Tag Archives: Richard Band

Tony Todd’s Last EVIL Released Film! “Cutter’s Club” reviewed! (Full Moon Feature / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Cutter’s Club” is Ready for Your Corpse! Buy it Here!

Two promising surgeons Jack and Jill seeking to reach new heights beyond their Hippocratic oath find themselves in presence of Dr. George Roberts, a once renowned surgeon turned obsessed head of a secretly society of surgeons known as the Cutter’s Club who use their skill to be monster makers, craved from slivers of fresh human flesh and harvested internal organs.  Suffering from a severe dissociative order, Dr. Roberts is eager to recruit his former lover and colleague Jill who has the necessary surgical skillset and medical knowledge to bring his two-headed, pint-sized monstrosity to life.  There’s only one problem, Jill’s boyfriend Jack is not in Dr. Roberts’s good graces and is kept out of secret operations to piece together a monster.  As Dr. Roberts’s split personality divides even further and the police become aware of the missing corpses used in their experiments, all of the Cutter’s Clubs efforts, two-headed monster, and even their lives are in jeopardy.

Filmed in 2005, shelved due to lack of funding, and thought lost by the lab storing the negative, the Charles Band directed “Cutter’s Club” went through hell and back to be finally released 20 years later.  The science fiction-horror teeters the same basic premise and principals of David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” where surgery is the new sex and expressive art, a concept Cronenberg had for decades prior, yet the “Videodrome” director couldn’t fully flesh out the idea into cinematic fruition until recently, starring Viggio Mortensen and Léa Seydoux in 2022.  The script that’s less body horror and more mad science than Cronenberg’s vision is penned by “Thir13en Ghosts” and “AMIEE:  The Visitor” writer, and long time Full Moon narrative collaborator, Neal Marshall Stevens under his pseudonym of Benjamin Carr.  Re-discovered, ironically, the same month Tony Todd died, the “Cutter’s Club” was restored to be the unreleased swan song production from the late and great “Candyman” actor.  Band produces the venture under his founded company Full Moon.

This November is the one-year anniversary of Tony Todd’s death, yet the actor still has new movie releases with “Cutter’s Club” being one of them.  As Dr. George Roberts, Todd plays to his stereotyped tune of being large and in-charge, commanding the screen with his low-frequency voice and intense stares, but Dr. Roberts also has a softer side in his disassociation, a side that’s kinder and gentler against the mad doctor version of himself but that more gentile version barely surfaces and Todd’s ultimately stuck playing an aggressor role he’s all too familiar with and known for.  Not to speak too ill of the dead, but Todd does a bit of overacting with the character by stretching into unnecessary exposition and melodrama, especially when kinder Dr. Roberts briefly sits behind the driver’s seat.  A more down-to-Earth performance comes from Melissa Searing (“Deadly Beloved”) as the anti-heroine Jill.  Grounding an overly articulated Todd to the story, Searing makes for a decent ambitious surgeon trapped inside the confines of the law and ethics and being romantically attached to colleague Jack who’s own self-indulgent inclusion is motivated by the affection he has for Jill.  Played by Davee Youngblood (“Bigfoot County”), Jack looks like the typical Full Moon principal white guy actor that’s more surfer dude with an early 2000’s spikey hair and puka pendant necklace and less defined as a serious surgeon other than wearing the blue scrubs.  Along with Todd’s Dr. Roberts, the Cutter’s Cub society is comprised of lesser disturbed promising medical professionals with David Sean Robinson, Jemal McNeil, and Raelyn Hennessee in various facets of medicine from anesthesiology to retrieving dead bodies from the morgue to being star students when it comes to surgery.  The latter Hennessee is also supposed to playing the jealous other woman to Jill with an at interval relationship with Dr. Roberts that suggests a level perversion or infatuation we’re never privy to.  Jon Simanton, from another Charles Band production “The Creeps,” fills out the cast as the man in a monster suit, stuffing himself into Two-Head, the pieced together monstrous creation.

