Tag Archives: Wizard Entertainment

Invincible-Seeking EVIL Loves to Hide Behind Strip Clubs! “Decadent Evil 2” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The Sequel “Decadent EVIL II” Bites Hard! Check It Out!

After barely surviving Morella, Dex and Sugar, along with carrying around the homunculous Marvin, traverse across the country to find a vampire master.  Their plan is to take a drop of his blood needed for a resurrection ritual to bring vampire hunter and Marvin’s son Ivan Burroughs back to life after sacrificing himself to stop the deadly, megalomaniac Morella.  Ivan’s golden tracking cross brings them to midwestern gentleman’s club full of possible seedy suspects as the master vampire – the vampiric-attributed club owner Janos, the stern and scary club manager Burke, or even the club’s beautiful top dancer Lena are all suspects.  To uncover the master vampire, Dex and Sugar work their way to being hired at the club in order to snoop around.  Meanwhile, dancers and customers are winding up dead nearby.  As the investigation continues, Dex, Sugar, Marvin, and even the undead Ivan must work together to find the master vampire and stop him from continuing what Morella started. 

“Decadent Evil II” is a direct sequel to the 2005 original that returns Full Moon founder Charles Band (“Puppet Master”) to the director’s chair and writer Domonic Muir to pen the follow-up.  Same vampire tricks, more topless strippers, and a ragtag team of vampire trackers has this 2007 subsequent feature feel like a heel biter by keeping the story going without a lot of time lapsed.  Band retains his personal interest in pint size creatures and nude women in the sequel while keeping costs down as much as possible with limited locations and special effects fields filled in mostly with strippers doing their routines in between.  Band also returns as producer alongside Bill Barton (“Blood Forest”) and Joe Magna (“Dangerous Worry Dolls”) with James Synder, Jon Morrey, and Dana K. Harrloe serving executive producer under Band’s Wizard Entertainment, now Full Moon Productions.

Jill Michelle and Daniel Lennox return to their respective roles of being a vampire-human love story couple, Sugar and Dex.  No longer hiding secrets from one another and on-the-road together, going from one dingy hotel to the next, the carry around the corpses of Ivan Burroughs in hopes to one day resurrect him by securing master vampire blood.  Ivan Burroughs, unfortunately, is played by a new actor, one who in my opinion is an upgrade from the already great Phil Fondacaro (“Land of the Dead”).  Ricardo Gil replaces Fondacaro as the vampire hunter with a vindictive vendetta.  Gil does have similar features to Fondacaro but has more personality in his delivery, making Ivan Burroughs more sarcastic and rougher around the edges than the first subdued portrayal with less snarkiness, and that gives the sequel more notability against the first film.  The vampire lot doubles in villainy with a master vampire purposing sporting his beastly side of a red vampire bat head, complete with pointy airs, conical snout, and elongated fangs, and which, in all honesty, makes him look more like the Prince of Darkness of traditional appearance.  The master vampire hides amongst the human pool of the gentleman’s club to mist the air with mystery of who it is with a suspect list including a club owner Janos (Jon-Paul Gates, “Alice in Terrorland”), club’s top stripper Lena (Jessica Morris, “The Haunted Casino”), and club manager Burke (James C. Burns, “A Haunting at Silver Falls”).  Mike Muscat, Lillie Nyx, and Rory Williamson make up the rest of the cast.

“Decadent Evil II” is comparable to the original film with both being watermarked by Charles Band need for small creatures, campy horror, and substantial number of topless women, the latter being more prominently risky in the sequel with extra suggestive stripper poses that focus on the crotch area to lay gingerly into that filmmaking golden role of bigger and better for a sequel.  “Decadent Evil II” does teeter that idea with also a doubled antagonist pool and a higher body count but not necessarily containing, and also being a sorely lack of, gore that more-or-less stays the same from the original film with a rivulet trickles of blood running down necks and chins.   Band and Muir do take the vampire out of the Gothic setting, one that Morella had resided herself into living at a mansion of marble and stone, and they trade it for an automotive junkyard, an ill-fitting home for a well-dressed vampire whose lived centuries in human culture.  One locale that has remained constant throughout both Band’s films are strip clubs and channeling the success of such gentleman’s club with bloodsuckers as “From Dusk till Dawn, both films prominently display them with great grandeur for the B-roll stripper moves.  With being a sequel, I held quite a bit of disappointment for the story that follows the same thematics as the first, the main being a singular master vampire garnering souls to become invincible and there’s nothing to accentuate that idea even further as it’s surrounded by, again, much of the same – Dex, Sugar, and Ivan, the inexplicable homonculous and his strange attributes, and a strip clubs.  Even the final scene remains familiarity with instead of Marvin making love to another homunculous, he makes doggy love to a full-size person in a cringy and uncomfortable last scene moment.

