Tag Archives: Full Moon

EVIL is Ready to Administer Your Physikill! “Puppet Master: Doktor Death” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The Doktor Will See You Now. See You in Hell!  Blu-ray Available on Amazon.com!

The sudden death of a World War II veteran leaves the employees and residents of Shady Oak retirement home to mourn his loss to their humble community.  April, new to the Shady Oak employee family and starting her very first day in the wake of resident’s death, is tasked to assist clean out the family-less resident’s leftover belongings.  Along with a couple of other orderlies, April discovers a trunk bound with a chain lock and breaking into it proves to be a creeper endeavor when the contents of the battered chest is a single doll, dressed in a blood-stained doctor’s gown with a hideously grinning skull upon it’s shoulders.  Soon after, the handful of residents and orderlies of Shady Oak are being hunted down and the maniac-looking doll with a scalpel is suspected to be cause of the grim reaper knocking early on the retirement home attendees’ doors.

One-by-one, and slowly and surely over the decades, Full Moon continues its campaign in broadening the “Puppet Master” universe.  For 34 years and an over three dozen films, including same universe and spinoffs, “Puppet Master” has been the porcelain, wood carved, and rubber-molded face of Charles Band’s Full Moon empire.  “Puppet Master’s” legacy continues to live on animating inanimate dolls into malevolent marionettes with their strings cut.  2020 saw the release of the company’s first character standalone with the more popular, if not the poster doll, Blade in “Blade:  The Iron Cross.”  Next, the span of a year between 2021 and 2022, Baby Oopsie from the “Demonic Toys” universe became the subject of a television series compiled until a three-part TV movie released by Full Moon on Blu-ray and DVD in the last six months.  Presently, Full Moon has ventured back to the “Puppet Master” universe with their release of “Doktor Death,” officially titled “Puppet Master:  Doktor Death,” that resurrects the miniature medical murderer last seen from “Retro Puppet Master” in 1999.  Helmed by the director of “The Dead Hate the Living!” and “The Hills Run Red,” Dave Parker chapters in a darker, gorier edge to the “Puppet Master” series that makes Dr. Kevorkian look like Florence Nightengale.  “Puppet Master:  Doktor Death” is a production of William Butler’s Candy Bar Productions, produced by Butler, who directed the “Baby Oopsie” television series/movies, Charles Band, representing Full Moon distributing powers, and alongside Josh Apple, Greg Lightner, and Mikey Stice.

The non-anthropomorphic cast is about as fresh faced as they come with young actors and actresses who likely weren’t even twinkle in their parents’ eyes yet when “Puppet Master” was released.  A new generation, integrated as victims and conspirators, are folded into this new line of a “Puppet Master” offshoot, beginning with Jenny Boswell in her sophomore feature film role as Shady Oaks’ new employee, April.  Having traversed from California to a small town in the middle of nowhere to work a retirement home, April mentions her strange choice of life-changing circumstances was due in part of searching for a lost relative.  This morsel of mystery puts an enigmatic taste swirling around in our mouths, but Boswell plays the statement casually enough to not throw up warning flags in a natural delivery of her character’s new girl innocence and candor with the rest of her Shady Oak counterparts, which include a perverse man-child Flynn (Zach Zebrowski), a pay for promiscuity Jennifer (Emily Sue Bengston, “Smiley Origins”), and all-around nice guy Ryan (Chad Patterson).  Intertwined by their occupational relation are the patients, clients, or residents, if you will, of Shady Oaks that are more of an interesting, eclectic bunch than the genre trope orderlies that become run of the mill victim fodder for Doktor Death.  Rick Montgomery Hr. (“Gore Orphanage”) plays the wealthy old perv with uncontrollable pinch fingers for the female bottom, John Capocci (“Praetorian”) is an unfiltered opinionate and avid golfer, Melissa Moore (“Sorority House Massacre II”) as a painter who whips up portraits embedded in her clairvoyant visions, and Tary Lyn Bergoine as a mute kleptomaniac living in fear off an oxygen tank.  See – much more interesting and with concrete performances to express who they are precisely as individuals.  “Puppet Master:  Doktor Death” fills the cast void with Erin Eva Butcher, Asthon Wolf, wrestler Jesse Guilmette, and Bill D. Russell.

