Charles Band, the man behind Full Moon Pictures and its series of movies starring or featuring puppets, has returned to the home video market with Wizard Entertainment, his new company that aims to release at least six new movies a year. Low budgets appear to be the norm for Band and Wizard Entertainment, and “Decadent Evil,” the first title released under the Wizard banner, is no exception to that rule—though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Shot in just six days, “Decadent Evil” is a simple little tale about vampires and the midget vampire hunter out to kill them.
Tracking Vampire master Morella and her two minions, Sugar and Spyce, we learn that these women vampires have been killing one hundred people a year for one hundred years in order to reach the ten thousand mark. Once ten thousand victims have been drained of their blood, Morella will become the invincible Queen of vampires.
With only two more kills to go before she becomes the mother of all vampires, Morella suddenly finds a wrench in her gears when Ivan, a three-foot vampire hunter tracks her down. Ivan is out for revenge because Morella turned his father, whom she’d been dating, into a 12-inch tall homunculus, a pygmy lizard human hybrid. Locked in a cage, Marvin, the homunculus, is a h***y little devil who just wants to screw. Unaware that his father is still alive, Ivan tracks Morella and her crew to a mansion on the outskirts of town and attempts to kill Morella before she takes down her final two victims.
While this film does suffer a few setbacks from its budgetary limitations, the acting suffers more than anything else. While Phil Fondacaro, the little person playing Ivan the vampire hunter delivers a solid, entertaining performance, everyone else is the film suffer from a syndrome in which they try too hard to act and pay little attention to being in the moment. Though, it should be noted, that Jill Michelle delivers a solid, spicy performance.
“Decadent Evil” delivers everything you’d expect from a Charles Band movie. Here we have nudity, animatronic creatures, and gore. Shot on such a low budget and in such a limited time frame, it’s apparent that certain sacrifices were made. Including no more than four set pieces, “Decadent Evil” is a film that relies on dialogue driven scenes. At only seventy minutes—sixty if you subtract the end credits sequence—the film is light on action and heavy on plot and talking heads. Given the film’s fiscal limitations, this is something that can easily be overlooked—especially if you’re a fan of Band’s form of entertainment.
