Charles Band's Full Moon Road Show--stand-up comedy for horror fans. After a mind numbing montage of film clips to some heavy metal music, the man of the hour came out for an engaging, informal, off-the-cuff talk about making low budget gore and monsters.
We saw her boobies!
Although a rabid horror fan, I've had just about zero interest in his killer puppet movies, but he was the guy responsible for
The Reanimator and
From Beyond. When the show started out I yelled, "I saw
Laserblast and want my money back!" which is probably why the guy was kind of distant from me the rest of the night.
Needless to say I really enjoyed his true stories about sleazy promoters, actor tantrums, the mountain of hate mail he received about the ad campaign for
Ghoulies--
I've been trying to toilet train my little Jimmy and now he's scared to go near the potty because he's afraid a little monster's going to come out and bite him on the behind! YOU SUCK!!!
and hilarious accounts of an obviously very drugged up Gary Busey. I think the hours of footage of him "improvising" a scene by waving guns, throwing money and babbling on and on about homosexuals and aliens would have been a whole lot more entertaining than wisecracking puppets.
The show culminated in a lame sketch involving five (5) audience members and electric chair. Three (3) girls were supposed to show their "boobies" (We could have played a drinking game if you drank every time he said that word.)
Two of them were kind of ugly and one was smoking hot, who initially refused, but when the crowd egged her on she was glad to lift up her shirt.
After the show she was VERY friendly to me and more than a little bit drunk.
I tried to engage Mr. Band in some conversation but he seemed a lot more interested in peddling his gargantuan amounts of Full Moon junk. He had made a comment about how DVD's even are a thing of the past and you can pretty much download any movie now. "It's good and bad."
Owning me will NOT get you laid.
Though it was a good time, the whole thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and it wasn't just the New Brookland Tavern's cheap whiskey. It just seemed like this guy who had made hundreds of movies was now out of money and deperately trying to pay his bills by hawking plastic junk (including a non-functioning "evil bong" with a face on it and, of course, action figures) and DVD's of films that, to me, always had that miasma of the manufactured "cult" film that infected everything Troma put out, too.
I used to have such good vibes at the Chiller Theater conventions. This was more like the State Fair.