Between “Demonic Toy’s” “Baby Oopsie” and “Puppet Master’s” “Doktor Death” spinoff projects, “Doktor Death” has a tighter story and more effective gore.  Granted, “Doktor Death” only has single under-an-hour film to its name but with completed and out in the world today, “Baby Oopsie” came off the rails as the series progressed with Oopsie’s look appearing different between the opening drive and the two latter parts, the story unhinges itself with the arbitrary introduction of a fembot, and doll kills that dwindled into dullness.  So, if you’re like me and was irked and turned off by “Baby Oopsie” when it was all said and done, you are likely hesitant to jump right into Full Moon’s next departure from the foremost franchise.  Don’t.  “Puppet Master: Doktor Death” may have the same aesthetic veneer but the guts of story are better compacted to keep audiences on track and the “Doktor Death’s” malevolent malpractice renders a far better disturbing slasher.  On the flip side of that coin, most of the deaths happen offscreen.  Out of “Doktor Death’s” personal 8-kill body count, only one is visually graphic within the scene.  I would say two but the character is later found not dead but just severely injured and we’re left unresolved with their life status.  The other deaths are done offscreen and are implied, denoting signs of demise with blood splatter against the wall or glass, a bloodied club repetitively bashing into a victim just out of the frame, or bodies are misappropriated post-mortem, posed in different discoveries of death, one in a very neat, very marionette, way.  The short runtime falls in sync with the nowadays Full Moon line of quick, cheap, and dirty modern movie, but what it also does is provide quick pacing into “Doktor Death’s” acrid atrocities against the elderly and their clueless caregivers and also opens up the potential for a sequel with a revelation, open ended finale that’ll surely see the return of psychotic puppet. 

Dave Parker brings his knowledge of blood-soaked carnage and maniacal macabre to a resurrected retro puppet for “Puppet Master:  Doktor Death!”  The Doktor is in and has arrived on Blu-ray home video from Full Moon Features with an AVC encoded BD25 presented in high-definition 1080p and a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.78:1.  From my last few previous views of Full Moon productions, there hasn’t been a whole lot of effort into creating an atmosphere but this latest entry levels out what’s been missing from contemporary Full Moon Features for some time, a dark and gloomy, evocatively tropey canvas that looks past the mundane sheen of digital recorded image and into another world of terror. In regard to storage format and compression, there was anything to note that stood out with artefact reproach. The Blu-ray comes with two audio options, an English Dolby Digital stereo 2.0 mix and an English Dolby Digital 5.1. Toggling between the two audio format, not a ton of variance between them, if any at all, that has to make you wonder about the credibility of the multi-channel mix. In any case, both formats offer a well-balanced diet of dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack with dialogue in front and prominent. Range is diverse with all the squishiness of Doktor Death’s puppeteering his golems inside an internal organ orchestra. The Full Moon release offers no subtitles for SDH. Bonus features only include a Full Moon Video Zone featurette of Retro Puppet Master with Charles Band, the original trailer, and other Full Moon trailers, including “Retro Puppet Master,” “Puppet Master 3,” “Don’t Let Her In,” “Piranha Women,” “Blade: The Iron Cross,” “Weedies: Halloweed Night,” and “The Resonator.” case physicality includes a traditional Blu-ray snapper with Doktor Death predominantly taking up the entire front cover with trademark maniacal grin, glowing eyes, and double fisting hypodermic instruments – a scalpel and syringe. The Disc art is pressed with the same front image. The film comes region free, uot rated, and has a runtime of 59 minutes, confirmed against IMDB.com’s listing of 75 minutes. So, either IMDB is incorrect, or the film is heavily edited down. “Puppet Master: Doktor Death” not only expands upon the legacy of the franchise but beefs up the ancillary side puppets that didn’t receive enough screen time and with a constructed filmic narrative worthy of Full Moon’s early canon of films, going back to the Doktor is a necessary follow up.

The Doktor Will See You Now. See You in Hell!  Blu-ray Available on Amazon.com!

Fresh-Water Fatalities of the EVIL Female Kind! “Piranha Women” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Awesome Cover for “Piranha Women!”  Check Out the Reversible Cover Art by Purchasing Your Copy Today!  Click Below.

At the seaside dive bar of Antonio Bay, flesh hungry creatures dressed in high heels and lowcut blouses circle around unsuspecting male prey gawking into their female gaze and their female bosoms.  Lured back to the woman’s indoor pool lair, the lured men are nibbled-to-death with tiny, sharp teeth bred by a science gone mad.  The normal, everyday guy Richard understands the dangers of his coining of the Piranha Women all too well as his cancer-stricken girlfriend desperately enrolls in an experiment drug program led by a Dr. Sinclair who binds the magically healing properties of the Piranha chromosome to his patients to build a sexy, sharp-teethed army.  With his colleague dead after being enticed by one of the beautiful and fish-spliced femme fatales and his girlfriend disappearing soon after seeing Dr. Sinclair, Richard must evade the murder suspicions from the police and battle through a pair of sexually aggressive, bikini-cladded chompers to save his endangered girlfriend from becoming one of the Piranha Women!

From the bizarre brain of Charles Band, who delivered devilishly cult pictures like “Puppet Master” and “Trancers” under the Full Moon empire for 40 years (if you’re counting Band’s defunct Empire Pictures) , and from the eccentric and erotica-charged touch of Fred Olen Ray, the writer-director of “Evil Toons” and “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers”, comes the next freeform and fishy Full Moon feature, “Piranha Women.”  The 2022 film has all the assurances of a contemporary Full Moon production with a slapdash story structure, a handful of willing women to go topless, a hale and hearty use of a familiar carnivalesque score, and, of course, blood and lots of it, discharged by freaks and fiends of mad science.  Charles Band produces the venture, alongside associate producer, the former Playboy model and under-the-radar scream queen, Cody Renee Cameron, with Fred Olen Rey having penned the script treatment and sitting in the director’s chair.

