According to the Internet Movie Database, Charles Band once said, “There's no formula for making a good genre film. Everybody seems to come up with one, but you really can't create anything that's going to have value four or five years from now. This is a business that changes every year. Everybody is looking for the next trend, but nobody can predict it.” Whether the man really feels this is true or it's just his excuse for the jarring downward trend his movies have had over the last decade, the man has actually made his mark on b-movie with a slew of unforgettable titles that still entertain people to this day! Such is the basis behind “Full Moon Rising”: a roundtable done in appreciation of what Chucky Band has done for all of us over the span of his career... or should that be “in defecation of”?

Born of bad movie director Albert “Zoltan, Hound of Dracula” Band and brother to movie score composer Richard Band, Charlie got into the business of writing and directing his own feature films starting in the early '70s. Though some of his stuff was pretty good, Band's real calling was producing movies, which he started doing with his Italian based company Empire Pictures back in the mid-80s. Empire gave birth to several memorable flicks (thought not always for the right reasons...), including Trancers, Ghoulies, TerrorVision, Puppet Master, From Beyond and, of course, Re-Animator... hallowed be thy name. Unfortunately, the economic sodomizing of Italy brought the Empire down around Chuck's ears. He would rebuild though, heading to America and working out a distribution deal with Hollywood big wigs (“but not to small wigs”) Paramount Pictures to release features from his new production company: Full Moon Entertainment. Through Full Moon, Band could continue cranking out cheaply made horror and sci-fi flicks, always embracing the idea of “quantity over quality”. Why? Because people like us will continue to watch them as long as we all get a sick thrill out of watching cinematic enemas.

Speaking of enemas, the late '90s were a shitty time to be a Full Moon follower. The company was really starting to show its ailing budgets as once loved franchises like Puppet Master, Trancers, and Subspecies were tapping new veins of fecal unhappiness with increasingly poor sequels, while Charles-in-charge was spreading his resources thinly over other genres like kids' movies (anybody else remember the Prehysteria! series?) and sci-fi skin flicks I like to refer to as “science fucktion”. In an effort to pump some fresh blood through Full Moon's collapsing arteries, the company tried making new killer dolls movies (Totem and Blood Dolls), “urban” (i.e. black) horror flicks (Killjoy and The Horrible Dr. Bones), a combination of the two (Ragdoll), zombie movies (Prison of the Dead and The Dead Hate the Living!), wooing back fan favorites to make new “classics” (Castle Freak), and even Japanese style giant monster movies where aliens try to destroy the planet with guys in rubber costumes smashing model toys (Kraa! and Zarkorr!). Needless to say, these new flicks didn't exactly bring in the new fans Band was hoping for, nor did they keep the attention of current fans who were abandoning ship before they too sank like so many of the rats on the USS Full Moon and its leader, Captain Charles. And now, the first of our contributions to the “Full Moon Rising roundtable: Kraa! The Sea Monster.

On the dark and dying planet of Proyas, evil Powers Rangers villain-wanna-be Lord Doom grows tired of sitting around and doing nothing. As such, he and his evil dwarf minion Chamberlain (who looks like a half-pint version of one of the mutants from The Omega Man) send DL's man-eating pet Kraa(!) to Earth to ravage the little blue marble. Standing in their way is the Planet Patrol, a group of good clean-cut twenty-somethings in bad spandex costumes who, as their name suggest, patrol the planets. Planet Patrol is led by the greased hair and over-enunciating powers of Captain Ruric, given “street cred” by employing their sassy black engineer chick Lt. Able, can take out home loans thanks to the presence of their excessively white patrolman Garth, and have a wealth of punchlines at their disposal thanks to the joining of newest member Curtis (played by Alison Lohman, the only cast member to make something of her life), who claims to have psychic powers. No sooner can Ruric assure Curtis that “nothing bad has happened in a long time”, than they receive an emergency warning that something big has just teleported into Earth's airspace... given that there's no air in space, I guess I could've phrased that a little better...

As I'm sure you've figured out by now, said “something big” is Kraa(!). Looking not unlike a giant mutant rainbow trout of unending doom (by way of a modified Ghoulies II costume), Big K makes a midnight water landing on Earth and prepares to do some damage. Meanwhile, Doom disables Curic's outpost, meaning the Planet Patrol (all four members...) has no way of going to Earth to stop the Fourth Fish of the Apocalypse. The only hope if that PP agent Mogyar, on Earth for a scouting mission, can stop the monster before he turns the planet into Lord Doom's new summer home. Not an easy task, considering Mogyar is something resembling a half-decayed midget Matango with a bad Italian accent, and his only allies are a know-it-all biker named Bobbie and a disagreeable New Jersey diner worker named Alma. To make matters worse (for the characters AND the viewers), Moggy's crash landing through Alma's place of business was noticed by alien hunting men-in-black types, thus giving us the old E.T. “ran away from the government!” spiel to look forward to. Hooray. As for Kraa(!), well, his “world tour of destruction” so far has been limited to smashing a model mechanic's garage, complete with big Paul Bunyany mascot. Though, to be fair, the place only goes up in flames because of a kamikaze oil tanker truck that happened to be passing by, so you can't even blame this little bit of property damage on the dime store kaiju. Kraa(!) also smashes through a large office building, the side of which has a huge ad for the Tristar Godzilla movie (ala the old Hills Have Eyes oneupmanship sight gag)... and said building is surprisingly lacking in the things you'd normally find inside office buildings, like office furniture, people, and floors. That's right, the building Kraa(!) is smashing not only breaks apart into pre-cut panels, but it also doesn't have any floors to it, making it a very large, empty box. Meanwhile, flames start to ignite in other buildings before Kraa(!) has even smashed them, and given the few cars lining the streets and complete lack of “screaming pedestrians” footage you'd normally see interlaced with scenes like this, I'd say El Monstro Del Mar is wasting his time attacking small populace towns rather than bustling metropli. Maybe Band shouldn't have been so busy trying to cut corners and should have been trying to cut his wrists instead.