Without a doubt, horror fans will flock to get their hands on the last and once lost Tony Todd title, but as with many notable genre actors, only a handful of first-class films out of many of the horror legends’ filmographies deserve to be stamped and sealed into their legacy.  “Cutter’s Club” will not be one of those remarkably renowned films.  And like usual, the interesting story of monster making and crafting art out of the flesh of the recently deceased is cut off at the knees by the production’s lack of funding, funding that has rarely been outside the inbreeding of crew talent that retains a certain staleness and the necessary funding to elevate “Cutter’s Cub” from out of the depths of dirt cheap filmmaking and into novel and crisply stylish territory.  Charles Band also nearly always finds a way to integrate his fascination with miniaturized dolls and creatures by having Two-Head be short and stout side villain, adding his directing trademark where he can.  You know it’s a dime-store production not by the rudimentary crafted man-in-a-shoddy-monster suit or the bunch of greenhorn actors that can’t express lines or actions without sullying themselves but rather by the obvious nude nipple pastie on Melissa Searing as she rides an over-sex acting Davee Youngblood nearly convulses out of the bed while lying on his back.  While nude nipples pasties themselves don’t indicate the production’s value, its the from behind-and-over-the-shoulder perspective camera shot that provides a little Searing side boob with the bubbling and loose pastie that really speaks to the fast-and-loose “Cutter’s Club” construction, screaming to the top of it’s lungs that not even a nipple pastie is worth the time and effort to fix for realism.  The story itself has the bone density to stand on it’s own two feet but has hardly any flesh clingy on the Jill love triangle with Jack and George, Jill’s intense motivation to be beyond the grave of a conventional surgeon’s oath to help people, and the secretly society’s wishy-washy goal that doesn’t quite materialize whether their objective is to sculpt art out of flesh or to be monster makers as their deranged core values.

Todd fans will surely want to pick up this lost but not forgotten movie that has been resurrected from the tomb of misplaced films. Full Moon Features handles their own production and distribution with a Blu-ray release on an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition resolution, BD25, formatted in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  For an early-to-mid 2000s horror, that pleasant film layer of 35mm stock grain is a sight for sore eyes from modern day digital capturing with natural saturation and texturization that provide better practicality to the picture quality. Depth between medium to close up shorts offer plenty of outline and detail around the simultaneous focus points.  There’s not a ton of color range or texture with a most of the mise-en-scene blends a bland swirl of greens, browns, and blacks mostly only a few micro pops of brighter hues, though muted from the desaturated grading, coming through with Jack and Jill’s blue scrubs and we do get some nice sliminess from Two-Head’s stucco flesh.  Full Moon encodes two English audio options:  a Dolby Digital 2.0 and a Dolby Digital 5.1.  Both mixes keep put mostly in front with little atmosphere surround through the back and a front channels, resulting in the stereo mix to be just as adequate as the surround.  Dialogue retains prevalence throughout with the carnivalesque soundtrack of a usually tagged team of Charles Band-directed and Richard Band scored mix replaced with the Jonathan Walters trickling keyboard struck alto keys of menacing science.  English closed captioning is available.  Special features include an interview featurette with director Charles Band and actors Melissa Searing and Davee Youngblood.  The official trailer rounds out the special content laid out alongside a Full Moon promotional trailer for their streaming video magazine, VIdeoZone.  The standard Amaray Blu-ray contains collective character compositional artwork with no other physical trimmings.  The 82 minute, not rated film has region free playback capabilities. 

Last Rites: Jack and Jill might have went to fetch a pail of water, but “Cutter’s Club” is the one that fell and broke its crown. Nice to see Tony Todd in a relatively new project posthumously; yet, having no more financial standing to finish, “Cutter’s Club” feels just that, unfinished, as another slapdash, get-it-out-there-on-the-shelves, product to bank as the unseen film.

“Cutter’s Club” is Ready for Your Corpse! Buy it Here!

Enjoy The Last Night in EVIL’s Hotel. “The Innkeepers” reviewed! (Second Sight Films / 4K UHD Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Book a Copy of “The Innkeepers” on 4K Ultra High-Definition!

The Yankee Pedlar is a historic hospitality hotel with over 100 years of service that comes with its own notorious past and haunted tidings.  On the verge of closing for good, the Yankee Pedlar has one more weekend to remain open and house guests but with only a handful of rooms occupied, there’s not much else to do for the two innkeepers, Claire and Luke.  As a way to pass the time, Claire is eager to video capture spooky events to feed into Luke’s website based off the hotel’s history in the death of Madeline O’Malle, a bride to be who committed suicide on her wedding day when the finance no-showed and her corpse was left to rot for 3 days in the basement as hotel owners feared for bad publicity, but when eerie begin to plague, call for her, with visions of a bloodied O’Malle in a white gown, Claire finds herself in the dangerous company with a permanent guest at the dying hotel. 

Ti West, the established genre director with the famed “X” trilogy, kept audiences pale in fear and the hairs on the back of their neck stiff and straight up with his written-and-directed horror films that retained staying power amongst fans.  2009’s “The House of the Devil” is considered one of the more recent better throwback horrors of our time surrounding classic tropes like a satanic cult and a home alone babysitter.  West’s 2011 film  “The Innkeepers” comes at a rebound time when his commercial picture, “Cabin Fever 2:  Spring Fever”, sequel to Eli Roth’s breakthrough hit from 2002 about a flesh-eating virus, didn’t quite feel like his film and “The Innkeepers” also hit a little different by shielding audiences from any type of horrific, on screen splatter violence and be concentrated on pure fear of the senses.  Though narratively set in perhaps Pennsylvania due to some references of towns an hour outside of Philadelphia, “The Innkeepers” was actually filmed more North in Connecticut with the real-life Yankee Pedlar building.  Larry Fessenden (“The Last Winter,” “Rehab”) of Glass Eye Pix and Derek Curl of Darksky Pictures co-produce the film along with Peter Phok and Ti West. 