Charles Band’s “Decadent Evil II” receives it’s Hi-Def Blu-ray as a part of a long and arduous of converting Full Moon’s films to Blu-ray.  The AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25 offers Full Moon’s catalogued 239 title a new pixel perspective of a saturated color palette inside its darker shaded tone.  The details are mediocre as much of the finer points are lost in low light, gel lighting, and haze but the compressions aim to be stable without any artefacts to note on lowest capacity Blu-ray.  Plenty of inky and less visible delineating contrast is a credit to the gaffing and director of photography Terrance Ryker for a soap opera-noir aesthetic.  For the first time ever, the film is presented in HD in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  The audio options are an English LPCM 5.1 surround and a stereo 2.0 that caters to District 78’s alternative, indie rock during the club sequences but elucidates and livens up the dialogue to where nothing obstructed with ambiguity.  Hardly any depth to the sound design as characters never wade beyond medium shots and range is limited to mostly the dialogue track along with imitation actions one would see in a low budget production or cartoon.  English subtitles are not available on the Blu-ray.  Extra features include a behind-the-scenes, a 42-minute featurette Battle of the Bands with a little stroll down memory lane for Charles Band as well as musical ventures for the film, stripper auditions for the Visions Night Club, the original trailer, and Full Moon trailers.  The physical presence is much of the same from Full Moon with a standard Blu-ray Amaray with relatively new artwork focusing on the homunculous rather than the vampires.  The sleeve is one sided with no inserts inside.  The region free Blu-ray has a runtime of 81 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: Like stuck on repeat, “Decadent Evil II” doesn’t offer a different type of narrative but ups the amount of nudity and vampires without much formidability in this lackluster sequel.

The Sequel “Decadent EVIL II” Bites Hard! Check It Out!

EVIL’s Vampiric Power Over the Homunculus is Short Lived! “Decadent Evil” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The Remastered “Decadent Evil” is now on Blu-ray!

An evil vampiric bloodline has stretched from Europe to U.S., specially in the Los Angeles area, where Morella, a centuries year old master vampire, collects the blood of innocent victims and she requires just one more soul to fulfill a prophecy to be the most powerful and invincible vampire ever.  Morella is so cruel she even transformed her once lover into a homunculus, a scaly and green shrunken humanoid, to keep as a caged pet.  When two of Morella’s thralls are uncovered working at a strip club by a dwarf vampire hunter with a grudge, she finds obtaining the last soul to be challenging, especially when one of her subservient vampires, Sugar, is against the whole bloodsucking attribute and falls in love with the strip club DJ.  With Sugar, the DJ, the homunculus, and the vampire hunter standing in her way of total immortality of godlike proportions, Morella has little allies in her corner but has the majority of evil power behind her ancestral lineage. 

An early 2000’s Anne Rice facsimile, “Decadent Evil” is Charles Band and Full Moon’s other Gothically romantic infused vampire feature behind “Subspecies” and “The Vampire Journals,” which are technically all part of the same “Subspecies” universe in one way or another.   The “Puppet Master” and “Trancers” cult filmmaker helms the 2005 low-budget feature and cowrites it alongside a staple Full Moon screenwriter Domonic Weir (“Evil Bong”) in what would be one of Weir’s first feature length films for the longtime genre producing company after gifting the horror community with a “Critters” screenplay in 1986.  After a few minor re-writings of Hong Kong actioners for an English dub, Weir returns to horror with Full Moon and indulges Band on his diminutive obsession with tiny terrors.  And what may you ask is the small creature in a sexy-slathered vampire flick?  A homunculus is written into the story, of course!  Band produces “Decadent Evil” not under Full Moon but Wizard Entertainment in collaboration with Shoot Productions and Astonishing Features with Jeremy Gordon and Jethro Rothe-Kushel as association producers on the Los Angeles based shoot. 

