DVD double-feature Dead & Rotting
Directed by: David P. Barton
Written by:
Douglas Snauffer
David P. Barton

Stitches
Directed by: Neal Stevens
Written by: Benjamin Carr

Say the words "horror movie" out loud and most people automatically think, "crap." The sad truth is, the horror movie landscape is not a pretty one. We enthusiasts have to pick through a lot of garbage to find our treasures. Every now and then, we come across garbage that's pretty good. We all have our favorite guilty pleasures, and if you're like me, the list of titles is long. Up above the garbage, of course, you have movies of varying degrees of quality. But down here, the good garbage is a lot less common than you might think, because there's a LOT of garbage. Even we fans complain about the amount of it, but, like the weather, nobody does anything about it.

Everyone who knows me knows I love horror movies. Every time they see a bad one, they come complaining to me, as if I had something to do with it. I do my best to steer them away from the crap they have come to expect from the genre, but sooner or later, they stumble on a video at the local Blockbuster that's appealingly packaged and they fall for it. Bad Garbage. Or worse ... Toxic Waste.

It seems a lot of this garbage could be the result of an exchange similar to this:

"If we're gonna make a horror movie, we should have a creepy rhyme in it, like a nursery rhyme, only creepy."

"Yeah. And we could have, like ... witches in it."

"Yeah, witches are scary. And the main witch, a really ugly old one — she could make these zombie-like henchmen to help her out when she kills."

"Yeah. But who's she going to kill? And why?"

"We'll get to that, we'll get to that. Later. What else is she gonna do?"

"She could ... oh, I know! She could make trees grow out of people's heads!"

"Yeah, yeah, that's good. And, and she makes people rot ... while they're still alive!"

"Rot?"

"Yeah. It's a horror movie, we should have some rotting people around."

"You think?"

"Sure. I used to watch horror movies all the time when I was a kid, so I know."

"What about blood?"

"Oh, hell yeah, gotta have lots of blood."

"And tits."

"And tits."

In 2002's Dead and Rotting, three morons murder a young man who turns out to be the son of a vengeful witch who, one by one, makes trees grow out of their heads and makes them rot while still living. These three morons are our protagonists. Yeah, here are some guys we can cheer on. So maybe we're supposed to be siding with the evil witch? It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. It's just a horror movie. People expect it to be crap, right?

A demon stitched up in the skin of a grandmotherly woman moves into a boarding house where she tries to possess the souls of the residents in 2001's Stitches. At one point, Mrs. Albright, the demon in a grandma-suit, says, "You may think I'm making clever conversation. I'm not." Boy, you got that right, honey — neither is anybody else in this movie!

Dead and Rotting and Stitches have a lot in common. They can be found on the same DVD in a double feature from Full Moon Pictures. They bear what has become the Full Moon trademark — they're crap.

Both of these movies look and sound so cheap that watching them somehow feels dirty. They are unchilling and unsuspenseful. Their characters are poorly drawn, poorly performed, and utterly uninvolving. The movies have no sense of humor about themselves — if they intend to be funny, they're not. They aren't even unintentionally funny. It seems we are meant to take them seriously, which is insulting to, even contemptuous of, the viewer. They are simply bad on every conceivable level. They're Full Moon movies. They're horror movies. And everybody knows horror movies are crap. Right?

I've watched a lot of Full Moon movies over the years, and I've seen a few good ones — Stuart Gordon's The Pit and the Pendulum and Castle Freak, and I enjoyed Dr. Mordrid — but I've seen enough Full Moon movies to be pretty confident that those good ones were each a freak accident (although it's no accident that Stuart Gordon directed two of them). Does anyone out there rent a Full Moon movie thinking it's going to be GOOD? Someone must, because Charles Band's Full Moon Pictures has been quite successful. But that success has been built on a mountain of fairly consistently bad movies. They are the kind of movies that give horror movies a bad name. When you say the words "horror movie" out loud and most people think "crap," they're thinking of movies like the ones churned out by Full Moon Pictures.

Let's put some satanic toys in this one, killer puppets in that one, a few zombies over here, some vampires over there, and lots and lots of blood and gore. Plots? Characters? Intelligence? Some kind of emotional connection with the viewer? The slightest pretense that we give a damn? We'll get to it, we'll get to it. Later. Maybe. Or maybe not. More like probably not. It's a horror movie, people expect it to be crap. Right?

Not only do people rent and buy the crappy movies, they buy the action figures based on the crappy movies. And they buy the many sequels to the crappy movies.

Of Full Moon's product, Band says in a quote from his bio at his CineMaker website (www.cinemaker.com), "Every film we make has the potential to become a series in the way that television series or comic books are created. If the pilot works, we make more."

Sometimes that search through the garbage can be pretty bleak, the distance between good movies long — even between the pieces of good garbage. So we pick up a Full Moon movie, just to see what they're up to. We know it's probably going to be crap, but we rent it, anyway.

But after watching Dead and Rotting and Stitches, I have to rethink my lax attitude. These moves were the worst kind of garbage — the stinky, gooey kind, with an odor you can't get out of your nostrils for awhile. The kind that stings your skin if you touch it. This is part of a pattern of shoddiness and contempt that I can no longer support.

When those friends of mine who know I love horror movies come to me to complain about the bad horror movies they've seen, they complain often about movies from the Full Moon factory. As a fan of the genre, I've been embarassed by those movies for quite awhile now, and I've tried to explain them away with their few good titles. But not anymore.

I was stupid enough to pay money to see Dead and Rotting and Stitches — and Full Moon had the audacity to TAKE money in exchange for something so completely bad and contemptuous of its audience. But I will no longer be part of the problem.

We horror fans already have to pick through a lot of garbage to find our treasures, so we don't need somebody out there making our job worse by churning out slapped-together crap to see if it'll catch on as a series, or maybe spawn a line of action figures. We should see the Full Moon label not as a logo but as a posted warning: Toxic Waste!

So, this will be my first, and last, Bloodshot Eye Review of a Full Moon movie.

From now on, when my friends complain to me about Full Moon movies, I will simply explain to them, "Those aren't horror movies. Those are horror commercials."

[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]