In the two principal roles of Claire and Luke is “Barbarian’s” Sara Paxton as an unmotivated hotel clerk coasting until the very, bitter end and “Cheap Thrill’s” Pat Healy as a blasé and uninterested front desk colleague interested in getting on the popular haunted house train with his own website about their employer’s centenarian hotel.  Paxton inarguably shoulders much of the screentime as the girl who cried wolf when she experience’s the sounds of a wolf, aka the spooky serenades of one Madeline O’Malle, and the visual eviscerations of her bloodied corpse that would scare the bejesus out of anyone.  However, the frights are not enough to seemingly strike fear in Paxton’s shield of composure or even enough to put West’s story to rest with a simple I’m outta here as most of us chickens would flock toward the exit on the first instance waking from a vivid dream too real for comfort.  Healy ultimately steals the primary performance away from Paxton with his own gruff and irritated by everything:  the hotel, the guests, his own pitiful existence.  Healy does a nice job creating that subtle tension between Luke and Claire, knowing Luke’s own hangups lie somewhere in between and haven’t been exposed yet, all the while being a sarcastic boor for most of the time.  There are also side characters in the form of random guests occupying the skeleton-crewed hotel bringing with them their own set of baggage.  One of guests is Kelly McGillis and the “Top Gun” actress, in a bit of a meta-role of an aging actress turned mystic.  There’s also Alison Bartlett (Gina from various Sesame Street shows and specials) and Jake Ryan (“Asteroid City”) as scorned wife and her son and the peculiar older gentlemen, played by George Riddle, who requests a special room and will not take no for an answer.  One of the more curious castings is Girls’ Lena Dunham as a coffeeshop barista in a one and only brief scene that doesn’t add really anything to the whole in a pointlessly random interaction with Claire that, perhaps, plays off Claire’s repetitiveness and stasis life of going there everyday but not really knowing much about the barista, who is apparently always there too. 

Juggling between the blended tones of comedy and horror, Ti West doesn’t commingle the two directly into one scene, keeping distinction for one or the other in their individualized moments.  This leaves little room for alleviating dread levity inside the scare moment after building tension and fear of being chased or waiting for the silence to be broken but an unsuspected jump scare.  Outside the context of the fright-filled moment, back and forth quips and playful antics between Luke and Claire as two bored and starved for company innkeepers in the hotel’s waning days are delivered in brightly lit rooms and mostly shared with another person to be a telltale safe space against the malevolence of serrating spook-house intensity that often lingers and waits on with bated breath.  In the innermost between is Claire’s internal struggle to cope with the impending outcome that there is nothing on the horizon for her.  No secure job, no ambitions, no plans of any kind are seemingly providing the character with no hope and in that stagnation, she desperately holds onto what’s nearby – Luke’s interest in the Yankee Pedlar’s hauntings.  Enhanced by the odd actions and placement of the modicum of guests – McGillis as a crystal charm intuitive and Riddle as a strange-enough older man with a specific room fascination – Claire motivation to reveal Madeline O’Malle becomes tenfold because of her unconscious lack to move forward in life, which then spurs the question, is Claire’s experiences grounded in truth or are they just a downspout of manifestations induced compensation?  You’ll have to be the judge.

