Talisman

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Audience Member David DeCoteau has a goal of making the "male version of Suspiria" which means that we get a movie where the dialogue says things like "Boys' tears are the most delicious of all," and the music from Dark Angel: The Ascent gets reused and so does the exteriors from Subspecies, plus this was shot at the same time as Frankenstein Reborn*. Also, DeCoteau dislocated his elbow halfway through the shoot and toughed out the filming on painkillers, which I would argue made this a better film. I would assume that by Suspiria the director meant that this had to be set in a foreign school and not anything to do with the color palette, as this looks quite dark and drab. It's closer to Reform School Girls except it is not self-aware and it's really all about seeing shirtless boys get murdered on a Satanic altar. And it's also about dudes in their underwear betting one another about how many push-ups they can do. There's also a dude named Theriel the Black Angel who is bald and has glowing red eyes and seems like he'd be a good hang, but is really here to bring about the end of the world so he just roams the halls and rips out human hearts. There is actually a talisman, so the title makes sense. He was brought back to life by said talisman, along with the blood of a baby virgin. Now he gets to set people on fire, which is a way better life than I figure he had the first try. Also, the Black Ranger is in this. And the only straight relationship in the whole movie ends up being incestual. It also makes 78 minutes feel like 78 years and I'm not even going to bring up that the credits take double digit minutes to play. This was renamed "Evil Never Dies" and cut down to thirty minutes for Full Moon's Tomb of Terror remix release. Full Moon does so love recycling things. *I am not talking down on re-use. Roger Corman made a career out of it. He also made some better movies than the output of Full Moon, but why argue? Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 02/06/23 Full Review Audience Member A small, fairly talented cast and just a few simple special effects in service of a far from original but coherent story all add up to a pretty entertaining horror film. This is no horror classic but it is good quality B picture fare. This being a David Coteau film, a majority of the cast is made up of good looking young men and there is the obligatory scene with a bunch of them in their underwear. Unlike his more recent films, there is no overtly homoerotic content. An entertaining horror film that doesnt cry out to be seen again but was fun to watch once. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/13/23 Full Review Audience Member A new student (Parrish) arrives at an isolated boarding school for the troubled sons of the rich... just in time for the student body to be turned into dead bodies. This film is a sort of miror image of the usual "boarding school of evil"/"trapped girls in peril" horror film, with a small group of cutesy late-teen boys being murdered and running around in their underwear instead of the usual nubile teen girls. It was also Full Moon's attempt to cash in on the growing "end of the world" craze that was gripping pop culture during the final years of the 1990s. Unfortunately, even at a brief 74-minute running time, the film draaaaaags. The film is populated with mostly unlikeable characters that portrayed by actors who are handsome and flat in an Abercrombie & Fitch print-ad sort of way. The promise of some character development and maybe even a little humanity is quickly dispelled by the sleazy shadow of incest when the story's heavily-telegraphed "secrets" emerge as the plot comes together. Even worse, the gore effects--which come into play when the film's Uncle Fester-looking demon pulls people's hearts out of their chests--are so cheaply done that even the attempt at camera trickery can't make them look good and the blood that sprays upward like a malfunctioning lawn sprinkler whenever the demon rips a heart out only makes it look even more ridiculous There are really only ten minutes of the film that are truly scary, where the demonic rituals come to a head and the film's pretty-boy hero comes face-to-face with his long-lost sister. But even this is ultimately ruined by a lame attempt at a "shock twist-ending". (Which is itself an odd touch, since many Full Moon pictures are more in the "classic vein", in the sense that they end the moment they're over, with no denouement of any kind.) All in all, there's no reason to watch this movie, unless you're doing a research paper on homo-erotic themes in the films of David DeCoteau. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 01/18/23 Full Review Audience Member Just a short horror film,,Not scary or any thing...Just complet stupid..End was werid...Sister and brother don't become together even in married...Watch the original Satan's School for Girls instead. I think that may have been the inspiration for this anyway. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/16/23 Full Review Audience Member The decent performance from Walter Jones, the classic Full Moon special FX, the mild levels of gore and the decent art direction don't help this homoerotic horror film from everything that is wrong about it. The film suffers from some really bad editing, terrible sound design, and poor storytelling. It wasn't until I watched the behind-the-scenes for the film that I learned exactly what the full story of the film was supposed to be. The film could have been more worthwhile had it had more attention to detail. While the story wasn't much to talk about, the fact that it was also poorly told didn't help. Only for the die hard Full Moon fans. Everyone else can give this one a wide berth. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member This movie was so short, it went by like a blur. Not bad for a low budget flick. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 01/15/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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