Tag Archives: Head of the family

EVIL Sinks Its Teeth into the Reach of the Worldwide Web! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Death Streamer” Now on Blu-ray!

A trio of struggling horror video podcasters stumble across a dark web stream while content mining for their derelict house of God set macabre show Church of Chills.  When they stumble upon a bloodcurdling ritual of drugging women and man vampirically ripping out and feasting on their necks, the footage is all too real based on their research and investigation into the underground live streams that rack up thousands of views and subscribers.  Eager to piggyback off the streams’ success, the Church of Chills reveals the callous, artery puncturing content to the world.  The live streaming ancient vampire master, seeking sacrifices to bring the end of days upon the world, is none too happy with the intruders doxing his content that has amassed a large following and warns them with omnipotent power, sending the three into flight or fight for their very lives and the for the sake of the world.

As the famous chorus line from the legendary rock-n-roll band AC/DC once sang, If you want nudity, you got it!  Or was it blood?  Either way, Charles Band’s “Death Streamer” you get plenty of both!  The new tech, modernized vampire lurks from out of the classic, gothic shadows and becomes the next inspirational concept from the longtime, distinguished founder and filmmaker of Full Moon Entertainment and the “Trancers” and “Head of the Family” director, Charles Band.  The 2024 feature is written from Band’s concept into story detail and dialogue by Neal Marshall Stevens, the screenwriter behind “Thir13en Ghosts” remake “Hellraiser:  Deader” and who has since become a Full Moon staff writer with credits going from touching the “Puppet Master” franchise with “Blade:  The Iron Cross” to new content with “AIMEE:  The Visitor,” penned under Stevens’ pseudonym of Roger Baron as so too with “Death Streamer.”  Full Moon Entertainment’s Charles Band and Nakai Nelson produce their latest with a budget aid alley-oop by a crowdfunding campaign.

“Death Streamers” core cast has small but mighty with Aaron Michael McDaniel debuting in his feature film role as Alex Jarvis, the egocentric host of Church of Chills, and his two beautiful assistants in Emma Massalone as Edwins and Kaitlin Moore as Juniper struggling in a power dynamic over who has creative control over the show while staying financially afloat being unhoused living inside test in a defunct house of God.  Convincing audiences the trio of being adept and meticulous with computers and a video podcast is a hard sell when they live in popup tents and rariely leave the church grounds without much background other than short spats of the show’s brief history, but nonetheless, the three M’s – McDaniel, Massalone, and Moore – make their character emotions and pangs work to the story’s advantage rarther than have it feel like a detrimental free for all for the spotlight.  Creeping into that bright circle is the dark heart of vampire streamer Arturo Valenor, played Sean Ohlman.  The sex club proprietor, operating in the underground markets, drugs beauties with his own blood, rips their clothes off, and has his way sucking the lifeforce from their tender necks.  This dark web act is unearthed by the Church of Chills team and becomes the focal point for them to piggyback and drive-up subscribers with real life macabre only to be discovered and threatened by Valenor’s ever-present powers. Ohlman makes for a good hip vampire but doesn’t exact that gothic depravity of a classic bloodsucker in Valenor’s more erotically inclined sacrifices.  Only in the very showdown end do all four principals find themselves in the same scene together, previous working separately across the worldwide dark web or through Valenor’s giant floating eyes of foreboding.  Yes, floating giant eyes is pretty trippy and old school.  The rest cast constitutes as one half of Valenor’s vampiric acolytes with Chili Jean as the blood serving barkeep and Travis Stoner as the gimp-masked muscle and the other half half-naked Valenor victims in Llana Barron, Piper Parks, and it wouldn’t be a Full Moon Feature without an adult actress making an appearance with Maddy May going fully nude.

“Death Streamer” follows the same formula Full Moon has been following the last few years by pulling inspiration from the latest and greatest, perhaps even from the ugliest, flavor of the month cultural impact item has to offer.  2020 saw the release of “Corona Zombies” to bank off the pandemic, also from 2020 was “Barbie & Kendra Save the Tiger King” spun from the popular Netflix documentary of the same “Tiger King” title surrounding convicted felon Joe Exotic, “AIMEE:  The Visitor” featured sensationally the dangers of A.I. during the artificial intelligence concern of rise, especially amongst the arts industry, and, lastly, a slew of video content infused storylines as TikTok, Facebook Live, X Live, and many other platforms become an overconsumption of media with “Bad Influencer,” “Attack of the 50ft Camgirl,” and “Subscriber” being a few examples.  “Death Streamer” fits in the latter category as well by following a what seems to be an endless horizon of streaming content from music, to vidcasts, to live feeds in today’s highly consumable media world where everybody, and their brother, has streams to be viral.  “Death Streamer” using today’s tech to try and modernize the mythos of one of man’s longstanding lores, vampires.  Charles Band’s two-prong locations keep costs of the crowdfunded dollars down while pushing much of the cashflow toward effects, both practical with off-screen trickery and blood spurts, and compositional VFX that sees large floating eyes and thousands of chirping bats, as well as getting essentially all the female actresses at least to a bare-chested level with even one using her holy cross chest tattoo, nested right between her mammaries, as the final nail in the coffin for one unlucky, or maybe very luck, vampire with a death by a gratuitous emblematic exposure.  Hands down, “Death Streamer” has the best kill scene I’ve seen this year!