Like “House of the Devil,” another of Ti West films makes the Second Sight Film cut onto a newly restored 4K scanned UHD Blu-ray release.  “The Innkeepers” HVEC encoded, 2160p ultra high-definition, BD100 has the true presence of quality video with a gradual improvement in the finer details of a greater pixel count inside the HDR with Dolby Vision.  Though digitally recorded with a no imperfections to note from previous releases, Second Sight’s release does appear sharper and deeper around the black levels that often improve with better resolution and suitable compression and with a good portion of the story taking place in the dark recesses of a hotel basement and the in the shadows of unlit rooms, there’s no visual compression issue or loss of expected detail.  Contrastively, darker scenes appear more lit by a lower contrast but still, the details are there in depth and in closeup.  The English DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound audio track diffuses the spread of atmospheric creepiness – ghosts whispers, nondiegetic bangs and clangs, and a Jeff Grace building orchestral score that keeps the heart bumping (think Richard Band’s “Re-Animator” but with more lulls”).  Dialogue is prominently clear and in front of the aforesaid layers with depth mostly between Claire and Luke’s conversing in the lobby and range limited to, again, the aforesaid.  English subtitles are available.  Though this review is catered to the limited edition, rigid slipbox release full of tangible goodies, the standard release does have encoded a small army of special features that has two audio commentaries with the first including Ti West, producer Larry Fessenden of Glass Eye Pix, producer Peter Phok, and sound designer Graham Reznick and the second commentary also West but with principal actors Sara Paxton and Pat Healy.  A slew of new interviews provide a well-rounded, in-depth look at the creative design as It West A Lasting Memory, Pat Healy Let’s Make This Good, Larry Fessenden Our Dysfunctional World, director of photography Eliot Rockett Living in the Process, composer Jeff Grace Cast a Wide Net, and line producer Jacob Jaffke A Validating Moment contribute to the retrospective.  Special features round out with archival behind-the-scenes and the trailer.  The physical presence of Second Sight’s “The Innkeepers” keeps in-line with previous standard edition 4K releases with a black Amaray case and a monochromic grayish illustrative cover art setting audiences up for ghostly expectations.  The UK certified 15 release contains strong horror, gore, language, and sex reference – though the gore is subtle and definitely not over-the-top or even explicit.  This particular UK release, that has a runtime of 101 minutes, is region free and presented in a widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio.

Last Rites: “The Innkeepers” works, if not wriggles, into the brain, much like the invasive worthlessness inside Claire’s swirling mind, and the Second Sight Films’ 4K UHD Blu-ray is an ultimate celebration of not only the film itself, but also the venerable work of the horror genre’s freshest master Ti West.

Book a Copy of “The Innkeepers” on 4K Ultra High-Definition!

The Holidays Are Over, but the EVIL Remains With Us in this Cookie-Cutter Classic “The Gingerdead Man” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get Ready to Chomp on this Cookie! “The Gingerdead Man” Blu-ray Available Here!

Cold-hearted, mama’s boy killer, Millard Findlemeyer, brutally gun downs Sarah Leigh’s father and brother before wounding during a diner robbery.  Two years later, Findlemeyer is executed with the help of Sarah’s damning testimony and the traumatized survivor attempts to pick up the pieces of her life by keeping her crumbling family bakery business afloat.  With her mother a raging alcoholic and a competing business threatening to shut the business down, Sarah doesn’t realize the gingerbread seasoning dropped off at her doorstep is actually the ashes of the evil Findlemeyer.  Thrown in a gingerbread mix and baked to live again, Findlemeyer returns to continue his carnage but as a delectably devilish cookie sporting candied buttons and wielding a knife.  Trapped inside the bakery, a handful of survivors are being more-than-gingerly picked off one-by-one by Findlemeyer’s possession of a pint-sized cookie and Sarah must face again the evil that destroyed her family.  

“The Gingerdead Man” is one of Full Moon’s more contemporary repeat villains this side of the century.  Christmas may be over, but the holiday cookie carnage doesn’t just pack on the pounds, it also can shred and cut the waist, literally, with guts spilling out everywhere.  The Charles Brand directed, 2005 film that kicked off the icing for not one, not two, but three sequels and a timeline intertwinement with Full Moon’s “Evil Bong” series.  Pot and cookies, a perfect combination when blazed.  The script was penned by Full Moon regular and “Night of the Living Dead” remake actor William Butler, under the pseudonym of Silvia St. Croix, and fellow Full Moon regular Dominic Muir (“Critters,” “Doll Graveyard”), under the pseudonym of August White.  Filmed in Los Angeles, the indie horror-comedy is a Shoot Productions and Full Moon coproduction venture with Band producing and Dana Harrloe serving as executive producer. 

Adding to “The Gingerdead Man’s already zany resurrecting the evil dead into a baked good concept (there’s nothing good about this cookie monster), the untamed energy and distinguished voiceover from Gary Busey is better than self-rising flour for this doughy production.  The “Predator 2” and “Lethal Weapon” actor headlines as the despicable killer Millard Findelmeyer but only in the flesh for the opening diner sequence that establishes Findelmeyer as a coldblooded murderer.  The backstory of his apprehension, trial, and execution is whisked into a frothy afterthought after the title credits to establish more of Robin Sydney’s Sarah Leigh character of rebuilding her life.  Sydney, who would become Charles Band’s wife nearly two decades later after debuting in this role, reserves Sarah into a stasis of plugging along into a woe-as-me state as a setup for her to be heroine nemesis to Findlemeyer’s flaky, killer crust.  What’s neat about her character, along with a handful of other principal characters, is they’re subtly and smartly named after notable cookie making companies.  Sarah Leigh is an obvious rework of the frozen desserts company Sara Lee, Ryan Locke, an unlikely Sarah Leigh love interest cladded and carried by all things from early 2000s, is Amos Cadbury, a mixed play on Famous Amos and Cadbury confectionary, and Jonathan Chase as commercial wrestling enthusiast Brick Fields lends to believe the character’s name pulls inspiration from Mrs. Fields soft baked cookies.  There’s also the corporate-commercial takeover statement with an adjacent restaurant that threatens to put Sarah’s bakery out of business and the owner’s name is Jimmy Dean, as in the sausage company, with Larry Cedar (“The Hidden,” “C.H.U.D. II”) in the role.  Alexia Aleman, Margaret Blye, Daniela Melgoza, and James Synder fill out the cast.

