If you are not familiar with the name Charles Band, or his Full Moon Features, you may know a few titles with which he is attached – or you may simply appreciate good cinema. Band was integral to the creation of trash classics like
Laserblast, and
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, among others. In the ensuing decades he has lorded over his own version of a Troma-like studio, in Lloyd Kaufman fashion. Of late he has shown a predilection for doll-based features, yet this foray becomes more stark than the rest of his catalogue.
Making a racial treatise in the shock-schlock genre could have been a cathartic lark, but this is not the work of a deft hand. The message is delivered with all the grace of a dog dropping a dead opossum in your lap. The attempt to challenge your social mores is more of a challenge to good taste and decorum. Now let’s carve into this attempt which died in the planning stage.
00:00:33 Weakened Impulse
The tiles glide in with a pronounced African track blaring over them, replete with bongos and chanting. Get ready for a shit-ton of racial subtlety.
00:02:30 Visual Interaction
We open with a children’s program based on a farm, featuring a character named Hambo. The sidekick is a rather fetching farmer’s daughter-type named Peggy Suey. She is played by a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader named Amber Strauser and turns out to be the only Caucasian in the film who is not a ribald racist.
00:03:41 Septic Introduction
Backstage we meet the star of the program. Hambo is a drunken, abusive Pig/Clown/Farmhand/Pederast. He is stroking himself to a Playboy magazine. Any parents allowing their kids to sit in the audience of the Hambo Show should be brought up on charges of neglect. In fact, allowing them to appear in this film should also be grounds for investigation.
00:07:17 Contradictory Character Interaction
Once again, Peggy Suey is the lone white individual you will encounter here who is not an inveterate sociopath. Enjoy her again now, while you can.
00:10:49 Cranial Atrophy
We meet the young African-American Devin, coming home to his sharp girlfriend Donna, after completing his schooling to become a doctor. Donna starts climbing on his lap -- in order to make him Cum Laude -- but Devin instead takes a call from Hambo and decides he needs to go see his friend. For Devin time with a lecherous clown-hybrid is preferable to a lithe and sexually willing female.
00:14:14 Exploratory Story Incision
Hambo gets fired but he has a brilliant fallback plan. He wants to sell a line of deeply offensive novelty statues called Badass Dolls. With names such as "The Gook", and "The Butt Pirate" you have to wonder who would sell something so overtly tasteless. Wonder no more -- Full Moon will have these exact items offered up for sale on its web site in the coming weeks.
00:17:55 Chronicle Seizure
The Ooga Booga doll has made cameos in previous Charles Band productions, introduced in
Doll Graveyard. In that film the doll was said to have been created in the early 1900s. That means that this new release is not following the Full Moon canon!
00:19:12 Plot Stimulant
Showing appropriate outrage at the figures Devin none the less accepts a prototype of the Ooga Booga doll as a gift. Later he enters a convenience store doll in hand -- rather than tossing it in a dumpster.
00:20:21 Invasive Pathos
Devin hides while three thugs enter the store, shoot the clerk in the head, and steal the security tape. Next the recent medical school grad drags the victim and then roughly turns him over and jostles his head wound. Maybe he’s a podiatrist?
00:23:50 Weakened Impulse
Devin calls 911 and two cops arrive. Of course Officer White is a scathing racist and he ends up shooting Devin dead on the basis that he is black and thus guilty of shooting the clerk.
WHITE: “
One dead kid, one living black kid – easy math!”
00:27:33 Arrested Physics
Lying dead beneath the Slushie counter Devin is in prime position as the machine malfunctions, its spilled contents mixing with his blood and the electrical charges from the dispenser jolting his body. This proves to be the exact process needed to transport his soul into the Ooga Booga doll.
00:28:36 Septic Introduction
While certainly not even a C-List star, it is still embarrassing to see Stacy Keach slumming as a racist judge controlling the corrupt cops AND the brain-dead group of white trash thugs.
00:29:37 Continuity Failure
In lecturing the cops Judge Marks declares they should hope the missing security tape from the store does not turn up. He says this despite the reality that the idiot thugs took the tape long before the cops had even been called to the store.
00:33:39 Chronicle Seizure
One of the store thugs mentions having the security tape and possibly using it for leverage over the cops. There are only three problems:
1) This group had no way of knowing what the cops did since they had long left the store prior.
2) They took the security tape with them, so there is nothing recorded to implicate the cops.
3) Immediately after speaking another of the dolts, for no damned reason, begins stripping yards of tape out of the cassette, rendering it useless.
