Robert Talbot And The Bride Of The Head

Discussing the concept of authorship in relation to mini-mogul Charles Band is more complicated than it might first seem. On the face of it, Band is a latter-day Roger Corman, heading a series of production companies specialising in low-budget cult horror and sci-fi films. As the 'studio head' and initial ideas man for his early companies (Charles Band Productions, Empire Pictures, Full Moon Entertainment), Band could ensure that his personal interests were present in films that he had little actual involvement in. Most prominent of these interests was the fascination with 'small things that kill you', which he himself traces back to his love of the final segment of 1975's Trilogy of Terror. We can see this interest expressed in films such as Parasite, Dolls, Troll, Ghoulies, and most successfully the Puppet Master series. Full Moon Entertainment established another important tendency in Band's output – the franchise. Full Moon produced films for the direct-to-video rental market of the early 1990s and the establishment of connections between the films helped to distinguish a clear brand and encouraged video renters to try all of their related products (adverts for future instalments, or Band himself showing off poster art for films in production were included after the films on the VHS cassettes).

Nowadays, as head of Full Moon Features (the third iteration of Full Moon), Band is more closely involved in production, directing some 20 out of 35 films. Here, Band's authorship is even less in question, as we can trace not only the premise back to him but also the execution of the individual film. Franchises and small killer objects have not lessened, with films like Doll Graveyard, Ooga-Booga, and the Gingerdead Man and Evil Bong series continuing the trends in a cheaper and dafter way. But there is an interesting middle period to Full Moon, when the company was known as Full Moon Pictures, that I think casts Band's authorship in quite a different light. We can almost see in the late 1990s that Band is something of a victim of his own success. He had already made a point of bringing all of Full Moon's successful franchises to a close while the company was still Full Moon Entertainment, but found that he was pressed to make more Puppet Master and Trancers films during the 'Pictures' years. These were uninspired and limp entries, seemingly designed to sabotage their franchises, and unusual in that the Pictures years were otherwise devoid of sequels.

Band instigated several new labels during this time, each aimed at a slightly different target audience. While Full Moon continued to make mainstream horror and sci-fi films, other labels focused on more specific variations. 'PulsePounders' produced kids adventure genre films, 'Filmonsters' likewise aimed at younger audiences but focused on resurrecting the classic monsters (Dracula and Frankenstein and the like), 'Monster Island Entertainment' produced Godzilla-style tokusatsu movies, 'Alchemy Pictures' focused on the highly dubious notion of ‘black’ horror movies made for an African-American audience (by white American filmmakers). Several other labels dealt with other markets. These new labels functioned as the equivalent of franchises, giving audiences 'more of the same', but without direct continuity links between films.

What does this tell us about how Band felt about his company at this point? Well, on one hand, it certainly reveals a level of optimism; he was confident that the company would be capable of producing such a variety of films without having to fall back on sequels and repetition. Yet at the same time it implies a certain degree of disillusionment with the success of some of his ideas. Instead of more specific Puppet Master films, Band wanted to make more general ‘small things that kill you’ films. Ragdoll, Totem, Hideous! and Blood Dolls can be seen as continuing the idea without continuing the series. It seems as if the company-cohesion of the 'Entertainment' years became a straight-jacket for Band, who wanted more variety in his output. This labels-approach would give Band more creative freedom, certainly, but it would also allow for diversification and marketing opportunities (each new film offers up the opportunity for new collectible figures). But what about more personal reasons? Did Band actually have a more – for the lack of a better word – ‘artistic’ agenda with this idea? To answer this question, we have to call upon two fictional characters that Band created during this period: Eugenia Travers and Robert Talbot.

Both of these characters have only ever appeared in a short promotional video for the still-unmade Bride Of The Head Of The Family (a project that I shall return to later). Eugenia is the titular Bride, the fictional star of the story, but Robert Talbot is more complicated – he is the pseudonym employed by Band at certain points during the Pictures years. In the promo video, his face is covered with a black hood and his voice has been digitally altered, establishing him as an intentionally ambiguous figure, just as much a work of fiction as Eugenia. Talbot’s credits include directing Mystery Monsters (for PulsePounders) and The Head Of The Family (for another label, Pulp Fantasy), and as the writer for Blood Dolls (for Full Moon Pictures). It is important to understand that each of these labels did not, at the time, explicitly relate themselves to Full Moon as the parent company. So, although nowadays Head Of The Family is considered a Full Moon film that Band is particularly fond of, at the time of its release, all reference to Full Moon or Band were removed. Why?