Be a subscriber to the end of the world with Full Moon Feature’s “Death Streamer” now available on Blu-ray. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD25 seems adequate for the presentation flushed with warm red, blue, and green color filters. Details are sparse depending on the artistic alleyway inside Valenor’s club or inside his POV camera-specs, brighter the gels, lesser the finer points to the textures. The church setting, or the Church of Chills HQ, puts together a better angled lighting and a starker contrast by way of deeper shadows. Insignificant compression issues despite the single layer format but we’re not receiving the cleanest, most refined, looking picture image that’s presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Two English encoded audio outputs are both Dolby Digital compressed with a 5.1 surround sound mix and a dual channel 2.0 stereo. Not the strongest or dynamic reproduction of the original, raw audio as it suppresses the action and removes the multiple channel pathways, rendering over mostly in the front channels in what the listing is more 5.1 in name only. Dialogue comes over clean and clearly enough without a spark of obstruction and is layered above the environment as well as what’s usually an overpowering Full Moon carnivalesque or Gothic score. English closed captioned subtitles are available. Special features include a behind-the-scenes of the regularly archived and accompanying Videozone specials, the “Death Streamer” premiere held in Los Angele was cast, crew, and a few select Full Moon friends, such as Barbara Crampton, with a Charles Band pre-movie few words, and a lineup of Full Moon trailers. The standard release of the Blu-ray Amaray has a pulpy illustrative cover art of a bloodied mouth Valenor and his two acolytes splayed in red, blues, and purple. The region free release comes not rated and has a just above an hour runtime of 72 minutes.

Last Rites: As the vampire canon expands with age, new grooves are etched into the classical monster’s lineage tree and “Death Streamer” is a cyber-ghoul knot ready to leave its influential mark only to have its fangs nulled down and overshadowed by the all-powerful naked female figure in another fair-weather Full Moon Feature.

“Death Streamer” Now on Blu-ray!

This EVIL Has Brains! “Head of the Family” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Remastered DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get Ahead in Life with “Head of the Family” on DVD!

The Stackpooles are a little strange and are usually the talk of the small town of Nob Hollows when the zombified trio of siblings pick up the groceries at Lance’s Stop and Shop general store and diner.  Yet, the Stackpoole’s are not Lance’s problem, not yet anyway, when Howard, a no-good shakedown thug, forces his might into Lance’s business as a silent partner.  Little does Howard know that Lance has an ongoing affair with his wife, Loretta, and they devise a plan to get rid of Howard using the newly discovered dirt on the Stackpoole family’s bizarre kidnappings to take care of Howard once and for all.  Lance figures he’s found his meal ticket after blackmailing Mryon, the fourth, and unseen, sibling who’s the mastermind and head of the family – literally a giant head – using telepathy and mind control to against his brothers and sister to do his bidding, but Myron is no fool to be taken advantage of so easily. 

Who just is this Robert Talbot?  The director of “Head of the Family,” who hides behind a black mask and speaks through a voice modulator, is none other than Full Moon’s secret identity for Charles Band under a pseudonym persona to exact a different kind of picture outside the context he’s expected to continue as well as an empire built on the image of horror.  “Head of the Family” may not be tiny dolls inflicting an affliction based on their evil ways or the resurrection of the formerly dead and abnormal to, once again, inflect damage upon their creators, and possibly, the world we know it.  Instead, “Head of the Family” slips out of Full Moon’s comfort zone and into another, different kind of shadowy namkeen to small plate audiences’ bizarre fascination with the weird and fantastical.   Also, to exhibit T&A more than like the usual in the Full Moon repertoire.  The less horror, more zany cult 1995 feature structures around the titular big headed villain, a band of his freakshow kin, and a constantly copulating couple that’s penned by Neal Marshall Stevens (“Thir13en Ghosts”), also under a pseudonym of Benjamin Carr, based off a “Talbot” story, and produced by, also “Talbot,” and “Hideous!” and “Witchouse” producer, Kirk Edward Hansen.

