dead Man’s Hand is a generic horror product, fleetingly interesting and not even competent enough to be scary. Connoisseurs know that nothing good now carries the Full Moon production label, and this is no exception.

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) By the later standards of Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures, Puppet Master (no, not the alien-invasion film, the killer-dolls one) is almost lavishly high-quality. While no great art, it does feature puppets, stop-motion special effects, some strong visual imagery and competent actors all smothered in the vaguely disreputable 35 mm sheen of horror movies intended for theatrical distribution. (It was ultimately released straight to video for additional profit.) The killer-dolls premise does have some kick to it (unlike later Band films) even if the execution is somewhat less interesting. What’s less explainable is not that the premise would (barely) sustain a film, but that it led to twelve sequels and spinoffs, in addition to reinforcing Band’s fascination for similar thematic material for his slate of horror films. But what can I say—in the wild context of 1980s horror films, Puppet Master almost makes perfect sense.