Robert Talbot was created as something of a 'get-out' for Band, allowing him to make films that he wanted to make, separate from the pressures of delivering the product that people expected from him and Full Moon. Head Of The Family is an exceptionally quirky film; although revolving around murder and a family of freaks, the film is a far cry from horror and instead opts for a more comical cult film tone. Myron Stackpool is the titular head, literally a gigantic MODOK-like cranium with tiny and ineffectual limbs. He controls his three siblings like puppets with something akin to telepathy. When local diner owner Lance accidentally spies the Stackpools abducting a man for experimentation (Myron wants to transpose his intellect into a more normal body), he threatens them with the police and blackmails them. The plot then thickens with schemes and counter-schemes between Lance and Myron, eventually culminating in a fire and the apparent deaths of most of the cast.

The following year, Talbot/Band made Mystery Monsters (subsequently released under the title Goobers), a strange story ostensibly aimed at children, but with little to appeal to anyone under the age of thirty without an understanding of the cut-throat business of television. Tommy has just landed a role on the top children's TV show 'Captain Mike's Mystery Monsters', starring three highly realistic monster puppets that seem to be alive. Shortly after he arrives, Tommy discovers that in fact the monsters are alive; they are demons from another dimension and their former mistress Queen Mara has travelled to Earth to retrieve them. As kids movies go, it's probably the only one you'll find that makes jokes about child stars needing analysts and comparisons between television and Hell. The same year, Band directed Hideous! for Full Moon under his own name. This film revolves around two rival collectors of medical oddities, Emile Lorca and Napoleon Lazar, who fight over a new specimen – a highly deformed human foetus with four eyes – only to discover that the creature is alive and has brought three other specimens back from the dead. All of the above films star J. W. Perra (a.k.a. Michael Citriniti) as Myron Stackpool, the demon Squidgy, and Emile Lorca, and are also unified by their lack of any traditional 'good guys' or strict villains. Instead, all three films play out more like episodes of Dallas or Dynasty but with freaks; their stories are of groups of amoral characters screwing each other over. The films are all written by Benjamin Carr (who would become the go-to writer for much of the late 90s at Full Moon) and revel in their casts of self-absorbed characters with Machiavellian designs on one another.

The glorious soap opera storytelling would reach its height with Blood Dolls, a Full Moon film directed by Band but 'written by' Talbot. The story is about the power struggle between the enigmatic billionaire Virgil Travers and the manipulative dominatrix-cum-businesswoman Moira Yulin. This film seems designed to be the encapsulation of everything that defined 'Full Moon'; Virgil Travers is a freak, a genius with a head the size of an avocado, and his trusted right-hand man, Mr. Mascaro, wears clown make-up and has his teeth sharpened to points. As figures, they are homages to the Puppet Master character Pinhead and the Demonic Toys character Jack Attack respectively. On top of this, Phil Fondacaro (a long-time Band collaborator appearing in Empire movies such as Ghoulies 2 and Troll and later Full Moon movies like Decadent Evil 1 & 2) appears as an eye-patch wearing butler with an electric cattle-prod, who forces a caged punk girl band to play mood music. And it wouldn't be a Charles Band film without killer dolls; this time they are a team of three racial caricatures that execute Travers' business rivals.

It is as if Band wanted to reclaim the essence of Full Moon for himself, condensing it down into a purely personal project (it is one of the few screenplays that Band wrote himself, albeit as Talbot). Killer dolls, kinky girls, weird machinery, clowns, freaks, Phil Fondacaro and franchising opportunities (the caged girl group were initially planned to tour as a Full Moon-backed musical act) are all contained within the film's eccentric 84 minute runtime. This consciously quintessential Full Moon movie was to then be incorporated into Band's more personal 'meta-franchise' of the Bride of the Head.

