Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Produced and directed by Charles Band
• Starring
  • Robin Sydney
  • Samantha Light
  • Steve Kramer
  • Rane Jameson
  • Kim Argetsinger

I don’t want to say that Dangerous Worry Dolls (2008) is the “right” way for Charles Band to shoehorn his obsessions with toy creatures into a movie, but comparing it with Skull Heads clearly shows that the latter is the wrong way. Squandering a fecund if familiar set of horror movie premises, Skull Heads almost becomes an inadvertent horror flick version of Waiting For Godot; the movie marks time for 80% of the 75-minute running time (plus credits), as if unwilling to really get things started until the titular creatures show up — which they barely do.

The setting is a castle in Italy — Charles Band’s personal castle, actually, serving as a Full Moon location for the first time since Castle Freak (1995); Skull Heads has a little bit of a Castle Freak-esque vibe to it, though only to the degree that you wish you were watching the earlier movie instead of this one. Said castle is home to the Arkoff family, whom we’re supposed to believe is standoffish and mistrustful of outsiders (literally, anyone from outside the castle walls). This despite the fact that they wear mostly modern clothes and speak with middle American cadences, without even the hint of a generic European accent.

Why do I get the idea that Charles Band just had one of these sitting around?

We’re introduced first to father Carver Arkoff (Steve Kramer) and eighteen-year-old Naomi (twenty-five-year-old Robin Sydney, familiar to Full Moon audiences from The Gingerdead Man (2005) and both Evil Bong flicks) as he straps her on a rack in the torture chamber in the cellar. Her infraction? Having a cell phone, which she got from the grocery delivery boy. Carver’s very definite on the family rules: Don’t let the outside world in. After a bit of stretching, Carver relents, and Naomi’s pitiful whines turn to giggly girlishness, as if this were a normal part of family interaction instead of a traumatic experience. (I don’t care what kind of family dynamic she’s used to, no one should be able to skip away after they’ve been on the rack.)

At least they’re taking the time to sit down together for meals. That’s something, right?

The rest of the household is comprised of Naomi’s mother Lisbeth (Samantha Light), a somewhat more intellectual and sympathetic person than Carver; Carver’s learning-disabled half-brother Peter (Giacomo Gonnella) whom Carver delights in tormenting; Grandpa, who stays sequestered and silent in a veiled bed in an upstairs bedroom; and Claudia (Lucia Stara), housekeeper and cook whose consommé raises Lisbeth’s ire. They’re probably the least-convincing reclusive family ever, and not just because they sound like average Americans. (There’s a throwaway line about them speaking English in keeping with their American great-grandfather’s wishes, who bought the castle after the Great War, but that still doesn’t explain why they sound like they’re from Ohio.) Carver dresses and sounds like a blue-collar worker who comes home off the assembly line and wants some respect, dammit! Naomi dresses in normal, off-the-rack clothes that don’t look at all like her world has been circumscribed to the castle all her life. Lisbeth throws in overeducated words, beyond the actress’ ability to pull off (not so much a criticism of the talent, as those lines would stymie the most accomplished thespian). And (this is NOT a spoiler alert) it’s even more unbelievable when Carver and Lisbeth are revealed to be incestuous siblings; while both sound whitebread American, their vocabulary and attitudes are far enough apart that one can’t believe they’re even from the same town, much less the same gene pool and insular upbringing.

A Skull Head, doing what they do best: striking a pose.

So why is that bombshell in the previous paragraph not a spoiler, even though it’s only revealed ten minutes before the closing credits? Because the back of the DVD box refers to them in the first sentence as “the strange, inbred Arkoff family,” and there’s really no one else to do the inbreeding. Shucks, the movie only brings up that fact in an awkward declaration, occasioned by nothing that precedes it; it’s really clumsy screenwriting when the only way to show that characters are incestuous is for them to state, “By the way, we’re incestuous!”

Also revealed on the back of the DVD box is the fact that the castle is “invaded by a trio of treacherous art thieves.” That must be the three outsiders who knock on the courtyard door at the 23-minute mark, posing as Hollywood people scouting for locations. Naomi is immediately taken with the hunka-hunka supposed director Jenson (Rane Jameson), and despite her father’s firm protests that they don’t want any outsiders making a movie there, she invites them to dinner where, at the 41-minute mark, we first hear the words “Skull Heads.” We’ve seen them before this, mind you — lurking behind furniture and tapestries, scrabbling around the walls in Grandpa’s room. The story the Arkoffs tell the “movie people” is that they’re ancient protectors of the castle, occasioned by the Christian catacombs beneath the castle.

I always thought reclusive inbred girls would smell bad. Shows what I know.

Too bad nobody told the prop department they were supposed to be ancient guardians, because they’re a trio of brightly-painted rod puppets which look more like the product of modern Mexican folk art. I also don’t think I’m revealing any spoilers when I say that the Skull Heads really don’t do anything. This movie probably sets a record in the Full Moon catalog for the ease with which the titular killer toys could be excised from the plot without doing it any damage.

I can’t really criticize any of the acting because of the script and directorial miscues. Robin Sydney is almost believable as the repressed, undersocialized Naomi who’s feeling the weight of her hormones; Steve Kramer is fine if we posit that he was told to play Carver like a stereotypical red stater with the castle as the world’s largest mobile home. Everyone else simply stands where they’re told and says what they’re supposed to, which is fully competent given the one-week shooting schedule.

“If you don’t stop humming the Mission: Impossible theme…”

Because there is no behind-the-scenes material on the DVD, Band doesn’t get the chance to let slip on who “August White” is this time. It could very well be either Brian or Domonic Muir, as has been in previous film Band has directed in the past five years, or it could be someone else entirely under the house name. All I know is that if I turned in this screenplay, even with directorial diktats determining the high lameness factor, I wouldn’t put my real name on it either.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0