By David Dent
Sarah Appleton has successfully established herself as a chronicler of the fantastic genre both on Blu-ray extras and film, with recent documentaries on J horror and found footage movies.
Her latest is a long-overdue look at the amazing life of Charles Band, a director and producer of over 400 films whose tenacity, as John Carpenter observes in the film, would enable him to survive a nuclear holocaust; along with the cockroaches.
Full Moon Rising charts Band’s numerous rises and falls, mainly through a series of talking heads (including Band’s own), starting with his influential filmmaking (and acting) mother and father – and yes Band still maintains he was babysat by Marilyn Monroe – to his first steps into directing. This was 1973’s Last Foxtrot in Burbank, a long-thought-lost satire of Last Tango in Paris (obvs) with Michael Pataki doing his best Marlon Brando, a movie which gave Carpenter his first paid job in Hollywood.
Band’s hucksterish ways – pre-selling movies, for example, to get the cash to make them, mainly based on a title or poster – was pretty standard behaviour in low-budget films. But Charles made a success of it, forming Empire Pictures in 1983 and going on to reap rewards by expanding his operation to Italy.
The documentary recognises Band’s ability to remain ahead of the curve, both in cornering the direct-to-video market – pretty much unknown in the 1980s – and later adapting his Full Moon production company to streaming services. It’s a career that’s seen its fair share of ups and downs – the shady money men moving in at the end of Empire and Band’s attendant financial problems, and cashflow issues resulting in film crews failing to be paid – but through it all Band has continued; and three wives later, it’s hard to find (on camera anyway) anyone who has a bad word to say about him.
Like all good documentaries, Full Moon Rising makes you want to seek out more of Band’s films, although in terms of his later output that’s an itch you can scratch fairly quickly; but there’s no denying that, under Empire International, he gave us a series of skilfully made, inventive low-budget movies easily equalling anything produced by Roger Corman.
Bloody Flicks 