Dead Man's Hand

People all around the world are full of many wise old sayings or I guess some would call it sage advice.

Prior to watching Full Moon Features latest horrific offering, I wanted to check out their making off featurette and once again the man at the head of affairs, Mr Charles Band as ever was offering up his thoughts and words of wisdom.

As is his want, the full moon rule book appears to state, shoot fast and loose and keep the questions to the barest minimum.

For Mr Band, time is money! The vast majority of his movies these days seem to take less than a week to shoot, and as for any post production time, lord only how long that takes.

However watching 'Dead Man's Hand - Casino Of The Damned' I kept thinking about that phrase, time is money! The movie starts with a very slow and very un-involving prologue with two extras spouting forth about the Myteria casino and it's bloody history, now looking at the timer on my DVD player this took about ten minutes, of course anyone who knows their horror movies will know that these two characters are just two lambs ready for the slaughter, but when the inevitable happens it's a pretty lacklustre affair.

I have pretty much resigned myself to the basic fact that Charles Band is washed up, sure he can serve up a pretty decent concept, but the glory days of Empire Pictures are well and truly long gone and once again his writer in residence, August White has let him down badly! However once again, time is money! and I guess that no matter what shape the script is in, Mr Band, wearing his producer/director cap is not going to waste anytime about trying to address any issues that might arise within the scripting department.

The main star of the movie, or so the main credits after the lengthy prologue would have us believe is the legendary Sid Haig, however he does not appear in the movie until forty plus minutes have dissolved.

Up to that point, rather than deliver some heartpounding moments, I say heartpounding, because the set up within a long abandoned and very much haunted casino is just rife for some good old fashioned William Castle type scares.

Alas no, no such things happen, instead the script calls for character development and lame situations. Now of course without character development we as the audience wouldn't be able to identify with who is who on the screen, but within the first scene proper after the prologue, the characters and their traits are pretty much set up for us.

It must be said that at this point I started to get a little restless, and felt a strange desire to reach for the fast forward button, but owing to my allegiance to Mr Band's movies, no matter how bad they have become, I firmly resisted that temptation.

Too bad! as the rest of the movie crawled to it's conclusion, which I won't spoil for anyone, just in case like myself, you are a longstanding and oh so suffering fan of Full Moon or indeed the entire works of Charles Band himself.

Of course it has been noted that this movie contains no nudity, but it does have plenty of pretty young women and there is just enough old style gore to keep the mind just about focused but in a nutshell, as soon as this movie had finished, I had pretty much forgotten about it.

Yes Indeed, time is money and in this case both were not well spent! My rating is 1

After inheriting a casino from his great uncle, a young man and a few of his friends decide to check it out and spend the night. Guess what? Past employees of the casino who have been killed by the uncle haunt the place and are eager to get their revenge on the new owner. Can the curse be broken? Will they survive?

Charles Band... that name conjures up all sorts of thoughts, but most of all it should bring to mind one thing: low quality horror films. Once upon a time, hits like "Puppet Master" came from Band, as did other cheesy (but enjoyable) movies like "Head of the Family" and "Troll". Now, we are treated to low-grade smut like this and "Evil Bong". Are they still enjoyable? Sadly, yes. But if there is anything Band lacks, it is artistic merit.

Veterans Sid Haig and Michael Berryman are here, which is nice (but not necessary). Kristyn Green appears, as she did in "Evil Bong" and one other Band production -- she has the chance to get big, but must escape his territory. The other actors are good, but we will likely never see them again outside of a Full Moon film. And I do not feel bad about that... they were more or less here for the higher body count.

The film is rather vague about why the ghosts haunt the casino and how they can be stopped. (It seems they want the uncle's silver, but that begs the question -- what can ghosts do with silver if they are dead?) The background of the characters in general seems lacking. A guy inherits a casino from an uncle he does not know, because he is the next of kin. Well, where are all the other family members? I understand these things make the plot workable and the story easier, but they are also illustrative of Band's shortcomings -- he is great at dirty jokes and senseless violence, as well as topless women (which does not come up as much here as you would expect). He fails at three-dimensional characters. That may be writer August White's fault, but Band is White's boss, and therefore to blame.

When a film needs three titles ("Dead Man's Hand", then "Casino of the Damned" and now "Haunted Casino") I get worried, and when Band is attached I get even more worried. In the end, you get what you would expect from Full Moon. Cheesy horror and not much more. If you are with another horror fan and have some booze, you might enjoy this. But it is not a date movie or anything you are going to want to see again and again or talk up to friends. There is a reason that "straight-to-DVD" was invented and this film is it.