Which returns us to Eugenia. Head Of The Family, Hideous!, Mystery Monsters and Blood Dolls are all arguably linked by the unmade film Bride Of The Head Of The Family. This film remains a passion project for Band (17 years after its initial announcement he still hopes to get it made) but it is its very absence that makes it all the more interesting. Although the Talbot/Perra/Carr films described above have little relationship to one another in continuity terms, they are all intertextually unified by Bride Of The Head; the film is, obviously, designed as a direct sequel to Head Of The Family, with Myron meeting and falling for Eugenia, but the basic hair and make-up design for Eugenia is utilised in Mystery Monsters for the demon Esmerelda. The various deformed foetuses from Hideous! are implied to be Eugenia's creations, not least of all because of Virgil Travers' comments in Blood Dolls where he discusses his mother Eugenia's brilliant experiments in genetic engineering and describes himself as “perhaps her most perfect creation... although not, as you can see, altogether perfect”.

The late 90s saw Charles Band attempt to expand his Full Moon company into a media empire whilst at the same time carving out a far more personal and offbeat mythology that tied certain favoured films together. These were linked not through franchising, but through implied references to non-existent films and the use of non-existent cast and crew (Robert Talbot, J. W. Perra and others). Shortly after Blood Dolls Full Moon Pictures fell into hibernation for several years, eventually resurrecting as Full Moon Features. Though Band would helm many of the films from this point on, they would never display quite the same idiosyncratic vision as those that he made between 1996 and 1999.

                                                                                                                                       - P.S.

Cult Currency

Perhaps one way to distinguish between how a 'cult' horror film and a 'mainstream' horror film is sold to their respective audiences is in the treatment of the content. While the mainstream horror is sold much like any film conforming to Classical Hollywood norms – a character-driven narrative, three-act structure, a logical chain of cause-and-effect – but including set-pieces designed to scare and repulse, the cult horror film is often sold by downplaying the actual content and instead emphasising the uniqueness of its premise. Indeed, the premise itself becomes so important to the cult horror film that in some cases we can see that it is conceived, financed, produced, marketed and consumed entirely on that basis, without actual content of the film playing any significant role. Cult horror films as they are sold (and indeed produced) today is not so much as entertainment, or even a commodity, but rather as a form of currency. The idea of a cult horror film passes from producer, to distributor, to film fan like a £5 note – its value is in the premise, not the characters, story, direction, or cinematography.

In the UK we can see three distributors that overtly take the cult-movie-as-currency approach; Shameless Screen Entertainment, Arrow Films (specifically the Arrow Video Collection) and 88 Films. Each of them uses the Cult Laboratories message boards as a means of advertising and gauging consumer interest (http://www.cult-labs.com/forums/). Fans communicate with the labels, suggesting possible titles for future releases and voting on cover artwork. Of course, these distributors also release films that are sold on a kind of 'cult prestige' based upon the content (Shameless release several Fulci and Argento films, Arrow have picked up several old Tartan Asia Extreme titles such as Battle Royale) but an overwhelming number of them are sold on their premises rather than reputation. One does not look at Ratman and assume that it is going to have high-quality direction and an intriguing plot. One instead looks at the tagline ('He's the critter from the shitter') and decides to watch it (or not) based upon its preposterousness. But because the majority of these films lack much merit beyond the bizarreness of their premises, strategies need to be employed in order to increase sales.

One major technique is to instigate a collector mentality in their buyers; all three distributors create a sense of unity within their catalogues – DVD covers are designed to not only convey the individual film's distinctness but also unify them under the 'Arrow' or 'Shameless' banner (88 Films already have a sense of unity in that their releases are all drawn from the output of Full Moon Features, the low-budget company behind the Puppet Master franchise, among others). Many of the DVD spines are numbered to increase the desire to complete the collection. Shameless releases can be recognised by the yellow and black colour scheme, while Arrow's 'colour bar' running at the bottom of the image distinguishes them from other cult film distributors. 88 Films has decided to utilise the current fascination with Grindhouse movies and released several titles under the 'Eighty Eight Films Grindhouse Collection' label, a way of trying to increase interest in films that otherwise have little appeal (The Day Time Ended, Seed People, Beach Babes From Beyond, and Mandroid have all been release under the Grindhouse banner despite their not being remotely 'Grindhouse' in any way).