00:34:32 Plot Stimulant
At the apartment a mourning Donna encounters the returning Ooga Booga doll. After the expected freakout Devin manages to let Donna know he is trapped in the figure through a series of grunts, nods, and carving his name into the coffee table with his spear.
00:38:16 Editing Arrythmia
While playing loud music there’s a knock on the door and a nebbish neighbor, wearing a sweater, comes in complaining about the noise and spouting racial epithets. As to who this is, or why he feels able to storm into their apartment; no clue at all. But Ooga Booga gets the drop on him and stabs his spear in the guy’s forehead.
00:41:16 Continuity Failure
Donna and Devin hatch a plan of revenge on his killers. Her first move is to allow herself to become raped in an alley by the three thugs, all in order to steal a set of keys from one of them. Seriously, this was a plan. She does this despite neither of them having ANY way of knowing these three were at all connected to the cops.
00:42:21 Comedic Arrest
Donna returns home beaten and bloodied, and drops the keys in front of the doll. As she is next showering off the remnants and shame of her sexual assault the doll walks over and begins masturbating to her naked form. Well that sure places the impact of her attack into perspective.
00:44:37 Blunt-Force Dialogue
The judge is upset with the dwindling profits from the drug and prostitution ring the three tweakers are running on his behalf, so he calls in Officer White to go check on them and straighten out the business. White tells him he does not like to involve himself with the drug operation.
JUDGE MARKS: “
I don’t give a Mexican magic jumping-bean what you like!”
00:46:47 Septic Introduction
Officer White stops in at the office of the trailer park, run by the oddly historic (or, historically odd) actress Karen Black. White is hitting her up for information as to which trailer the thugs live in; this despite that we are told the judge has the ability to know everything about them and all of their moves.
01:00:19 Locale Anesthesia
Donna next drops in on Karen Black, under the ruse of using her phone for a car repair. Ooga Booga escapes her purse and nestles in with Karen's extensive stuffed animal collection. He ends up killing the woman, not because she was involved with the judge, or served his revenge purposes – it was all because she had some racist figurines on the shelf beside his hiding space.
01:07:44 Weakened Impulse
Donna goes to the trailer and the thugs let her in, believing she is there looking for work as a hooker. She shoots two of them and then Ooga Booga finishes off the third. However this invited ingress means there was no use for the keys she had lifted, and further there was no need AT ALL to allow herself to be raped.
01:11:23 Cranial Atrophy
Back at the apartment Donna makes a tragic discovery. Not only did she set out on a killing spree by taking her personal information with her but she managed to leave her wallet behind at the trailer with the three bodies.
01:15:22 Invasive Pathos
Donna and Ooga go to the home of White’s partner to eliminate him, but just before the vengeful doll can attack the cop directs them to his family picture. He is married to a black woman! He is spared! The partner then laughably declares, with a tender piano playing on the soundtrack:
I’m a bad cop – but a good man.”
01:18:48 Ruptured Visual
Officer White found Donna’s wallet and hid in their apartment to ambush them, but the two get him on the ground and Donna gets his gun. She begins to detail how they used to kill pigs on the family farm, and just before Ooga stabs him through the ear she pauses, placing an apple in the cop’s mouth.
01:21:11 Comedic Arrest
Lastly is the revenge in the judge’s chambers. Ooga Booga stabbed the judge in the eye, then he drops his spear on the desk with the orb still attached, optic nerve endings dangling, right beside the plaque which reads, "An Eye For An Eye".
01:22:13 Iatrogenic Direction
As a coda to this affair Donna receives a knock on the door and discovers an attache case in the hall. She opens it to discover tens of thousands of dollars, courtesy of Hambo. Turns out his hateful toy venture was a smashing success. Therefore in a film purportedly lecturing us on the evils of racism they spot-weld a happy ending onto it which relies on a marketplace passionate about hateful racial stereotypes.
01:23:15 Collapsed Climax
After all of the killing and the revenge has been satisfied Donna and Devin-Booga determine that he needed to avenge his death in order to move on. This is a repeat of the exact same scene four minutes earlier. This leads to the very powerfully touching scene of Donna tenderly kissing the doll with a bone in its nose.
POST MORTEM
The biggest indictment for this affair is that while posturing as social commentary it manages to pull its punches. The result then is all of this objectionable material is not presented as a provocative thought piece but merely to provoke cheap laughs. As an example the key art for this release invokes the name
DJANGO, as if it were a comparative, yet throughout this film you never hear any character utter the dreaded "N-Word". Every other degrading slur is freely spouted.
Then there is the small matter of displaying every white person (with the lone exception of Peggy Suey) as a spiteful hate-merchant. That kind of prejudicial display obliterates your theme of racism being wrong.