You'd have thought that a movie featuring the ever watchable Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding from 'Devil's Rejects') and Michael Berryman (of the same, but also the original Wes Craven's 'Hills have Eyes') combined with a synopsis of a derelict Vegas casino populated by the undead spirits of the criminal underworld, would leap out of the shelves at you like a rabid marmoset, tearing at your attentive glands and filling your pants with excited droplets of uric acid.

You couldn't be more wrong if you were to wear the skin of Mick Hucknall in an Arizona sandstorm. This is a woefully bad movie that would soon have you multi-tuning to QVC for escape if it was aired on Zone Horror. As is traditional to hawk it to the bored younger attention span-deficit generation, we get the usual fare of irritating teenagers of various personalities, i.e. geek, foxy, rebel, good guy/gal, stoner, etc. Amazing how so many demographics end up as friends. The main protagonist, who inherits the casino from his dead mafia great-uncle has more plank on display than a whole aisle at B&Q. His simpering girlfriend seemingly spends the entire movie stuck to him like an icecube to a dog's anus. The rest of the cast would fail a screentest for a porn flick such is their inherent disregard for imparting dialogue with any enthusiasm.

The effects are laughably poor. At one scene the 'foxy chick' encounters an equally sexy female ghost who, prior to dispatching the hormonal annoyance, metamorphoses into a rotten fairground corpse, replete with -get this- eyeballs that roll like one-armed bandits, displaying two death skulls. The soundtrack is hideously inappropriate and seems to have been hived from the abortion floor of 'Diagnosis Murder'. As we'd expect, our plucky heroes & heroines consistently ignore the basic rules of not getting snuffed in a horror movie. Though for this watcher's eyeballs, thankfully none of them did, as it would clearly have prolonged the agonising torment.

Which brings to us to Haig. Clearly this was an easy payday for him, cashing in on his past travails presumably to refurnish his Fresno apartment. Although eminently watchable as always, Haig doesn't even appear to make any semblance of effort ...and he doesn't really have to, surrounded as he is by graduates from a drama school for morons. Sid's no doubt got a few pay days left yet, such is the cultish currency of his demented Spaulding from the great 'Devil's Rejects'. Anyone who's seen his terrifying warning to the small boy in a car he's about to jack will lament the day that he featured in this bucket of bilge. Berryman is simply just himself, locked in that hanging prune of a face, with a lacklustre old look like decommissioned furniture.

In all 'Dead Man's Hand' is something that could (and should) have been circumcised without anaesthetic in order to fit an episode of 'Tales from the Crypt'. Possibly one of the worse and least scary horror movies of the last decade, to rank alongside the stupendously vile 'Catacombs' starring Pink. One can only lick our lips and think of the untold mayhem Rob Zombie could have wreaked with such a storyline. Then again, we probably would have been treated to another scene of Sheri Moon's gyrating bare bottom ...not that we're complaining, eh lads? I'm so sickened by this movie that it will be immediately returned to Poundland for a full refund.

So this movie is by no means amazing, but if, like me, you are a fan of everything Charles Band and his Full Moon Features, the certain charm and charisma, then this is worth a watch. it's certainly one of their better post-2000s movies. obviously the golden years are 89-95. things went downhill but in 99 Band made his magnum opus Blood Dolls. then 2000s Full Moon pretty much turned into a joke churning out Gingerdead Man and Evil Bongs, which i imagine a lot of people like but those ones just aren't my cup of tea. i love his earlier stuff, mixing fantasy and horror, and a profound sense of wonder sneaking somewhere within the film, in a schlocky way. this movie has a little of that. it's well filmed, the setting is pretty good. the acting is surprisingly good. sometimes Band gets some real doozies acting but these people were actually alright. and then of course there's Sid Haig . overall, worth a watch if you subscribe to the Full Moon streaming service and love the good and some of the bad out of their catalogue. if you're not the big of a Full Moon fan then maybe just catch their earlier stuff like Puppet Master, Subspecies, Bad Channels, Doctor Mordrid. or you can dive in Bands Empire Pictures films with Dolls and Trolls and Ghoulies. but if you're far down that full moon rabbit hole, you can do much worse than this film.

Saw this on Charter on demand. This is a 75 minute movie and nothing and I mean nothing happens until minute 57 leaving you with 18 minutes of pathetic action. Sid Haig and Michael Berryman are in this for 6 or 7 minutes. How did they spend $200,000 on this...as a grad student at UCLA in Theater I can tell you that this easily could have been shot in 2-3 days. They use 2 locations, a hotel room and a casino the size of a 4 bedroom house. Michael Berryman is no longer scary, he looks 110 years old and can barely speak. Sid Haig looks like he just came off a 3 day bender...you can tell that he was looking at cue cards(watch carefully and you'll see. This is a low point even by Full Moon Standards.