Tag: Debra Mayer

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain (2004) – A Movie A Day 2021 #36

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain poster

Continuing (and maybe ending) my loosely-linked movie watching streak, today’s flick pick features one of the stars and the director from yesterday’s movie. Charles Band, a prolific director and producer of low budget movies and the creator of Full Moon Features, directed Decadent Evil as well as today’s movie, and Debra Mayer, the master vampire Morella from Decadent Evil, plays a plucky news reporter named Mary Anne in today’s feature. And so, without any further ado, today I’ll be writing about Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, a strangely fun movie with blood and gore, mad scientists, and manimals. Yeah, manimals.

A title like Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain tells you a few things without even seeing a single frame of the film. First, the “Dr. Moreau’s” part of the title tells you that the movie will have at least some passing resemblance to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau or any of its many adaptations. I’ve never read the novel, and I can’t remember seeing any of its adaptations all the way through, but I understand there are human/animal hybrids in it. Judging by Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, I imagine that’s all the writer of the movie knew about the original novel as well.

The second half of the title, House of Pain, tells you that this is probably going to be a violent movie without a whole lot in the way of subtext or symbolism. I suppose you could also gather that information knowing that this is a Full Moon movie directed by Charles Band, but even if you didn’t know that (which I didn’t when I first came across the movie), the title still instills a sense of lurid shallowness. Once again, after watching the movie, the title is spot on.

And together “Dr. Moreau’s” and “House of Pain” tell you that you’re in for some b-movie campiness and cheesiness if you decide to watch it. I made that decision, and I definitely got what was promised. I think I even enjoyed it more than Decadent Evil.

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain is set sometime in or around the 1940s, and it follows a guy named Eric, his best friend Mary Anne, and his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Judith, as they search for Eric’s missing brother. A quick trip to the local strip joint gives Eric a lead in his search. Eric follows a stripper, Alliana, whom his brother apparently had the hots for. Before Eric can ask Alliana any questions, he sees her punch her hand straight through some guy’s head for trying to force himself on her. Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith follow the woman to a huge house on the outskirts of town, and inside they discover, naturally, Dr. Moreau’s house of pain.

Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith are quickly taken prisoner, and the movie follows their efforts to try to escape with their lives and all of their body parts. See, Dr. Moreau is back from his island vacation, and he’s now being forced to repeatedly operate to try to turn some of his hideous creations into normal humans. There’s a short pig man named Gallagher, a huge panther (or something) man named PeeWee, and a fish woman named Gorgana. Gorgana is the daughter of Pak, Dr. Moreau’s former assistant who now forces Moreau to keep working until he fixes his daughter. And there’s also Alliana, a beautiful and deadly creation that looks like a human, but has enhanced strength and a huge mean streak. There is a whole bunch of drama between all the members of the house of pain, but the real focus of the story is seeing if Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith can escape before they end up next on the mad doctor’s operating table. Or worse. It get worse, but I’ll let you experience that if you decide to watch.

The movie is full of camp and cheese. Whether that’s good or not is up to your personal cheese tolerance, but I enjoyed it. The pseudo-1940s dialogue felt really cumbersome in the first few scenes, but after a while I started to find the stilted lines kind of charming. I mean, when I see a pig man spouting flowery soliloquies at people chained up in a cage, I can’t help but enjoy it on some level.

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain is all about brightly colored, tilted camera, monstery goodness built on a base of ridiculous drama with a bit of nudity every so often for variety. I liked it fine. Am I being too forgiving? Maybe. The continuity is often laughable, the plot is stretched to its breaking point just so the movie can get to where the next scene needs to be, and lots of character moments just don’t make sense. But as a mindless way to spend 71 minutes of my life, I can think of worse things.

As a parting thought, the poster artwork for the movie is fantastic. That’s really what made me choose this movie over anything else. Also, I know the movie is going to be 17 years old this year, but I’d like to see a sequel with some new manimals (that’s Dr. Moreau’s word, not mine). Not to spoil anything, but lots of things die in this movie, so the sequel will need new human/animal hybrids. I would like to suggest half shark alligator half man, and I would like Dr. Octagon to write the dialogue for the film. If you’re unfamiliar with these references, please enjoy the following song.

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Decadent Evil A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Decadent Evil (2005) – A Movie A Day 2021 #35

The Decadent Evil DVD cover.

Today’s movie of the day is a strange one. Still continuing my linked-movie choices, the movie I watched technically contains a lot of the actors from yesterday’s movie, Vampire Journals. That’s because today’s movie, Decadent Evil, uses a whole lot of footage from Vampire Journals to set up an entirely new and almost completely unrelated story. It’s weird.

