Full Moon Fever Returns!

Just when I was beginning to think that Full Moon Productions was dead and buried, I received a mysterious package from a company called Amazing Fantasy Entertainment. Enclosed in the package was a copy of the latest Charles Band flick Hideous! One look at the cover art – a handful of mutated little freaks in action poses – and I began to experience horrid flashbacks to Full Moon’s many failed franchise attempts. But reviewing direct-to-video films is my job, so I buckled down and put that sucker in my VCR . . .

Before I begin to praise Hideous!, I must take a moment to explain my trepidation when it comes to Charles Band and his Full Moon Entertainment moniker. Mr. Band was singlehandedly responsible for the glut of cheesy horror product in the direct to video market during the mid-eighties. As anyone who reads this site knows, we're fans of this particular flavor of cinema. And although Charles Band had a fair number of interesting projects – TerrorVision, From Beyond, and The Pit and the Pendulum to name a few – a majority of his film projects were crass attempts at franchising characters. Troma Films enjoyed a moderate level of success with this tactic, but Band and Full Moon never had the renegade spirit that endears Troma to its fans. Their attempts to exploit horror fans with numerous idiotic sequels and crossover films were tainted with a sense of disdain for the very people it wanted to sell to. The vibe I got from the countless Puppet Master and Trancers sequels was that Charles Band didn’t give a damn about making quality product or interesting story . . . He was just cranking out concept characters, hoping that one of them would become a Saturday morning cartoon and make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

. . .So that was my state of mind when I popped Hideous! into the VCR. I was in for quite a surprise, however, because it was better than I could have ever imagined. Hilarious, witty, and painfully tongue-in-cheek, Hideous! is the story of rival "biological oddity" collectors and their double-crossing broker. The broker – a chain-smoking, tough-talking, Hollywood agent- styled uberbitch – scours the world for biological freaks and oddities, i.e. two-headed babies, chunks of space meat, etc. Then she sells the specimens to eccentric collectors for ludicrously high prices. A four-eyed, two-mouthed baby is found floating in a sewage treatment plant and sold to the broker. What follows is a dark comedy of back-stabbing greed and obsessive behavior that culminates in the spacious castle of one of the oddity collectors. Along the way, a grizzled private dick joins in the search for the purloined pickled punk who has somehow come back from the dead and has the power revivify his "hideous" brothers.

I must give Hideous! two moderately enthusiastic thumbs up. The script is smart enough not to take itself seriously and the performances are dead-on – a level of straight-faced hamminess that hasn’t been seen since the old Batman TV series. I was thoroughly entertained by the twisted premise and the film’s sense of humor never wavered. How could I give a bad review to a film that has a topless female highway robber in a gorilla mask AND a gun-toting mutant zombie head?

A suggestion to Charles Band: Hideous! has one of those sequel potential endings with the re-animated freaks escaping in a car trunk. I know that it’s tempting to make seven Hideous sequels . . .but please don’t do it! Hideous! is a recommended film based on the strength of its self-effacing script and interesting characterization, not because it’s got mutated monsters in it! Take your money and continue to make interesting films like this and you may acquire the supportive fan base you’ve been fishing for.