For to recognize any of the “Piranha Women” cast, one would need reach down to the far depts of the fish tank where the bottom feeders roam.  Now, I’m not stating that performances are poor but to call the principals household names at any caliber level in film.  If you’ve established a residing foot on the internet, like me, or maybe have a photogenic keen eye, “Piranha Women’s” slender cast might blip on your brain’s recollection radar.  For instance, Bobby Quinn Rice, the story’s male lead trying to save his girlfriend Lexi (Sof Puchley, “Gatham”) from the clutches of killer fish with hot bods, had swimmingly integrated into the web series Star Trek universe in multiple series.  The “Super Shark” finds a solid lead performance in the adulthood reasonable and morally incorruptible Richard in what is Rice and Olen Ray’s fifth collaboration together as actor and director. If you’re not a Trekkie and have a more salacious sense of knowledge, the two actresses playing the genetically spliced, serrated teeth villainesses are former Playboy models in Keep Chambers and Carrie Overgaard and, yes, they do show plenty of skin if you were wondering.  Chambers debuts herself as an actress with a tight curve on how to hook men to their death with an extremely attractive lure while Overgaard’s off-and-on working relationship with producer Cory Renee Cameron scores the Michigan native a Los Angeles shoot, her first dive into the horror genre.  Chambers and Overgaard do as well as expected in roles where their nipples morph into bite-sized piranha teeth in conjunction with their mouths also modulating into larger razor teeth.  In all honesty, the film could have benefited for more nipple dentata carnage much the same way vagina-dentata did for Mitchell Lichtenstein “Teeth.” “Piranha Women” fills the cast pool with B-movie actors Jon Briddell (“Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels”), Richard Gabai (“Demon Wind”), Michael Gaglio (“College Coeds vs. Zombie Housewives”), Nathaniel Moore, Jonathan Nation (“Mega Piranha”), Houston Rhines (“Angels Fallen”), and Shary Nassimi as the fishy Dr. Sinclair.

Sharks, the apex predators of the ocean, may have their own patented subgenre with Sharksploitation, but Piranha are predominately pack hunters also hungry from meat and deserve their own categorical moniker (perhaps Piranhasploitation?) as these little carnivorous creatures will eat a little of your flesh one morsel at a time until the masticated body looks like chewed bubblegum. Joe Dante knew this with his Roger Corman cult classic “Piranha” and even The Asylum gets into the action with their “Mega Piranha” schlocker. Fred Olen Ray, who once raised his own personal piranha fish, takes a stab at a new angle involving our rather ravenous ankle biters by not making them the main antagonists of the story. In fact, the fish itself is not the villain as “The Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfolds” and “Bikini Jones and the Temple of Eros” filmmaker splices female erotic genome into the fold with body horror elements. The science behind the genetic sequence isn’t necessarily important, as Dr. Sinclar mentions in the film, it’s all little complicated, but there’s a lackadaisical air with the barebones narrative. With a film titled “Piranha Women”, we’re not looking for Academy Award substance or an auteur aiming to reach the depths of our soul with a powerfully visceral, visual tale and there’s a genre fan understanding in what to expect from Film Moon Features and director Fred Olen Ray, but after being pleasantly surprised with Full Moon’s more contemporary projects, like “Don’t Let Her In” and “Baby Oopsie,” I found “Piranha Women” falling apart at the seams. Pivotal scenes of transformation of the desperate, ill-stricken women at the hands of Dr. Sinclair are boiled down to one moment their normal, the next their nips have gnashing nibblers. Plus, and I know I’m asking a stupid question in relation to the director, but why is Dr. Sinclair only genetically modifying beautiful women? And why are the women enacting siren ways by only seducing men? Perhaps men are easy prey when against a hot, female bod but isn’t meat meat? The climatic ending is the weakest link of the entire chain as Richard searches out his beloved Lexi at the “Piranha Womens'” indoor pool lair only to become with the last of the piranha mutants. Richard’s weapon? Ethylene glycol. Yup, antifreeze in the pool water kills piranha and before his showdown with the shifty seductress, he unloads a quart into a fairly large pool, which in my opinion would be diluted to the point of non-affect, but when the piranha woman hits the water, apparently antifreeze electrocutes piranhas and, apparently, for a brief glimpse, the bolts of voltage unveil their monstrous, animalistic side of a humanoid piranha. There’s also another instance of rain melting another creature and, again, the pieces of the puzzle of how this is happening isn’t adding up. A flat, crestfallen ending nearly drowns its interestingly ludicrous premise into forgotten oblivion as the lasting episodic memory continues to battle for legacy between a plunged ending of perplexity and the sharp-teethed piranha women with sharp-teethed areolas.