Kitschy personification horror is all the rage in the independent genre circle.  Murderous dolls at are dime a dozen, but a few outliers stray into something more risking and adventures, like an evil llama pinata in “Killer Pinata,” a wicked snowman in “Jack Frost,” or even a killer unicorn standing figure in “CarousHELL” that make the niche subgenre fascinatingly tacky for all the right reasons.  Charles Band and team tap into that peculiar ripe vein to extract their own usually joyous, kid-friendly object and transfigure its G-rated image to a hard R with death, sass, and a whole bunch of mischief and what better wholesome inanimate object to vilify than a scrumptious gingerbread man?  Voiced by Busey and animated by the always preferred practical means, “The Gingderdead Man” evokes promises of a so-bad-its-good composite, especially since the antagonist for this franchise starter fits right into the Full Moon small things come in killer packages niche, and while half of “The Gingerdead Man” delivers on a havoc-wreaking spiced cookie, the execution, as a whole, leaves much to be desired by whirling through a two year story gap of the capture and execution of Findlemeyer and how and why his malevolent essence is mixed into the batter for resurrection.  The slapdashedly before and after title credits causes a brief loss of thought as the brain frantically tries to catch up and fill in the gaps as much of the images and exposition haphazardly piece together.  The Gingerdead Man isn’t also quite as quippy as his human form counterpart, but a ton of appreciation goes into the multiple renditions of the distorted faced Gingerdead Man character from hand puppets, to animatronics, to full size human suit provides that breadth of range in angles, perspectives, and appearances that shape a personality package to where dialogue can nearly be neutralized altogether.  “The Gingerbread Man” lives and breathes as its marketed image, a mediocre kill possession-slasher with a bunch of characters scratching their heads instead of building upon who they are and what hurdles, figuratively and literally, to jump, the latter mostly falls into the hands of Sarah Leigh and her depression-induced fear, an aspect she has to face when being revisited by the man who killed her father and brother. 

An all-new transfer and remastered from the original 35mm elements, Full Moon Features re-bakes “The Gingerdead Man” onto a new physical media cookie sheet.  The AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, had elevated some lower resolution complications with better definition appeal but the overall package isn’t an epitome showcase of the format possibilities with softer contrasts that leaves voids and shadows milkier, textures fluctuate during decode that sways in a range between 15 to 25 Mbps, and minor damaged portions, such as light scratches and speckling, are not touched up in the restoration.  Skin tones and other colorist applications appear organic and, when reaching peak performance, displays a nicely diffused sweat sheen in the lighting.  Two English, lossy audio options are available, a Dolby Digital 5.1 and a Stereo 2.0.  A clean and clear presentation on all layers with an amalgamated cast that just as good as any other solid sound design with powerful forefront and intelligible dialogue, an above par ambient dispersal that has suitable depth and range, and a Roger Ballenger carnivalesque score that isn’t from Richard Band but is a great mimic.  English subtitles are available.  Extras include an archival behind-the-scenes featurette with interviews with cast, crew, and Charles Band with some BTS-footage in creating the cookie monster, a blooper reel, the original trailer, and trailers for other Full Moon features.  Front cover on the Amaray Blu-ray is an illustrated composition of characters that clue in a sense of what to expect but other than that, this standard re-release has physical bare bones.  The region free release has a runtime of 71 minute and is not rated.

Last Rites: Though doesn’t reinvent the recipe nor does it not make this naughty killer cookie stale, “The Gingerdead Man” has come a long way with a new, revitalizing release onto a high-definition format pulled from the extensive and vast Full Moon catalogue that’s slowly but surely updating the filmic cache. This schlocky bad baked good should surely be in everyone’s holiday horror collection.

Get Ready to Chomp on this Cookie! “The Gingerdead Man” Blu-ray Available Here!

A World Lost in Time Ruled by the EVILEST Animated Lizards with Spears! “The Primevals” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Yetis! Reptiles! “The Primevals” Lives Up To Its Title!

