Charles Band is a name B-movie fans should know well. In the business for over twenty-five years, Band has headed-up the prolific low-budget studios Empire Pictures and Full Moon Entertainment. It's through Full Moon he introduced a series of fans to genre friendly pictures such as Puppet Master, which took a general idea (example: killer "fill in the blank") and made generally pleasing fare.

However in the late 90's the Full Moon name started to crumble as Band lost his distribution deal with Paramount Pictures, had to deal with bankruptcy, and the filmed product coming from his company continued to slide downhill (especially during a period where he found himself teamed-up with fellow indie filmmakers such as J.R. Bookwalter's Tempe Pictures).

Now Band introduces Wizard Entertainment, a company dedicated to bringing fans at least six genre films per year and producing a series of tie-ins such as action figures. Decadent Evil is the first production under the banner, and while it's not worth watching and certainly not on the level of the early Full Moon films it does stick to the "guidelines" set forward by Band. Hopefully Wizard's next production, the much more promising looking Doll Graveyard, can turn out better than this.

As is the norm for Band productions, Decadent Evil gets off to a start that rips footage from one of his prior movies (Vampire Journals) before telling us the extremely thin story of a trio of female vampires led by Debra Mayer as Morella (who has the unfortunate task of muttering the line "Fee-fi-fo-fum I smell the blood of a human..." later in the movie) that when not working in a strip club are out to harvest human victims. Throw into the mix Phil Fondacaro (who's worked for Band dating as far back as 1985's The Dungeonmaster) as a steely, private eye-like vampire hunter and the fact Morella keeps her former-lover-turned-homunculus Marvin in a cage and you have this sloppily put together effort that not only runs a mere 67 minutes (if you take out the 15 minutes of credits and cribbed footage it only runs 52) but fails to deliver even the promise of skin setting scenes of the movie in a strip club offers.

Filmed in six days, and due to the scattershot nature of the story it shows, this does manage to look a lot more professional than most of Full Moon's last productions (I'm talking about stuff like Trancers 6) but it offers very little in the way of entertainment not even giving us much in the way of bloodshed to chew on. Fondacaro is the best thing here in his limited screen time and the "Marvin" puppet really isn't too bad, but those two things alone can't raise Decadent Evil above the level of "skippable".

Visit Wizard Entertainment for more info and to order. (Chris Hartley, 7/18/05)

Directed By: Charles Band.
Written By: August White.

Starring: Phil Fondacaro, Debra Mayer, Daniel Lennox, Raelyn Hennessee.

Picture Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: The picture here is completely acceptable and a lot better than previous Full Moon DVD releases. It's a pretty clear transfer that has a few specks of scattered grain and a few mild moments of fuzziness, but it still fine.

Extras: Unfortunately the special features continue the "self-promotion" vibe of many of Band's prior DVD releases with an ad for their website, an ad for clothing company "Vanitas", a trailer (plus trailers for the Cinemaker box set and compliation DVD's When Puppets And Dolls Attack and Monsters Gone Wild!), an introduction by Band that gives Wizard Entertainment's "Mission Statement", a brief snippet from the set of Doll Graveyard, an okay "making of" featurette, and a fairly pointless blooper reel.