Piranhasploitation might be an insignificant right now, but the pygmy pack hunters are fiercely swimming upstream to be a household name in terror as Full Moon Features adds their entry “Piranha Women” to the exclusive ranks. Full Moon’s AVC encoded, 1080p, high-definition Blu-ray is presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. This particular release has strayed from Full Moon’s indiscriminate use of dark and gloomy lighting gels, tints, and high contrast shadow work that heighten the horror tone for a more natural lit preserve that has become baselessly bland. Compression looks pretty good as I wasn’t catching major instances of banding or artefact blocking but there are softer details around skin textures. However, pixel resolution frequently waves up and down from mid-teens to low-30ss because of the interlaced composite shots with the Antonio Bay dive bar or the floor-to-ceiling piranha tank when layered with characters. The release defaults to an English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo but there is an English Dolby Digital 5.0 mix option that’ll you’ll have to toggle to during the feature. Both mixes are clean and clear with the surround sound option providing a slightly plusher but not by much more. No subtitles are available. More so with the post-production itself rather than issues with the Blu-ray is the stock ambient background noise doesn’t overpower the dialogue at all but is unfitting, especially when we only see a small cast in the scene but can hear a bustling office or bar. There is even one moment where the background clamor completely cuts out for an important part of the conversation and then never comes back despite being in the same room. Other ambience including poured drinks, popped corks, and high-heeled footsteps is right up front with the dialogue at times. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes with one-sided discussions by the principal cast and director Fred Olen Ray as well as other Full Moon trailers that not only included “Piranha Women” but also “The Resonator,” “Baby Oopsie,” “Don’t Let Her In,” Evil Bong 888 – Infinity High,” “Weedjies: Halloweed Night,” and “The Gingerweed Man.” The physical features include a snazzy illustrated cover art of one of the piranha women with teeth bared, ready to bite; however, the release includes reversible cover art that reveals more of same said posed piranha women in a NSFW option which is a far better display cover for the standard Blu-ray snapper. As mentioned before, “Piranha Women’s” ending drops steep like going off over the Mariana Trench shelf and part of that reason might be the film’s 58-minute, under an hour, runtime which some will not consider a full-length feature that comes unrated and region free. Plenty to like about Fred Olen Ray’s “Piranha Women,” but there is equally plenty to dislike too with the absurd take on the raptorial fish’s transgenic titty-twisting body horror.

Awesome Cover for “Piranha Women!”  Check Out the Reversible Cover Art by Purchasing Your Copy Today!  Click Below.

Back to the Past to Hunt Down EVIL! “Trancers” reviewed! (Full Moon / 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Become a Slave to “Trancers” on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray!

In the post-apocalyptic ravaged 23rd century, Jack Deth, a brusque and hardened trooper, hunts down Trancers, a group of easily influenced and entranced people turned zombified slaves by a power-hungry hypnotizer named Whistler.  With Whistler killed, Deth lives out his raged-filled days vindictively bounty hunting Trancers still beckoning to Whistler’s lingering snake charming after one of Trancers kills his wife, but when Whistler appears to have cheated death and sent his conscious mind to the year 1985 into a Police detective relative to assassinate ancestors of the Trooper council and gain control of what’s left of the future world, Deth gives chase, sending his consciousness into a journalist predecessor with a fast car, a relaxed lifestyle, and in the arms of a beautiful young woman who Deth must recruit and rely on if he wants to survive the past.

Charles Band’s Homeric Sci-fi opus “Trancers” is time-travelling neo-noir at its boldest.  With a limited budget and loads of talent, the 1984 future bounty hunter with a grudge actioner, the first of a franchise that spawned five sequels stretching over two decades, was penned by then Band hired screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, whose careers have run the variety spectrum of treatments from the Empire days of WWII soldiers battling aliens in a UFO in “Zone Troopers” in the mid-80s to finding themselves on the same credits screen as Spike Lee in the filmmaker’s post-war Vietnam drama ‘Da 5 Bloods.”  “Trancers” has nothing to do with war but has everything to do with a crumbling society, a hardnosed cop, and acrid acolytes with purple chapped lips and a yellowish green tinted complexion.  Also known as “Future Cop” in other parts of the world, the Los Angeles-shot “Trancers” is produced by the “Puppet Master” Charles Band and Debra Dion under Band’s Empire Pictures.

