FRENCH FRIES and FULL MOON FEATURES part I: "Puppet Master" and McCain Smiles

Hello, and welcome to yet another continuing series that involves us watching stuff and eating things -- because that's all we do anyway so why not make it your problem? As strongly implied by the title, we're buying bags of frozen french fries and cookin' 'em at 425 as we indulge in the low budget library that is Full Moon Features - the Home Video production company started by Charles Band in 1988. We don't like to impose a ton of "rules" in these lighthearted shenanigans but for consistency's sake we're sticking to the films actually produced by the studio and excluding all the previous Charles Band/Empire Pictures releases. That may seem irrelevant but we point it out as a way to call attention to the fact that this leaves us nearly 150 features to wade through (with more likely on the way). 

For fun (because that's the whole point) we begin this program at the very beginning with the very first Full Moon Production, 1989's Puppet Master. A wildly successful video rental (in "cult" terms) that has generated 14 sequels/spinoffs (thus far), it became the sorta symbol for the whole company; the name and its killer dolls are basically the Micky Mouse of Full Moon. In all honesty, we've seen this movie a handful of times already, and up to and including this most recent viewing, we just can't warm up to it - let alone comprehend its popularity. The premise involves a small group of psychics meeting together at a hotel where William Hickey made some possessed dolls 50 years earlier. The dolls have been freed from their tomb and are killing off the principal players one by one - but really there's only like five characters and two of them survive, so you could say there's some padding. Actually the whole movie could be described as padding: just a formless, convoluted pillow to fall asleep on. That's why its cult status as a video rental is so confounding - the movie's way too boring to create any sorta "party" atmosphere, and the four or five dolls (as cool looking as they are) don't really do much with their minimal screentime. Though while you wouldn't call this movie traditionally "atmospheric", it does establish the unique Full Moon mood that's ultimately present in all of their films.

To pair with this classic of Home Entertainment we chose a classic from Home Cuisine: The Smiley Fry. Several brands have tried their hand at this whimsical shape but McCain did it first in the 1970s and that's the label we've chosen to match our "original" movie. For us (like many) these fries have an air of childhood about them - no specific memories but the nostalgia is there. But clearly we've never cooked them ourselves as an adult because the same rules don't apply to these as regular french fries. We like our potatoes crispy, so when it comes to frozen fries we always add at least another 10 minutes to the suggested baking time. Apparently, Smiles are so dense that their innards dry out before the faces ever achieve that golden brown we're looking for; we wanted them to be something that God never intended, so in the end that's our folly. Still, one could only imagine how good these would've been had they not turned into tater-flavored wallpaper paste. 

The Movie: D+

The Fries: C-