While the government interrogates Alma (and her high-waisted “mom pants”) and Bob about everything they don't know, Kraa(!) and his terrible theme music (generic dramatic tune that plays while someone with a deep voice just keeps saying “Kraaaaaaaaa(!)”) march on without military interference, destroying a toy train with his film warping digital mouth beam... this crap is most definitely going up on the Tomb's YouTube page when I get around to making a vid. Alma, Bobbie, and Moggy (whose Italian accent is so bad, it makes Super Mario sound like Don Corleone) escape the suits amidst the confusion of K-Fed's attack, while back up at PP base everybody continues to show how much of their parents’ money they wasted on acting lessons. Their ruptured energy core continues to countdown to the end of their lives, but not only am I confident that some last minute deus ex machina will kick in, even if it didn’t, I still don’t think I’d care. Moggy and his friends (Bobbie of which has shaved his head and beard for no reason other than to look like a fat Mr. Clean) now have to come up with a wacky scheme that involves government espionage, the assembly of a super weapon, and saving the world within an 8 hour time limit before Kraa(!) finishes his job... something that I'm still pretty sure could have been stopped by simple military action had the government thrown a few jet fighters or tanks at him at some point. This was 1998 too, so it's not as if they were all over in Iraq at a time when their country could actually them to a good cause... like Hurricane Katrina *cough*cough*.

In standard movie logic (i.e. as far away from real logic as possible), our civilian heroes and their illegal extra-terrestrial have no trouble stealing those US military resources, constructing a super weapon all on their own, and commandeering an entire nuclear power plant to light it up. The government lackeys, also in standard movie logic, catch up to the heroes and try to stop them from saving the day because they think disposable people in black suits are the only ones who know what they're doing. As a further excuse to have the Planet Patrol in the movie at all, Curtis uses her psychic powers to slow down Kraa(!) all the way from their station way out in space and give the Earth crew a few extra moments to incapacitate the HIGHLY TRAINED GOVERNMENT SECURITY AGENTS and fire their beam cannon at the fish monster… who’s been out of water an awful long time for a giant space guppy. Using that insanely convoluted d.e.m. I mentioned earlier, the PP somehow fix all their mechanical problems by siphoning some gas from the nuclear ray beam (again, light years away on Earth…), then use their own recharged armament to turn Kraa(!) into the galaxy’s largest sushi platter. Before chasing down enough wassabi and soy sauce to feed the third world countries in need of such a banquet, our PP crew chases down Lord Doom for a silly little martial arts fight finale. Lord Zedd’s inbred cousin winds up in a dog kennel and existence is safe until the next Charles Band’s rent is due.

If you think the movie itself sounds like a painful trip to the world’s nastiest public bathroom, here’s the part where you’ve just finished washing your hands and discover that the paper towel dispenser is empty: the movie’s cover art is, surprise surprise, misleading. The characters running from Kraa(!) are two of the Planet Patrolers and thus never came within a few light years of the monster, let alone did they run from it in terror. Keeping it going now, there was never a helicopter buzz bombing the beast. ANY kind of military attack would've been appreciated, even if I had to look at model planes on fishing line or wind up tanks with the keys exposed. But, alas, we received nothing. All we get is one badly animated computer graphic of a flying triangle… Ed Wood at least gave us pie tins on strings, damn it!

Beyond the horrible acting, terrible writing, grade school set pieces, high school AV Club cgi, and drama class costume budget, there is one saving grace: I enjoyed the Kraa(!) suit. In a movie where everything else would have been out-shined by the cheapest episode of “Ultraman”, at least the title monster didn’t leave me feeling as if I’d had a severe groin injury. There was no zipper to be seen, the head never fell off at any point, and the guy in the costume wasn’t wearing his Doc Martins during scenes. I would complain that the mouth never really moves and the eyes are stone dead (fish don’t have eyelids anyway, do they?), but given the rest of the garbage piling up around it, the smell of dead trout was (mercifully) tame and almost pleasant by comparison. If this movie should jump into your net at any point in your life though, just throw it back. You’ll impress your friends with the story of “the big one that got away” more than you ever could with the truth about how a half-eaten goldfish swam into your net because it was hoping you’d put it out of its misery.