One of the aspects I adore most of the early Full Moon productions, before Charles Band even dubbed his Empire Pictures as Full Moon, was the star power behind the pictures.  Tim Thomerson is a versatile actor who can star in just about anything from microbudget indie productions (“Dollman,” “Left in Darkness”) to big Hollywood celluloids (“Air America,” “Iron Eagle”) as one of the most recognizable faces amongst viewers.  In “Trancers,” Thomerson relishes playing the 5 O’clock shadowed, brooding in a long trench coat, Sam Spade-type detective, Jack Deth, with skin in the game and a gruff attitude to take him to the edge.  Thomerson makes for a good grouchy gumshoe as Deth goes plays the cat-and-mouse game with his onscreen nemesis Whistler, played by Michael Stefani in his one and only feature film credit and also marks his last acting appearance.  Stefani has the long-ominous stare of a conventional villain, but I yearned for more toe-to-toe action between Thomerson and Stafani that what appears on screen in what was only a brief less than handful of moments that weren’t edge of your seat encounters, even the finale was underwhelmingly brisk.  More of the penetrating thrills were held in the future when Jack Deth is ambushed by an old Diner lady wielding a clever or when Deth laser blasts Whistler’s unconscious body to explosive smithereens.   What’s nurtured more in the past is the relationship between Deth and the half-his-age Leena, a role donned by a young Helen Hunt (“Twister,” “As Good as It Gets”) as the L.A. 80’s pop-goth girl with a thing for older men.  Thomerson and Hunt have chemistry that would turn heads clouded with ageism but they’re cute enough to work, especially when they ride matching mopeds around the city to either thwart Whistler’s plans or escape the police under Whistler’s control. The rest of cast that rounds out “Trancers” is just as inundated with individualism as the principal leads with Anne Seymour (“Big Top Pee-Wee”), Biff Manard (“Blankman”), Richard Herd (“Get Out”), and legendary supporting actor, Art LeFleur (“The Blob”).

With any story dealing with time traveler, undoubtedly, plot holes will exist and will stick out like a 23rd century cop time-hopping to 1985. “Trancers” is no different. When Whistler eventually assassinates an ancestor of one of the future council members, the memory of the slain still exists to those in the future. Though the council member never existed in the 23rd because his ancestor was wasted by a mind-melding maniac, their energy and presence is remembered and so that would suggest the 23rd century and the 20th century timelines coexist and move at the same time rate and once the future is written, the memory of can’t be undone? This transtemporal travel stymie comes early into the story and leaves me to chew on this paradoxical gobstopper for the rest of the film, but my advice to other views is to manage it just like I did with forcing that problematic plot hole into the backseat recesses of your mind and focus more on enjoying the nonstop clash and laughs high of a “Trancers” sci-fi speedball. Production value and location security is key to “Trancers” success and Band and his filmmaking team score multiple locations around Los Angeles that are often small but are neon lit or are crazed dress to reflect an era that offer relatability and style. Composited laser beams and vaporized dead bodies effects are an effulgence of neon layered with digitized 8-bit audio bytes for that futuristics flair. The matte work landscapes and set interiors of a crumbling Los Angeles with a blend of new styles are a thing of beauty. Iconic buildings engulfed by the ocean’s rising tides that never ebbed, the neo-totalitarian architecture, and the retrofuturism of a classic interior diner with a newfangled facade borders a dystopian metropolis on the brink of collapse and only held together by the glue of the council and the troopers who enforce the law.

“Trancers” receives the 4K Ultra HD treatment with a 2-disc release from Full Moon Features with the second disc a high-definition, 1080p Blu-ray, distributed MVD Visual. The 4K comes from a scan of the original camera negative; however, the Blu-ray and the 4K are fairly even in detail and clarity. Each format, presented in a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, decodes at a disconcerting average of 25Mbps and maintain the luminescence, detail repressive glow which tells me a regrading wasn’t completed to counter the intense neon on darker scenes. The glow shouldn’t be emanating half a foot off of characters. Despite a couple of minimally invasive spotty print damage, details are better in the natural lit and gaffer lit scenes though still quite soft around skin textures. Two English audio are available – a DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound and a Stereo 2.0. As soon as the Empire Pictures logo seizes the screen and the soundtrack begins, I knew the 5.1 was going to be worthwhile with a robust multi-channel output that leverages the Phil Davies (“Society”) synth-beat, adrenaline-producing score while still maintaining an even-keeled and appropriately layered ambient and dialogue track. Dialogue remains clear and clean throughout that compliment a range of action track like an exploding body with a short burst LFE explosion, the pew-pew-esque laser shots as discussed earlier, and the scattering of shattered glass when a moped goes through a sugar glass window. Bonus features are identical on each formatted disc with a commentary from Charles Band and Tim Thomerson, a 2013 documentary of the making of “Trancers,” the complete short film “Trancers: City of Lost Angels, Trancers: A Video Essay, the official trailer, archival interviews, and a still gallery. The physical attributes include a blacked-out Blu-ray snapper case with a cardboard slipcover, both the snapper and the slipcover have the same front artwork of Jack Deth pointing a gun out of a floating open door in space. The region free release has a runtime of 76 minutes and is rated PG-13. With a name like Jack Deth, you can’t go wrong with the science fictional film noir that is “Trancers,” a rustling time-travel good versus evil showdown with the future hanging in the balance.

Become a Slave to “Trancers” on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray!

This Bundle of EVIL has a Dirty Diaper! “Baby Oopsie” reviewed! (Full Moon / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Baby Oopsie”  The Baddest Baby in Town on Blu-ray!

