Hideous!

"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.

One of the worst movie made in '90.

A weird plot, a series of absurd characters too stupid or too amoral to be realistic.

The freaks are more complex of the human and more smart too.

There is almost nothing that can be saved from it.

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".

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!...

When sewage workers serendipitously discover a discarded and deformed fetus, several collectors of medical oddities vie for possession of it. Subsequently, the fetus, along with others in a collection, come back to life and begin wreaking havoc. The plot offers an interesting premise, as medical oddities are an exotic source of fascination, as well as a dark biological aesthetic which lends itself well to the horror genre, while providing an antidote to the sterile and plastic commercial culture which permeates the mainstream media.

While the viewer may be inclined to perceive the reanimated fetuses as the antagonists of the film, the real antagonists are the collectors - Elvina, Napoleon Lazar, and Dr. Lorca. They can be characterized as such because (1) they seek to obtain the deformed fetuses for their own personal collections, thus gratifying their own egos, whereas such preternatural specimens should be studied by science, or if such specimens are to be put on display, it should be a public exhibition in order to stimulate the intellectual curiosity of the novelty-starved masses. Preferably, they should be in a museum, ideally one that specializes in medical oddities, such as the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. (2) They are antagonists because they continue their pursuit of the fetuses even after they discover that the specimens are not only alive, but sentient. Therefore, they would exploit the fetuses for their own gain, despite the fact the fetuses express (in the form of writing notes!) their preference to be left alone. This can be symbolic of how businesspeople view the consumer as a commodity - a means of improving one's "bottom line" - rather than as beings with their own desires. The deformed fetuses, therefore, are not antagonists but antiheroes. They only cause trouble once their desire has been disregarded. This film contains some creatively sexy scenes. Regarding sexual content, mainstream films tend to offer little more than mundane male-female sexual intercourse. B-movies often deliver a refreshing selection of uncommon/unnatural sexual scenes, serving to satisfy one's desire for an alternative to routine and unimaginative sexuality. "Hideous!" is no exception, and in fact, the sexual scenes make for some of the most appealing content of this film.