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.
