In Vitro - Angriff der Mutanten

"Hideous" is the most professional Full Moon film on the surface. Its beautifully shot, very well-cast and makes use of an epic and atmospheric locale. But unfortunately it features one of the driest, most predictable and uneventful scripts. Charles Band directs in his usual cheapo style with loads of longwinded, faux-intellectual dialogue, sloooooow scenes where nothing happens and loads of stale or over-the-top acting. The incredible production value of this film should've been given to a Puppet Master film. Puppet Master 3 shows what a good budget can do for a Full Moon movie, but that film also succeeded because had Band his hands off artistically.

This is a decent watch if you want to see great low-budget cinematography or a 1940s style "old dark house" story redone in the 1990s. But its not entertaining enough or weird enough for the average audience.

HIDEOUS! is another classic from the heyday of Director Charles Band's FULL MOON productions. It has all the right ingredients, including an opening that features two men skimming a huge raw sewage vat for "artifacts"! The fiendish Dr. Lorca (Michael Citriniti) is a collector of such "treasures", and will pay any price to procure them from the sludge. What are these precious finds? Why, freakish mutant fetuses of course.

Trouble breaks out when Lorca's rivals show up at his castle, along with the FBI. Horrible fun ensues.

BEST SCENE IN THE MOVIE: Lorca's faithful assistant, Sheila (Jacqueline Lovell) topless, in leather shorts! Wearing a go-rilla mask! With a gun! In the snow! My friends, this is why god created cinema!...

A group of rival collectors of severely deformed freakish human beings and the FBI agents that are investigating them must battle against some of their collections which aren't as dead as they seem...

Full Moon makes cheap movies, often involving puppets and often with gratuitous nudity. This movie is clearly cheap, but there are no puppets and even the nudity seems okay because it is done in a humorous manner. This is not a "good" film, but compared to just about everything else Charlie Band has touched, it is actually alright.

Now, not that I would recommend this, but if it happens to be on or turn up on your Netflix queue, and you have a few friends and a case of beer, you could do worse than this. At least it's not "The Dead Want Women".

A sewage treatment plant clean-up crew (where do I sign up?!) fish out a red glob "specimen," which turns out to be more than just worthless sludge, but an invaluable formula capable of reviving mutant creatures. What it's doing in the sewer is anyone's guess. After it's stolen by eccentric, unorthodox Dr. Lorca (Michael Citriniti) and his sexy, blonde always topless assistant Sheila (Jacqueline Lovell), the "owners" hire a private detective to get it back. Above characters (plus a ditsy secretary) become trapped inside Lorca's castle home and face off against four bite-size mutant monsters who attack and start killing because they want their independence (!)

Although the little killers will instantly bring to mind Band's Full Moon PUPPET MASTER series, this silly, but very fun, time waster has decent production values, cute slimy puppet monsters and a decent unknown cast (Tracie May and Lovell are especially good). Although Band has fallen into a pit of mini-monster reptitiveness, he has improved as a scriptwriter, and the witty, sarcastic and often very funny dialogue in this film proves it.

Here is the thing. You have to enjoy cheesy horror movies. To be delighted by the bizarre also helps. Hideous! is a weird movie involving collectable biological oddities preserved (mostly) in formaldehyde, a girl band in a cage rocking out, and a mutant born of noxious waste hell-bent on getting revenge or eating people or something. A quirky movie that entertained me to no end just by it's amusing oddness. The topless bandit didn't hurt either. If you like Full Moon Pictures, you will probably like this one. If the Puppet Master or Subspecies movies didn't do anything for you, then you should probably skip it. But, if you are ready to take a leap of faith and/or have a backup video at the ready, get a copy and set back on the couch for a bizarre evening.