Himalayan Sherpas kill what was once considered the mythical Yeti.  The corpse is then donated to a U.S. university for scientific study.  When the grand reveal and world announcement that the abdominal snowman does exist, not only does the mankind go into a frenzy of questions and shock, but also proves sound one self-ostracized student’s long-rejected university thesis on the creature’s existences.  Teaming up with the university scientific department head, who now apologetically regrets personally rejecting his thesis based of speculatory concepts, an expedition to the Himalayas is formed to find, capture, and study the Yeti and sets in motion yet another discovery of a lifetime, a thousands of years old reptilian and technologically advanced alien race that have isolated themselves and have settled in a manipulated climate control river valley of the mountains and has surgically altered the minds of the Yeti to be more aggressive for battle and entertainment. 

“The Primevals” is a film 30 years in the making and is new film by a director who has long since passed away.  The 2023 released Full Moon production began its journey in 1993 with director David Allen, a visual and special effects artist who held prominence in Charles Band’s company as one of the go-to effects artists having played a big part of the crew in the “Puppet Master” franchise as well as note-worthy outside Band’s company with 1970’s “Equinox” and Joe Dante’s “The Howling” with stop-motion animation.  “The Primevals” relies heavily on stop-motion for the Yeti and reptilian race creatures based on Allen’s co-script treatment with another stop-motion and depth/dimensional effects master in “The Gate’s” Randall William Cook.  With all the live-action shots completed over the course of five years due to do Full Moon financial issues and “The Primevals” being an ambitious endeavor, David Allen untimely passes and the film is shelved for the unforeseeable future.  Once the ground under his feet was solid again, Band initiated an Indiegogo campaign to get the film finished and did so with a humble amount raised from contributors.  The Full Moon production was filmed in Romania, with the coproduction of Castle Film Romania, with additional mountain scenes filmed in Italy at the Dolomites mountains. 

Perhaps one of the more wholesome productions from Full Moon, “The Primevals” embraces that made-for-TV bravado of an expedition trek into a journey of the lost world.   The selected expeditioners are diverse enough to encourage character backstories and development, beginning with the civilized contentious history between Matt Connor, a former student whose Yeti thesis was rejected, and Dr. Claire Collier, the department director who did the rejecting on Matt Connor’s paper.  While the opportunity for a smug I-told-you-so moment is missed with a greater rebuff of excuses from the academia elite, respective role takers Richard Joseph Paul (“Oblivion,” “Vampirella”) and English actress Juliet Mills (“Beyond the Door,” “Demon, Demon”) are a cordial couple of platonic researchers who put their differences aside for the greater good of science.  In the real world, this premise wouldn’t fly and really harks back to underneath the bedrock of golden age cinema where creature features and lost world genre films reside.  They’re joined by the sport-hunting rehabilitated tracker and overall sensitive macho man Rando Montana, played by the screaming old man in the woods from “A Quiet Place,” Leon Russom.  Russom’s portrays a solid enough tough guy without really being challenged as such and that hurts Rando’s likeability, credibility, and survivability.  The grittiness, through the vessel of revenge, comes more from the Himalayan Sherpa with a grudge Siku by Tai Thai (“Killing Zoe”).  Walker Brandt (“Dante’s Peak”) rounds out the ensemble, whitewashing as a Sherpa sister to Siku.  With no real motive why she joins the expedition, Brandt’s character Kathleen dons the possible love interest role to Matt Cooper but that also doesn’t necessarily flesh out and secludes Kathleen’s contributions and presence as unnecessary.  Now, perhaps if she played a red shirt character, that would be another story. 

For a 30-year-old production, which still boggles my 40-year-old mind that it was only 1993, “The Primevals” footage was kept in great care by Charles Band and Full Moon Entertainment as it lies and waits to be restarted, and modernly restored, after it’s energizing battery, Director David Allen, suddenly dies.  The film embodies a show of perseverance by Band and company to not only have this homage of harrowing Earthbound sci-fi feature not be lost forever but also to posthumously honor David Allen and his legacy.  The stop-motion animation that was later added to the live action shots has near a seamless quality and is smoother, livelier than earlier examples of its anthropomorphic kind with stronger depth in the matte imagery to create the illusion of space and girth and puppeteering conjoined with more frames represent a sharper realism.  Granted, the Yeti and reptilian race still have the rad appearance of tangible 1990s toys but stop-motion has become a lost art that’s seeing a bit of a comeback in indie horror and sci-fi and it’s a welcome revert from the glossy, smoothed over, and ridiculously unnatural and impalpable computer-generated visual effects of certain films today. 