I couldn’t tell you if J.W. Perra is big-headed or not in real life, but the actor is certainly quite cranial as the family-telepathic, wheelchair bound Myron Stackpoole.  The literal pun of the title plays in tune with Full Moon’s madcap maniacal ties while having Perra’s large head shine, or rather sweat gland glisten, under a miniature lame body.  Myron’s enfeebled corporeal flesh drives his hunger to join the ranks of normal people as he kidnaps and surgically operates on the minds of unsuspected townsfolk to incorporate a portion of his higher intellect into a stronger body.  Myron uses his stupefied siblings’ talents, bestowed upon them through a paternal quadruplet birthing, with Wheeler (James Jones, “Dark Honeymoon”) given superhuman bugeye sight and hearing, Otis (Bob Schott, “Gymkata”) given the twice the strength of a normal man, and Georgina (adult actress Alexandria Quinn, “Taboo VIII”) given, you guessed it, the hot and voluptuous body to attract men like moth to a flame.  Speaking of hot bodies, former adult actress and “Femalien” star Jacqueline Lovell, aka porn handle Sara St. James, is absolutely supple as Loretta, a twangy blonde girlfriend to the scheming Lance, played with Cajun confidence by Blake Adams (“Lurking Fear”), and every chance Lance and Loretta get, they’re steaming the scene with erotically charged expo and exposition.  I’m fairly certain Lovell has more lines topless than she does with her clothes fully on.  In the supporting cast inventory, Vicki Lynn (“Fugitive Rage”) and Gordon Jennison Noice (“Virtuosity’) make up the remaining. 

I’ll admit I fell into that hole of expecting “Head of the Family” to play out just like any conventional Full Moon feature, comprised of pint-sized and mischievous devils to a carnivalesque tune of irregular horror.  To my surprise but not to my dismay, Band’s incognito oddity has the bones of a blackmailing thriller spiced with eccentric and caricature types and gratuitous sex at every turned corner.  “Head of the Family” progresses through interacting conversation to outline exploitation arrangements and to be informed of dangers of crossing a big headed brainiac, interjected with the occasional display of drooling operated rejects, Otis and Wheeler’s utilizing their inborn side effects, and, I keep coming around to this motif and hopefully not in a pervy way, the female toplessness that bares bountiful.  The depth perception effect to enlarge J.W. Perra’s head as Myron is executed pretty well with Adolfo Bartoli’s camera work that reflects the actors facing generally at the correct angle, as if they’re eye-to-eye with the Myron, and the edits do the effect justice as well, spliced precisely to account for dimensional space, the effects are reminiscent of Randy Cook’s illusionary work on “The Gate” films using dimensional animation and scale between live actors in the same frame but some distance apart.  If you excuse the upcoming intended pun, Band’s film is more of a talking head production than one of grotesque action, a realization you won’t be aware of until well stretched into the runtime and because of this that’s the reason there’s likely a ton of Jacqueline Lovell nudity.  Okay, okay, I’ll stop blabbering on about the nudity!   

“Head of the Family” arrives onto newly remastered DVD from Full Moon Features.  The MPEG2, upscaled 720p, DVD5, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, doesn’t have any detail regarding the remastering on the latest re-release but I suspect it’s the identical image or a slightly touched up 35mm negative used for the original Full Moon release from 1999 scanned in 2K.  15 years later, a reimagined “Head of the Family” retains the softer, radiant picture quality with a highly extensive color palette through the aura glow and a natural, yet reduced, grain.  The negative does have a flaw in what looks to be cell damage a little halfway through the runtime with a brief, dark cut line making itself known, if you blink, you’ll miss it.  This sort of obvious damage does lean more toward an identical transfer being used for the 2024 release with just a 2k scan without restorative elements.  Remastered restoration likely went hot and heavy into the audio elements.  The English language LPCM is available in two channel formats, a dual-channeled 2.0 and a surround sound 5.1 mix.  Robust with added nuances, “Head of the Family’s” soundtrack breathes new aural acuities that not only clean any distortions, if there was any, but also sharpens the tracks like a knife on a wet stone, cutting and clean.  Dialogue is clear and assertive through what is mostly a talking head span.  English close caption subtitles are available.  Much of the special features are reused from the 2016 Blu-ray release, including an audio commentary track from Actor J.W. Perra (Myron), promo behind-the-scenes video of the long anticipated “Bride of Head,” which has been stagnant for years, the original trailer, and other Full Moon Features’ trailers.  The DVD release is an exact mirror image of the physical Blu-ray release from 8 years prior with a disc press image of Myron’s closeup through a murky filter and no inserts included.  The region free release has an 82-minute runtime and is rated R without specifying the content but there is language, nudity, strong sexuality, and violence. 

Last Rites: “Head of the Family” bucks the lucrative trend of miniature killer imps for the Full Moon empire but keeps moderately in line with eccentric characters, unabashed skin, and a Richard Band jaunty soundtrack, accentuated even more in a brand-new remastered DVD version of the film that was helmed by Charlie Band himself in anonymity.

Get Ahead in Life with “Head of the Family” on DVD!