The prologue backstory of “Decadent Evil” can be misleading as to who the main characters will be with a restructured, recut introduction made from bits and pieces of scenes of “The Vampire Jounrals,” another Full Moon production, that uses a power Euro male vampire bloodline as the basis for Morella’s L.A. homebase of operations, which include the ying yang, naughty and nice, vampiric sisters, Sugar and Spyce.  “Blood Dolls” and “Prison of the Dead’s” Debra Mayer, a late 1990’s scream queen for about a decade and half until her eventual departure from acting, plays the head vampire in charge Morella with a firm grip on her subservient thrall, the angsty and gothic-inclined Spyce (Raelyn Hennessee, “Cutter’s Club”) and the sweet-and-innocence exuding Sugar (Jill Michelle, “Erotic Secrets”).  The sisters go through the motions of obedience but to an extent with Sugar basically disavowing her vampire blood in hopes for a romance relationship with her strip club’s DJ Dex (Daniel Lennox, “The Black Magic”) and Spyce pushes the limits of her own control, like a teenager testing their parents, by drinking the blood of those meant for Morella’s grand power count.  With a 67-minute runtime, “Decadent Evil” doesn’t have the minutes to really explore the characters that force the actors to be plain, act plain, and never be anything more than plain.  Even Phil Fondacaro, the headlining star and most recognizable face of the troupe, must purge backstory in a flash upon his acute introduction mid-way through.  The “Willow” and “Ghoulies II” actor is a vengeful vampire hunter after his father falls victim to Morella.  April Gilbert (“The Butcher”), Roger Toussaint (“Illicit Dreams”), John F. Schaeffer, and, of course, it wouldn’t be a Charles Band picture without a half-naked adult film star in Harmony Rose who goes topless for the cause. 

Locally shot near the company home base of Los Angeles, full of either Full Moon actors or greenhorn actors, little-to-no budget for practical or computer generated effects, a runtime of under an hour, and the tacking on of “The Vampire Journals” at the beginning to extend the length to just that under the hour mark is a true show of low-budget colors from Charles Band and Full Moon.  The premise of Morella becoming an omnipotent vampire through a scrapbook collection of pure blood is a solid enough premise that is unfortunately not explored enough to become invested, turning this Full Moon venture into what it has become over the last couple of decade, a feast of female-casted eye candy and fatigued nostalgia without implementing anything new to the vampire or horror genre.  There’s also the matter of the homunculus that becomes a centerpiece and eventually tops as the main motif that hangs around in a bird cage and perversely has eyes for blood while simultaneously carrying around a major libido with scenes of molesting and raping involving the pint size creature.  The whole idea is a bit off, added to sate Charles Band’s fascination of with small creatures, and only adds mild interest in its development through the story which ends in a perversion of slapstick that, again, doesn’t fit, this time in the narrative tone. 

Full Moon continues to upgrade their catalogue, and the “Decadent Evil” films are the latest to be AVC encoded onto a BD25 with a remastered, high-def, 1080p, resolution for the first time ever in HD with a transfer scan form the original 35mm negative.   The early 2000 film sustains a fair amount of its 35mm charm despite most companies flocking to the less expensive digital format and this helps retain a richer saturation and an organically bold image that accentuates the hardlines and elaborately dressed gothic interiors and the smoke-filled darkness of the strip club.  The rest of the settings are standard fair, but the focus is within Morella’s L.A. mansion that has a mistress vampire’s touch.  The digitized conversion and the upgrade in pixels have cleaned up the image some but hasn’t exactly wowed with impressive measure as the details often fluctuate outside stylized lighting and smoke.  There’s often superb, granule detail on the homunculus’s shiny wet gland-filled dermis and deep contoured bone structure in the obvious puppet’s face and head.  The English audio comes with a couple of uncompressed formats with an PCM 5.1 and a 2.0 Stereo.  The 5.1 is more than enough for dialogue, soundtrack, and the ambient environment, though the latter is more for immediate focal points rather than the natural course of surroundings.  For instance, the homunculus’s heavy breathing and slippery skin provide characteristics to the already unique character but since much of the narrative is held indoors in a still mansion, there’s not much to the audio atmospherics, and even the strip club is doused with a rock track that swallows any other diegetic and nondiegetic noise.  Dialogue prominently in front but can struggle with depth in the 5.1 mix that often doesn’t pick it up; there’s better discernibility within the dual channel that maintains a front forward audio rather than trying to diffuse the already distance stilted audio.  “Decadent Evil’s” soundtrack is less carnivalesque than other Full Moon productions because Richard Band is not at the orchestrator helm, providing “Deathbed” composer James T. Sale’s soap opera Gothicism and playful low-tones more opportunities to flourish with this campy vampy film.  Extra features include a behind-the-scenes with snip interviews with the cast, a blooper reel, the original trailer, and other preview trailers from Full Moon Features.  The physical release mirrors much from the same line of DVD to Blu-ray upgrades with standard Amaray case.  The one-sided sleeve art illustration is new, which is a fine collage of characters, yet is uncredited.  There’s no inserts or other tangible extras on this region free, 74-minute, unrated vampire indulger. 

Last Rites: Fans of Full Moon’s “Subspecies” and ‘The Vampire Journals” will find “Decadent Evil” to stagger in its more modern affiliation with a meek story having little-to-no bite, favoring more the shorter stints of an arbitrary homunculus inclusion and Phil Fondacaro’s flyby hunter.

The Remastered “Decadent Evil” is now on Blu-ray!