The epic arrives onto the home media format with a Full Moon Features single disc Blu-ray release.  A single-layered BD25 presented in a 1080p high definition and widescreen aspect ratio of anamorphic 1.78:1, “The Primevals” emerges generally seamless, especially since the work completed on the film spans over multiple decades.  However, what I suspect is the original 35mm print has been slightly smoothed over in the 2K processing and gives “The Primevals” a cleaner, sterile façade without the presence of natural grain.  Now, that’s not deeming the transfer as an enhanced flaw but rather just an observance as the image does favor the retro-adventure style of what the project aimed to accomplish.  Matte landscapes and miniaturized objects and characters meld and unify into one frame thanks to Randall Cook’s dimensional knowhow, the details on David Allen’s puppets, and a solidly uniform transfer of diffuse color, lower contrast, and cared for print.  The English language audio has two options, a Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1, both containing lossy clear, robust dialogue overtop a lively energetic and epic orchestra score by Charles Band’s brother, Richard Band.  Synchronized Foley assists in the anthropomorphic puppetry come to life and can be perceived instinctually through the side and rear channels.  There’s not a ton of LFE in what is more of one-sided octave above around the 4 or 5th.  Subtitles are available in English only.  One area that lacks substance in where one would think after 30-years of effort to get “The Primevals” out from the shadows is the special features.  Likely due to budget constraints, there is no showcasing of bons materials that structure around the struggles of finishing the film or a tribute to David Allen’s legacy and that greatly diminishes a portion of “The Primevals’” context value to audiences that may not be aware of the film’s historical troubles.  The only special feature listed under the static menu is the official trailer.  The standard physical release has little going for it too with a traditional Blu-ray Amaray casing sporting an epically rendered illustration of what to expect and a suitable homage to classic stop-motion adventure-creature celluloids.  Inside is a blue washed image of a Yeti pressed on the disc and there are no tangible inserts included.  Full Moon backdates the numerical order of catalogue releases and lists it as number 87.  The region free Blu-ray comes not rated and has a runtime 91 minutes. 

Last Rites: While its phenomenal to see that the beleaguered “The Primevals” didn’t let death and financial ruin didn’t stop Charles Band and steadfast backers from ponying up time and funds to see this project through to a long-awaited release, and such a marvel homage the film itself is to behold, there’s still a frustration to be had against the standard release that shows little interest in bonus featuring Davide Allen to celebrate the man, the myth, and the story’s ultimate creator. That material you’ll have to wait until 2025 when Full Moon releases the 3-Disc Collector’s Edition.

Yetis! Reptiles! “The Primevals” Lives Up To Its Title!

Poor Quality Dynamic Effects That Have a Horrendously EVIL Bite! “Bad CGI Gator” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Bad CGI Gator” is an Amazon Choice item! Order it Here!

Six college students end the schoolyear with a long weekend at a lakeside cabin in rural Georgia.  Looking forward to the youthful debauchery of drinking themselves into a stupor and engaging in lots of sexual hanky-panky, they each throw their school issued laptops into an alligator’s lake habitat for an Instagram moment to go viral and also in a moment of jovial release to be finally done with school and kick off Summer.  When the small gator encounters the laptop’s electrical current, the gator grows into a monstrosity and has the unique ability to float through the air.  Now larger than man, the gator is ravenous for his next meal and the college students are an easy, convenient dish.  Trapped inside the cabin, brawn stupidity won’t save them against the mutated reptilian that circles outside, and they have to use every ounce of their brainpower to outsmart the insatiable beast. 

You’ve (probably) heard of “Bad CGI Sharks!”  Now, get ready to sink your horribly rendered jaws into “Bad CGI Gator,” the latest alligator creature feature comedy-horror from Charles Band’s camp of Full Moon Features.  Helmed by resident Full Moon filmmaker, “Deathbed” and “Dark Walker” director Danny Draven, the 2023 film removes practicality and plausibility for the sake of following in the wake of the badly rendered shark film from brothers Jason and Matthew Ellsworth.  “Bad CGI Gator” is also a family affair with Charles Band’s son, Zalman Band, in his first full-length feature writing credit that, like “Bad CGI Sharks, gives into itself and doesn’t take itself seriously with genre tropes, the gore and nudity one-two punch, and, of course, bad computer-generated imagery.  Shot in the location state of Georgia as well as in Charlie Band’s Full Moon estate in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, “Bad CGI Gator” is produced by the father-son duo of Charlie and Zalman with Nakai Nelson (“Evil Bong 420,” “Don’t Let Her In”) picking up the rest of the producing slack. 

