Hot chicks, but no hot blood

Review of Charles Band Full Moon Horror Roadshow

September 14, 2006 show

Last night Mrs. Monster and I attended the first performance of the Charles Band Full Moon Horror Roadshow at San Francisco 's Rickshaw Stop. For those few not in the know, Band is the independent filmmaker behind Full Moon Pictures, and the producer, writer, and/or director of well over 200 low budget horror films.

The Roadshow, now in its second year, is a way for Band to adapt his work to a live stage setting. Last year's tour stuck to the East Coast, so I was excited to see that he would have a performance in the Bay Area. The Rickshaw Stop is a standard small club in downtown SF. With a very reasonable $12 admission price, the 100 capacity club looked to be nearly sold-out.

The show opened with a montage of Band's film, focusing mostly on the puppets, creatures, special effects, and explosive climaxes of films like Trancers, Puppet Masters, Troll, Demonic Toys, Subspecies, etc, all at top volume. As Band said later in the show, he is no fan of CGI (right on!), calling it "cartoonish" and prefers the hands-on tactile quality of latex masks and animatronic puppets. Being a fan first of Tom Savini and later Rick Baker, with their squishy, sloshy, spurting monster effects, I couldn't agree more.

Band himself then came out and began chatting with the audience. Having had no idea what to expect of the show, I was a bit let down by the informal quality. I had hoped for something more formal like a stage show or a gross-out play like SF's own Primitive Screwheads put on with their stagings of things like Evil Dead: Live! Instead it was a show-film-clips-then-chat format.

But Band is an engaging guy with a lot of good stories to tell. He talked a bit about his new film Evil Bong and showed the trailer for it. He also talked a bit about actors he had worked with who later went on to bigger fame (Helen Hunt, Demi Moore, Viggo Mortenson) and showed another montage of clips. He told some good anecdotes about working with known crazy-man Gary Busey in Gingerdead Man. Band stated that he had an hour of footage of Busey doing wild tangents on the script - but then proceeded to show none of it, only the trailer for GM. That was a disappointment.

The stated theme for the evening was "hot chicks" (i.e. skinny girls with no curves) and Band got some of them from the audience to come on stage and perform a Full Moon type scene of bondage, monsters, and lesbian titillation. He even managed to get one young Girl With Low Self-Esteem to take off her top and show her post-pubescent little breasts. It was nice to see a politically incorrect show in San Francisco where the PC can get a little suffocating. Mrs. Monster pointed out that the “chicks” could not, however, scream worth a damn. She waits undiscovered until a director unveils her glorious, ear-shattering sound.

Both that scene and the beheading were fun, but without the over-the-top theatrics and wet-work one gets in Full Moon films. Many of us are accustomed to Alice Cooper, GWAR and other such shows where the lighting, sound, costumes, and special effects come together for a powerful impact.

But the show did have special guest Phil Fondacaro who has acted in many of Band's films. At 3'6" Phil is a little person with a very big voice whose shout "Play Number 4!" became a catch-phrase for the evening. He and Band talked about some drunken work on a film together. And Phil made the point that no filmmaker other than Band has provided so many roles for a little person like him, especially roles that revolve so little around his size - such as playing Count Dracula (a role for which he had a really great evil look).

The show also had an auction of dolls and figures from Full Moon productions like Puppet Master and Demonic Toys. The six figures sold at prices ranging from $140 to somewhere over $600. I was quickly outbid beyond my means on the Pinhead figure, but oh well. Band also had a deal for everyone that he had first tried in last year's tour: everyone who bought $100 or more of merchandise (there were tables full of DVDs, action figures, etc) would get an executive producer credit on the next Full Moon film. A real one. Something you can look up on IMDB and put on your resume. Because the deal worked so well last year and so many names were listed on the film, it also resulted in a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records as the film with the most producers. Band is hoping to break last year's record and get another listing.

So it is a unique show. Maybe it doesn't have the small club pyrotechnics of, say, a Great White show, but it does have a lot of Full Moon features you can't get anywhere else. Afterwards, Band came out to sign DVD covers or whatever people brought him. In future shows, other guests will join Charles, such as Tim Thomerson (watch it, squids!). And who knows, maybe in a future show Adrienne Barbeau will show up to show the "hot chicks" how it's really done.

by Mitch Smith
web-only review