Who would have thought that playing with dolls could be deadly.  Sybil Pittman certainly didn’t think so as she hosts her internet streaming doll vlog showcasing her collection of pint sizes doll babies most of which Sybil has restored back to life…literally.  When a mysterious package arrives with the battered and stitched together head of Baby Oopsie, a severely bullied and neglected Sybil locks herself in the basement to work tirelessly on repairing Baby Oopsie’s head and mechanical body that includes, unbeknownst to Sybil, one special gear under a satanic spell to for collecting souls.   Baby Oopsie, the once pride and joy of Sybil’s restorations, has been resurrected from the toy junkyard and aims to claim the lives of Sybil’s tormentors to sustain it’s own diabolic animation.  When all of Sybil’s adversaries are eliminated, Baby Oopsie still requires lives to live and turns on Sybil’s friends and Sybil herself that becomes a battle to the death.

Full Moon knows how to run and market a good product that can last a lifetime and they continue to stroll through their finely tuned niche of deranged doll other pint-sized psychos to this very day with brand new produced features hitting the physical and streaming retain shelves in 2022.  Following the success of “Don’t Let Her In,” one of those new features aforementioned, is the return of the evilest rug rat known to infant kind, Baby Oopsie, from the “Demonic Toys” universe.  William Butler, who I fondly remember playing sweet country boy Tom being blown up and having his corpse feasted on in Tom Savini’s “Night of the Living Dead” remake, continues his long-standing tenure with Charles Band and Full Moon that began in 1986, under the Charles Band Empire Pictures company production and Stuart Gordon directed “From Beyond,” with a new written-and-directed feature “Baby Oopsie,” a concentrated, standalone spinoff of “Demonic Toys.”  This isn’t Butler’s first go-around with the go-go-ga-ga-gut your guts dolly as the filmmaker helmed “Demonic Toys 2:  Personal Demons” in 2010.  Charles Band and Butler produce the film with regular Full Moon executive producer Nick Blaskowski under the Full Moon Features in association with Candy Bar Productions.

Viral sensation the McRib Queen versus demonic toy Baby Oopsie. Stand up and character comedienne, Libbie Higgins, debuts in her first feature headlining role as Sybil Pittman, the repressed and intimidated vlogging doll queen living in abusive hell with tyrannical stepmother after the death of her beloved father. Higgins, who has an Onlyfans page for only $8 a month for all you obsessed fans out there, adorns a wig, glasses, and meme cat sweaters to get into the head of Pittman’s secluded world and where outsiders browbeat her into a reserved submission and wishful thinking only provides little comfort returning the hurt played out internal sadistic fantasies. For her breakout role, Higgins transcends her comedienne persona and into an anxiety-riddled outcast wretched by life’s punches and horror-struck by a doll that walks, talks, and kills like a macho-sadist. Before going head-to-head with the berserk Baby Oopsie (voiced by newcomer Jill Barlett), Sybil is caught between the devil and a saint with her brash, overbearing, stepmother played by Lynne Acton McPherson (“Improbus”) and the attentive and caring subletter played by Marilyn Bass, who tries very hard to be Full Moon sexy and skin-revealing without showing the camera too much. Her “best friend” Ray-Ray tips the scales toward believing in Sybil’s beauty and craft, befriending the doll queen despite her large radius of shunning those want to get closer to her, such as the mailman or the gardener, because of the depressive self-pity. Yet, Ray-Ray brings to the light and so does the actor who portrays the upbeat Hey Hunny sassy-mouth in TikTok and Youtuber influencer Justin Armistead. Armistead is magnetically chipper onscreen compared to Higgins story-obliged monotone placidness that balances out quite nicely the duo’s vanilla and peanut-butter-marshmallow swirl relationship. “Baby Oopsie” is full of character and characters, rounding out it’s smorgasbord of victims and supports with Diane Frankenhausen, Shamecka Nelson, Joseph Huebner, Michael O’Grady, Michael Carrino, Christopher J. Meigs, Tim Dorsey, and Josephine Bullock.

Set and filmed in Cleveland, Ohio at the proclaimed Full Moon estate, a 60’s-70’s anachronous house with many rooms becomes the playground setting for “Baby Oopsie,” the cast, and the crew. The location that reflects an era no longer modern, a dated obsoletism, to match Baby Oopsie’s classic and ideal bald-bald in a night gown form. However, normal Baby Oopsie also comes with that grotesque, malformed face that only a doll obsessed mother could love and would cause the toughest of horror fans to fear in their pants in on glance at the augmented representation of a human infant. It’s the creepy old doll look you definitely don’t want to see sitting in a dark corner blankly staring at you.  Of course, the special effects are not the classic Full Moon stop motion you see with the “Puppet Master” flicks as “Baby Oopsie” deals in tangibility with a bait and switch editing between the number of diverse molded Oopsie dolls created by special effects supervisor Greg Lightner (“Corona Zombies,” “Don’t Let Her In”) that include an open mouth and sneering face or a set of glowing eyes to provide a sense of evil.  Oopsie fits right into Sybil’s down on her luck story that is nicely compact and complete for an indie horror quietly but surely touches upon Sybil’s life in various key scenes, such as the gardener who hangs around because her father was much beloved or how much Sybil is despised at work between the dragooning, nitpicking, and strict boss and the snickering colleagues that look down at her.  Butler’s sweet-and-salty route delegates a fine line between her friends and foes that make the stakes clear when Oopsie decides impulsively to go off the bad-guy only rails. “Baby Oopsie” is far from cute and cuddly. “Baby Oopsie” is closer to being ugly and uncouth as the prime and pinnacle sequel of anthropomorphic toy horror in today’s Full Moon toy chest of films.