If there was ever a time to root for a visually vexing constructed alligator and not the young people trying to save their lives from its floating ferocity, the time would be now.  The cast is compromised of the very worst caricatures of millennial youth with their “bros,” Instagram virality, and overall toxic behavior.  As a whole it’s all purposefully scripted to be painted like pure putrid of personas that sodomize the very essence of heroic protagonists.  Ben VanderMey (“Malicious”) and Cooper Drippe are impeccable at being gym bro chads, even VanderMey’s character is named Chad, and their on screen slay honeys, in Rebecca Stoughton and Sarah Buchanan, are social media influencing prejudgers with thigh-high skirts and low cut blouses.  The obnoxiously coarse foursome becomes grounded by contrasted counterparts in Sam and Hope, played by Michael Bonini (“#ChadGetstheAxe”) and Maddie Lane (“Monster Mash”), and this clues in audiences of the two more level-headed potential gator bait as the likely, predictable heroes who will either survive with their life or end up destroying the floating gator.  While the Chads and Paisleys are an exaggeration of arrogantly crass people, led with the worst of qualities for easy kill digestion, Sam and Hope are also to the extreme in a polar opposite manner.  Sam’s cautious philosophy makes him the butt of many jokes while the neutral Hope, a rival hottie shoulder-to-shoulder with the other ladies, can whip Chad into place with almost a stare being his stepsister.  The common dislike for tasteless jerks force Sam and Hope together with the gator being a keynote in closing the door on the once ajar flirtations.  Lee Feely rounds out the cast as a fisherman badmouthing the gator’s size, but the opening scene doesn’t do much for the rest of story nor does it come back to bite, literally, with the lack of Feely’s return in his short-lived moment. 

A title like “Bad CGI Gator” doesn’t come with any strings attached; there is no subtext, no character development, or convoluted storyline to really tickle and tease the brain in a sophistication of foreplay.  What you get are dumb, unlikeable characters for a deathroll of laughs and gnarly kills.  What you also get is a badly rendered giant floating alligator that on a one to ten on the badly rendered scale, this poor design is a four, resulting in a not too terribly layered and not the worst we’ve seen to date but obviously stands outs as a cut and pasted fake with animated movements.  Also entailed, in complete Full Moon fashion, is the alligator’s transmogrified size and supplied new abilities that allows it to chomp heads clean off, savagely gnaw on half-naked beauties, and swallow hole it’s biggest, most arrogant opponent.  What castrates the story is the limited locations with much of the cat and mouse play at the house and around the only vehicle for escape.  The adjacent lake is virtually untapped for watery carnage, an area of helplessness for prey, aka people, to float in suspension while something more dangerous lurks below the surface or meets them at eye level.  “Bad CGI Gator” is swampy camp at its best and, at the same time, at its worst but never pretends to be anything more.

Not only an ode to the monster movies of yore and a lampoon hit to the gross, schlocky creature features of more modern times, “Bad CGI Gator” emerges onto an AVC encoded, high-definition Blu-ray from Full Moon Features. The 1080p resolution on the single-layered BD25 of Full Moon’s feature number 395 has no digital discord regarding sharpness around the details. Gator POVs remark good pixel counts under and above water, delineating around the aquatic ecosystem including the plants and lake’s mucky floor. Night sequences bathed in a softer, illuminatingly spreading blue see equal amount of definition where the, what is considered to be, moon light hits and transition into the exterior cabin juxtapositions nicely with a warmer, shadowy outlined tone. The release’s audio mixes include a LPCM 5.1 surround sound and a LPCM Stereo 2.0. Early on, dialogue has a conical sound with reverberations that seemingly bounce back almost immediately. Though not totally free of audio fallibility, the dialogue does come across prominent and clean of distortion. Conical echoing dissipates later in the runtime and is replaced with the impenetrable sounds of a growling gator and its stomping around the cabin property that doesn’t seem to occupy the same space, much like the gator, ridiculing this particular creature feature sub-subgenre even more. English subtitles are optionally available. Special features include an audio commentary from director Danny Draven and screenwriter Zalman Band, a Screams from the Basement Podcast interview with the director, A second director interview on the Dead Talk Live Podcast, an isolated Jojo Draven musical score that sounds just as carnivalesque, humorous horror blend as Richard Band would compose, a blooper reel, a cast table read at the Full Moon mansion in Ohio, and the original trailer. The standard Blu-ray comes a fairly telling illustration of a savage-looking gator mouth agape just below a bitten-ripped Spring Break banner. There are no insert or other tangible bonus content alongside a humorously standing upright gator, slight smirking with the catalogue film number. “Bad CGI Gator” Blu-ray comes region free, has a runtime just under an hour at 58 minutes, and is not rated.

Last Rites: Full Moon’s satirical take on lousy alligator anarchy is spot on and though the cast of characters deserve every rendered tooth ripped into their flesh, the glossy gator pales in comparison to practical effects of its predecessors, and the story stinks as much as gator bait, “Bad CGI Gator” doesn’t false advertise this uncanny predator’s X-factors and that’s brownie points in my book.

“Bad CGI Gator” is an Amazon Choice item! Order it Here!