I actually bought the DVD for Decadent Evil sometime last year, probably in the dollar bin of my local used movie store. I got it because the DVD cover looks kind of dumb, and I like dumb horror movies. I started watching it soon after purchase, but I stopped once I realized that it might be a sequel or a spinoff or something. It’s kind of neither of those things though, and the use of the footage from Vampire Journals feels like the filmmakers were just padding the movie to make it over an hour long. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to watching Vampire Journals, it made sense to pick Decadent Evil next. Was it worth the wait? Not really.

Decadent Evil starts out with a digest version of the entire plot of Vampire Journals. The stories of Ash, Zachary, and Sofia are told pretty much in their entirety as we watch ten minutes of clips from the movie. Towards the end of the recap, we are told that one of Ash’s underlings, the vampiric Cassandra, left the country after the events of Vampire Journals and started her own vampire clan in America. The thing is, Cassandra isn’t in Decadent Evil at all, and unless I missed something she’s not even mentioned. The movie focuses on a trio of female vampires, and I assume the insinuation is that they are descended from Cassandra, but now that I think about, that doesn’t make sense time-wise. So yeah, it’s already a rough start and the real movie hasn’t even started yet. 

Oh, but I forgot to mention the narrator for the opening recap that has nothing to do with the movie. The first shot of Decadent Evil is of a homunculus, a tiny red humanoid thing. He’s a creepy-looking puppet in a cage, and we don’t get an explanation of who or what he is until well into the the movie. But anyway, the beginning of the movie goes from the shot of the homunculus right into the recap, and there is someone narrating the events we’re watching. Naturally, since the only humanoid thing I’d seen so far was the tiny red puppet, I assumed he was the one narrating the story. Like, maybe he’s actually really smart, or maybe he was once a human and got mixed up in some dangerous magical scenario. But despite one of those things being sort of true, we don’t find out any of that until way later. And it’s not like they’re big reveals that have meaning for the story. They’re just things the filmmaker decided not to mention. 

So, if you watch Decadent Evil just skip the first ten minutes. You don’t need any of the information from it, and it might actually be distracting because you might make a bunch of incorrect and pointless assumptions like I did. While you’re at it, just skip ahead to the thirteen-minute mark. There are about three minutes of credits that feel like they go on for another ten. I appreciate the use of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer font for the credits, but they were just too long. So now, once the ensuing establishing shots are done, the movie begins for real about fourteen minutes in. With the movie being only 74 minutes long, that’s one-fifth of the run time wasted. 

You know, you might as well skip the first real sequence of the movie too. The first two characters we really get to meet are a pushy scumbag of a guy and his reluctant girlfriend (or wife or something, I’m not sure). The guy begs and pushes his girlfriend into going to a strip club. Then he pleads with her to go with him when one of the dancers invites them over to her house for a more hands-on encounter. Then he guilts her into having a ménage à trois which she clearly doesn’t want to do. But finally, well over twenty minutes into the movie, the guy is mercifully killed by a vampire that we haven’t gotten to know yet. The girlfriend is also slaughtered, and about twenty-five minutes into the movie we finally start to learn what’s going on. 

Three female vampires live together in a mansion somewhere in or near Los Angeles. Morella is the master of the house. Morella has lived for an unknown yet very long amount of time, and she is on the verge of maybe becoming invincible because of some blood thing they explain in the movie (it’s not important enough for this journal entry or really even for the movie for me to explain it here). Morella acts like a domineering mother to Sugar and Spyce, two younger and less experienced vampires. It was Spyce who brought the guy and girlfriend home, and it was Morella who killed them. Morella and Spyce are your typical evil seductresses, but Sugar is a nice vampire. Sugar has a boyfriend named Dex, and when Dex is visited by a vampire hunter named Ivan, Dex puts his life on the line to save Sugar, and Sugar puts her life on the line to save Dex. It all builds up to a tepid vampire-slaying session with more discussion than action. Oh yeah, and the homunculus’s name is Marvin, and he doesn’t really even play much of a role in the movie despite being in the gross final shot. Then we get about eight minutes of credits and the movie is over. 

In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t care much for Decadent Evil. Without all the padding at the beginning and end, the actual story part of the movie is about 45 minutes long. I enjoyed the laughable effects such as when the guy at the beginning of the movie gets his throat slashed, but it’s 100% clear that the ensuing blood comes not from his neck, but from someone squirting it on his cheek from off camera. I kind of liked the idea of the forbidden love between Dex and Sugar, but I never truly felt like they were in much danger. And I had to laugh when a certain connection was revealed between the vampire hunter and Marvin the homunculus. So I guess you could say I enjoyed Decadent Evil for what it is, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to movies though, and I know Decadent Evil II exists, so look for that in a future installment of A Movie A Day. It won’t be any time soon though. 

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