Spinoffs have become the new favorite amongst audiences, “Baby Oopsie” even pays a sideswiping jab to “Annabelle” of the “Conjuring” universe, and while we see a lot of spinoffs in television, the concepts and ideas are beginning to spill more frequently for filmgoing fans and, as such, “Baby Oopsie” is reborn onto her (or is it him? or it?) own Blu-ray home video from Full Moon Features. The region free, high-definition release, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, is the epitome of digital recording without much of a single critique or compression issue. Inundated with a more realism than stylism presence in front of the camera with the exception of a few edited in art renditions of satanic imagery, Butler and cinematographer Josh Apple apply a clean, high-resolution coating that undeniably very familiar to Full Moon’s repertoire. What’s also a motif straight out of Full Moon’s bag of goodies in the carnivalesque score. The Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtrack raises the volume on the Fred Rapoport and Rick Butler above a superseding level that swallows the English dialogue at times. You really want to absorb Jill Barlett’s vulgarities as Baby Oopsie but need to fight the soundtrack to do so during key moments when Oopsie’s profanity-laden Tourette like behavior kicks in. The release also comes with a second audio option with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes featurette with cast and crew interviews on their experience making the film and poking fun at each other at times in a well-edited jest, a Videozone featurette that’s essentially a mini panel with producer Charles Band, director William Butler, and stars Libbie Higgins, Marilyn Bass, and Lynne Acton McPherson taking a break in the midst of filming to talk about their characters, to talk about the film itself, and for Band to plug his streaming service and new projects, there’s a mini-featurette All Dolled Up! that has Libbie Higgins in character, Justin Armistead self-recording in his bathroom, like on TikTok, and Baby Oopsie announce the winner and runner-up’s of a contest to win a Full Moon prize package. Bonus content rounds out with Full Moon trailers. The Blu-ray comes unrated, and feature has a runtime of 78 minutes. “Baby Oopsie” is not the addendum to the profane book of “Demonic Toys” but rather an extenuating chapter that opens the door for all the misfit and maniacal toys to one day have their own independent rampaging furtherance that are likely already drafted, budged, and ready to shoot at a moment’s notice.

“Baby Oopsie”  The Baddest Baby in Town on Blu-ray!

A Gondola Ride of EVIL! “Gore in Venice” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Check out “Gore in Venice” on Blu-ray at Amazon.com!

A man stabbed to death in the abdomen. A few feet away, a drowned woman, pulled from an adjacent Venice canal, wearing no underwear beneath her dress. A double murder of a husband and wife has baffled a young, hardboiled egg-eating Inspector named De Pol, but the inspector knows one thing for sure, drugs were certainly involved. As the inspector digs deeper into the horribly confounding case, he learns that husband and wife were into a wide variety of kinky perversions that may have led to their untimely demise. Unable to make sense of some of the case’s facts and as more bizarre murders flare up all over town, De Pol leans on the behavior expertise of the department’s medical examiner as well as anecdotes by key suspects to piece together a prurient plot of perversion-killings sought to be handled quietly and quickly before tourists catch wind of what’s happening, and more dead bodies are discovered in the unparalleled canal-laden landscape of Venice.

Sex, drugs, and eggs run rampant on the walkway bridges and watery canals of the beautifully conglomerated Venice, Italy in Mario Landi’s “Gore in Venice.”   Also known by other titles such as Giallo a Venezia, Mystery in Venice, and Thriller in Venice around the globe, the “Supersexymarket” and “Patrick Still Lives” director Landi helms one of the more controversial Italian crime mysteries to come out of the golden age of giallo horror during the turn of the decade of 1979.  A script that houses a hellbent killer in super cool and reflective aviator shades, a sex-crazed married couple, and a detective racking his brain to connect the motive dots is the last treatment penned by writer Aldo Serio in what’s a non-linear, flashback driven, sordid piece of salacious culprit candy that’s more sexually explicit than is a whodunit thriller.  “Gore in Venice” is one of the few productions of Elea Cinematografica produced by Gabriele Crisanti who has produced “Satan’s Baby Doll, “Malabimba,” “Burial Ground:  The Nights of Terror,” and many others notorious for their sleazy and gory controversial content.

