A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Full Moon Entertainment

<< Blog | Editorial Features Friday, February 21, 4:00 PMFri, 21 Feb 2020 @ 4:00 PM by Thrustin' Hoffman

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After a grueling month spent deep diving into the career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I thought you guys deserved a nice treat this week! If you came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, chances are Full Moon Features played a huge part in your sexual awakening. The direct-to-video horror studio founded by Charles Band (Trancers, Parasite 3D) was a cult classic factory, churning out franchise after franchise in a bid to dominate the DTV horror market of the 1990s. With such franchises as Puppet Master, Subspecies, Demonic Toys, and countless others, the studio was a bit of a force to be reckoned with in the first half of the 90s.

As the studio's reputation grew, they began attracting higher profile directors like David DeCoteau, Stuart Gordon, andTed Nicolaou to name a few, and though none of the films released under the Full Moon Features banner were "good movies" by any conventional standards, they were jam-packed with blood, gore, and boobs. What more could a young Gen X-er in the throes of puberty ask for than those three elements? Full Moon evolved over the years, eventually becoming Full Moon Studios in the mid-90s, then Shadow Entertainment in the early aughts, before reverting back to Full Moon Pictures in 2004, but their commitment to blood, gore, and boobs has remained consistent from the very beginning.

Today, we're just going to cover the Full MoonEntertainmentera of the studio from Puppet Master in 1989 through Castle Freak in 1995. The studio cranked out 32 feature films during this six year period and we're going to be taking a look ata handful of these films today...

Puppet Master (1989)

Boasting easily the most legitimately star-studded cast of any Full Moon Feature (provided you consider Paul LeMat and William Hickey to be stars), the first Full Moon Feature was made before there was even a studio to speak of. Band partnered with Paramount Pictures to release the film on home video, giving the film a wider reach than it ever would have had otherwise. Legend tells of an old magician named Andre Toulon (Hickey) who was a puppeteer that used Nazi magic to bring his puppets to life during WWII. Now in the present, Toulon's puppets seem to have resurfaced at the Bodega Bay Inn in California, wreaking havoc on the work of a team of scientists.

While the franchise would incorporate more nudity as it went on, the only nude scene in the original comes to us courtesy ofKathryn O'Reilly, who bares her breasts while soaking in a tub...

Meridian (1990)

While far from the best film in the Full Moon catalog, Meridian: Kiss of the Beast was an attempt to break the mold a bit and do gothic horror. Band co-wrote and directed this film about two American girls, Catherine (Sherilyn Fenn) and Gina (Charlie Spradling), who travel to Italy because Catherine has just inherited her family's castle following the death of her father. At a local carnival, Gina becomes enamored with a magician named Lawrence (Malcolm Jamieson) and invites him and his crew to the castle for dinner.

It turns out, Lawrence has a few secrets of his own, namely that he has twin brother named Oliver—also played by Jamieson—and they are both cursed to turn into werewolf-esque beasts. He also has a Bill Cosby-esque predilection for drugging women and having sex with them, as he does to both Fenn and Spradling in the early going...

The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)

Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon joined the Full Moon family with this adaptation of the classic Edgar Allan Poe story set during the Spanish Inquisition. Why, you ask? Well, simply because...

Lance Henriksen stars as Torquemada, sleeping beneath several swords of Damocles in hopes that God will strike him dead should he have any impure thoughts. You can see where this is headed already, I'll bet. One day, Torquemada catches wind of a woman named Maria (Rona De Ricci) who has been speaking out publicly against the Inquisition. He orders that she be brought before him and tested for signs of witchcraft. The first test involves stripping her nude in front of the pious Grand Inquisitor, tempting the already weak man even further...

Subspecies (1991)

1986's TerrorVision was the feature directorial debut of Ted Nicolau, who had worked as a crew member on such horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Ghoulies, and the film was produced by Charles Band and his brother. Nicolau was one of the first directors that Band approached to direct a film for Full Moon and in 1991, he delivered his take on the vampire mythos with Subspecies. A trio of horny college coeds travels to Transylvania to do a study on Romanian culture when they find themselves mixed up in the world of legendary vampire Radu.

The film features just enough tweaks and interesting subversions of the vampire mythos to be a watchable endeavor, and the film spawned three sequels and a prequel, all written and directed by Nicolau. Like Puppet Master,the franchisehas its own staunchly loyal fan base who have elevated Radu to the same status as Dracula and Count Orlok. Two of the three randy coeds, played by Michelle McBride and Irina Movila, are turned into vampires by Radu, and both babes bare their breasts in the process...

Demonic Toys (1992)

While the Puppet Master films were still being churned out, Full Moon launched another series about small killer toys with Demonic Toys, written by future Batman Begins scribe David S. Goyer. Unlike Toulon's killer puppets which were brought to life thanks to good old fashioned Nazi black magic, these killer playthings are brought to life through Satanic means, as one may have gleaned from the film's title. Also, unlike Puppet Master's original puppet creations, these are more recognizable children's toys, like a Jack-in-the-Box, baby doll, teddy bear, robot, and so on.

In time, we would find the Demonic Toys going up against other Full Moon franchise characters like Puppet Master and Dollman, before getting their own sequel in 2010. The film's only nude scene comes in a classic horror movie fake-out where one of the guys hunting the Demonic Toys is briefly distracted by a calendar girl come to life. An hour in, Kristine Rose appears in the toy factory as Miss July, stripping down to seduce this bozo so the toys can have at him...

Doctor Mordrid (1992)

The 90s were a notoriously terrible time for a lot of Marvel properties, and one of them nearly ended up headlining a Full Moon Feature before joining the MCU. That's right, 1992's Doctor Mordrid began life as a Doctor Strange movie. Band had somehow acquired the film rights to Marvel's sorcerer supreme in the late 80s, but before the film could go into production, those rights lapsed. Undeterred, Band rewrote C. Courtney Joyner's script to be a little more Full Moon friendly and Doctor Mordrid was born. Re-Animator star Jeffrey Combs stars as the titular interdimensional wizard who must face an intergalactic threat known as Kabal (this movie's version of the Marvel character Death's Head, without the cool mask), who escapes galactic prison and threatens the earth.

It's no worse than Roger Corman's Fantastic Four or the 1990Captain Americamovie starring J.D. Salinger's son, in all honesty, and while it probably would've been culturally embarrassing for Doctor Strange to have been attached to this particular movie, it wouldn't have tarnished the character's reputation any. As for the film's only nude scene, Road House and Point Break'sJulie Michaels dropsby to bare some terrific TA for the film's villain...

Castle Freak (1995)

Stuart Gordon returned to Full Moon with this tale of terror loosely based on"The Outsider" by H. P. Lovecraft. Re-Animator co-stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton star as a married couple who, in proud Full Moon tradition, inherit a castle in Italy. Seriously, that is the inciting incident of like a half dozen of these movies. A 12th Century Duchess once owned the castle and her disfigured son Giorgio—the title character—still haunts the castle's dungeon, subsisting on a diet of rats until this new family of saps comes to call.

Jeffrey Combs' character isn't such a great dude, shock of all shocks, in this movie. In a crucial scene, he hires a prostitute (Raffaella Offidani) from the local village to come to the castle and have sex, which they do, but then she is attacked and mutilated by Giorgio...