Part of the art of selling cult horror lies in this form of presentation. Just as a film like Seed People isn't really going to sell unless it's placed within the Grindhouse Collection, certain products have to be arranged and organised in such a way to optimise their success. Arrow Video released several films produced by Fantastic Factory (a production label working out of Spain) but, perhaps foreseeing that few of the films would sell in and of themselves, Arrow Video collected the four films under the 'Fantastic Factory Presents...' banner, giving each a similar aesthetic on the DVD covers and providing extras that unify the films. Faust: Love Of The Damned includes the featurette Director Of The Damned: Brian Yuzna, Faust and The Fantastic Factory, which traces Yuzna's formation of the label and its first film, but the 'whole story' of Yuzna and Fantastic Factory is broken up over all four DVDs, with Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt featuring the final documentary instalment Romasanta: Lycanthropes, Lunacy And The Last Days Of Fantastic Factory. If one wants to own Arrow Video's fairly encyclopaedic overview of the Fantastic Factory label and its influence on Spanish horror, one needs to buy all four releases.

U.S. distributor Anchor Bay utilised the exact opposite approach when releasing the television series Masters Of Horror. While Arrow took several films and used DVD extras to unite them into a single product, Anchor Bay took a single product and turned it into a label, a collection of 26 films. Just as with Shameless' covers, the Masters Of Horror releases each had their own unique look and self-styled logo, but were all headed with the same banner. Because the series is an anthology, with each episode directed by a famous horror director and all coming in at around an hour in length (rather than the standard 42 minutes of US television), Anchor Bay decided to give each episode its own release, packing the DVD with extras that emphasised the individual director and making of the specific instalment, thereby increasing sales thirteen times more than if they had simply released two 'complete season' box sets alone. It's interesting to note that in the interviews on the Fantastic Factory DVDs, Brian Yuzna claims that the idea for Masters Of Horror comes from his own idea for a series of films, each based upon one of the Seven Deadly Sins and directed by a famous horror director (several of the proposed directors for that series, such as Stuart Gordon and Dario Argento subsequently directed episodes of Masters Of Horror). When the idea fell through, he went to Spain to launch Fantastic Factory.

Creating the sense that these disparate films with bizarre premises can be seen as a single collection, something that needs to be completed by any self-respecting cult film fan, helps to draw attention away from the films' actual failings or achievements as films. The individual films simply become a checklist, a group of titles and premises. What's important is that one owns Surf Nazis Must Die, not that one watches it (and subsequently realises how poorly paced and dull the film is – as is the case with any Troma movie not directed by Lloyd Kaufman, it seems). The 'cult credentials' of the film are less about how weird the content or execution of the film is (as we might find with The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Eraserhead) and rather purely on the absurdity of the idea (surfing meets Nazis). The appeal of Shameless' Amsterdamned is almost entirely in its title and its premise of a serial killer in a wetsuit leaping out of the canal system. As a narrative, it's just another serial killer/hard-boiled cop movie making a desperate attempt to put a new spin on the tried and tested formula. In reality, few of the films released by these labels are really 'cult' but simply not very good genre films.

This way of presenting a less-than-impressive horror film as a 'cult' film by simply upping the ante in the absurdity of the premise is not limited to distribution but can also be found in production. Speaking of the Full Moon movie, Castle Freak (released in the UK by 88 Films – but too high a quality production to force into the 'Grindhouse Collection'), director Stuart Gordon recalls that studio founder Charles Band “had already sold the film on the basis of the title and the artwork alone. He said 'As long as you have a castle in this film, and there's a freak inside of the castle, you can direct it'” (from Anchor Bay's DVD release of Re-Animator). The process of 'pre-selling' a film is not new, nor limited to low-budget filmmaking. Plenty of big budget Hollywood films over the years have been 'pre-sold' on the basis of its star and premise, but in the low-budget arena pre-sales are an important part of being able to make films at all. As the inclusion of genuine stars is unlikely, a low-budget or independent film needs to have a clear and distinct premise in order to convince financial backers that it will be a success if made. You have to convince the money men that your Dutch crime film will do well because it is simultaneously a safe bet (serial killer movies are popular in the 1980s) and different from the others (the killer swims around the canals in a wetsuit).

Today, the trend of absurd movies, started by B-Movie master Roger Corman and continued by 'mockbuster' studio The Asylum, have tried to play the 'premise-is-everything' card as much as possible. Whether something relatively simple, such as Two-Headed Shark Attack, something a little more obscure, like Corman's Sharktopus, or the out-and-out ludicrous glory that is Sharknado, the situation is much the same: the film is conceived, sold, financed, produced, marketed and released on the basis of its initial idea. Sharknado the movie is not much different (a little inferior, in fact) to Sharknado the poster. As the tagline states: 'Enough Said!'

                                                                                                                                                       - P. S.