In the cast’s lead of this Italian production is an American actor.  The California-born, “Weapons of Death’s” actor Jeff Blynn has lived in Italy for much of his career and had become tapped to play youthful inspector De Pol, an arrogant prodigy of Venice sleuths with a habit of constantly cracking open and eating hard boiled eggs in the office, out of the office, at the crime scene, during the questioning in suspect’s home, and in just about every single scene Blynn is messing with an egg in a symbolic gesture of trying to trying to crack a strange case is to crack an egg strangely.  Blynn’s pale complexion, large perm afro, and thick caterpillar mustache make him stick out against his Italian counterpart costars that include Leonora Fani (“The House by the Edge of the Lake”) and Gianni Del (“Sex, Demons and Death”) as the deceased wife and husband, Flavia and Fabio.  Fani and Del’s impeccable Euro traits are flaunted all over Venice as sexual maniacs, exhibitionists, and voyeurs who take their relationship to the next level every time they step outside their character’s love nest full of erotica books and wall-to-wall mirror bedroom.  However, trouble in paradise sends the couple hurling toward jagged rocks with salacious orgy photos involving a prostitute (Maria Mancini), a drug-dealer named Marco (Maurizio Streccioni), and Flavia’s best friend Marzia (Mariangela Giordano, “Killer Barbys”) that omits no one from the suspect pool.  Not even Flavia’s ex-lover, a cartoonist Bruno Neilson (Vassili Karis, “An Angel for Satan”) is safe from Inspector De Pol’s investigation.  Unlike traditional giallo films, we’re already privy to the killer, a voyeuristic madman (Andrea Caron) with slick aviators and a complex hardon to kill everyone involved in the orgy and it’s up to Del Pol and his troupe of professional colleagues and chums, who provide not only the vigor (“Private House of the SS’s” Eolo Capritti’s gung-ho assistant to the inspector) but also sage, scientific guidance surrounding sexual deviancy (“Satan’s Baby Doll’s” Giancarlo Del Duca as the case’s pathologist).

As noted in the previous paragraph, “Gore in Venice” is less giallo than one would expect despite an alternate title denoting the film as such in Italy as “Giallo a Venezia.” Does the killer have gloved hands? Yes. Is Landi’s film stylish enough to pass criteria? Absolutely. Does “Gore in Venice” live up to the eponymous title? Blood flows freely. Yet, why doesn’t “Gore in Venice” feel like a traditional giallo? One of the more clinching reasons is the mystery dissolves roughly halfway into the story by exposing the unmasked, unconcealed killer, trailing off from that unsolved perplexity of who the killer might be at the conclusion. However, one could argue that though the killer is revealed, the question of why all the carnage still remains, leaving the giallo more or less intact. Violent tropes aside, Landi’s film abundantly saturates itself into carnal exploits that linger on-and-on more than necessary to get the point across. These scenes of masturbation, public exhibition, and raging erotic zigzag along a blurry, indistinct line of pornography, coming (and coming!) away from the intended murder-mystery subgenre with more skin and slaughter. That’s not the say “Gore in Venice” fails to live up to the moniker as the kills are as grisly as implicitly promised with a large blade to the vaginal cavity, one poor soul gas drenched and lit up like a bonfire, and a one gal having the naked legs cut out right from under her complete with an extreme closeup of the sawing pellicle perfection. Whether because of Mario Landi’s direction or Aldo Siro’s script, the explicit eroticism eats way too far into the story that, in turn, ultimately betrays any kind character development aside from the tragic perversive arc of Fabio and Flavia. Inspector De Pol often skirts around much of the action being only an investigator continuously trapped in the accounts of other people’s tales of debauchery and always one step late to the crime scene party that baffles his keen scrutinizing eye. I’m not one to deprecate graphic sexual content, especially in works that display actual fondling and masturbation in their art, but “Gore in Venice” mildly entertains as a low-end giallo albeit a spectacularly vivid and vehement blood show in front of the unique waterways of Venice.

Under one of the more slapped together and detailed shrouded cover arts I’ve seen this year comes “Gore in Venice” onto Blu-ray home video as one of the revisited classics purchased and redistributed by Full Moon Features. The Blu-ray is an AVC encoded, region free, 1080p presentation of an uncut (and uncensored) remastered feature exhibited in a full frame 1.66:1 aspect ratio. The Full Moon back cover mentions the transfer was compiled from the best available materials, but, honestly, the original 35mm print looks great with only sparse dirt specks and an occasional frame omission. Details look good as well despite the flat coloring. The Italian language LCPM 2.0 and 5.1 offer nearly identical outputs with no real composition distinction between the two others than a slightly more complex background track of motorboats ripping through the canals. There are no bonus materials with this feature only release that’s house in a standard blue snapper case and a red on black, cheesy, Eurotrash cover art for the 99-minute film. Libidinous with a capital L, expect more of sesso e depravazione with profound tidbits of gore than an engrossingly intelligent crime thriller in Mario Landi’s “Gore in Venice.”

Check out “Gore in Venice” on Blu-ray at Amazon.com!