• Directed by “Victoria Sloan” (David DeCoteau)
• Written by Benjamin Carr
• Starring
  • Billy Parish
  • Walter Jones
  • Jason Adelman
  • Ilinca Goia
• Costi (Constantin) Barbulescu
• Produced by Vlad Paunescu
• Executive produced by Charles Band

These things have to be taken in context. On an absolute scale of cinematic quality, Talisman doesn’t rate very well. However, compared to other Full Moon projects from the late ‘90’s shot in Romania pseudonymously by Dave DeCoteau from a script by Benjamin Carr starring a handful of young unknown American actors, it’s not so bad. And I have no idea whether I’ve just praised or damned the movie.

At least it doesn’t try to hide its Romanian locations. The setting is the Gornek International School For Boys, an imposing old stone building out in the overcast countryside to which we are first introduced when a young man in a school uniform runs down the puddled lane and directly into the gothic undergirdings of the building. He stands for a moment, breathing heavily, before he is accosted by a bald figure with glowing eyes, clad all in black (Constantin Barbulescu)! The bald figure wrenches the youth’s heart right out of his chest, and it bursts into digital flames on his palm! Pretty cool, huh?

“Oh, we are indeed dynamite with a laser beam.”

Barbulescu, by the way, is the second Romanian actor frequently used for supporting parts in these films that I’ve come to recognize on sight (the first being the ubiquitous Ion Haiduc), though Barbulescu might be harder to recognize here, even to hardcore Full Moon fans; in contrast to his hirsute appearance in movies like Shadow of the Knight and Phantom Town, here he’s shaved as bald as a billiard. His greasepaint is meant to suggest something vaguely like Max Schreck in Nosferatu, but Barbulescu’s so much more fleshy that he looks more like Uncle Fester.

The plot proper begins thus: Young Elias Storm (Billy Parish) arrives at the school during the winter break, when only a few students and even fewer educators remain. He’s first met by Jake (Walter Jones, one of the first crop of Power Rangers from the American TV series), who’s an affable source of exposition on everything else at Gornek. He also meets Burke (Jason Adelman), the resident bully, and his three-person posse. And given that this is a David DeCoteau flick, it will come as no surprise that Burke’s bullying has homoerotic undertones, and will eventually revolve around a group of boys doing pushups while dressed in their tighty-whities.

“I wonder how much this would go for on eBay?”

There’s also the icy headmistress Mrs. Greynitz (Oana Stefanescu), who knows that she’s running a last-resort school for wealthy wastrels and treats her charges accordingly, and her virginal and almost pathologically shy teenaged daughter Lilya (Ilinca Goya); and Dr. Jarod (Claudiu Trandafir), the doctor of theology who is conveniently the only other teacher in residence during the break. Convenient, wouldn’t you say?

It soon becomes clear to Jake that Elias has hidden motives for being at the school, though Elias plays close to the vest with both his schoolmates and the audience. We know, though, that it has something to with a recurring memory he has of himself and a sister at a graveyard a dozen years earlier, where their parents performed some sort of ritual over the grave of Elias’ deceased great-uncle Stefan Sturma – a ritual which involves an amulet of an upside-down crucifix over a pentagram, topped with a bat-winged demon.

“It’s a two-for-one lunch deal. MWOO-ha-ha-hwah!”

We next see that amulet around the neck of – Lilya! As two of Burke’s goons leave for a Riviera trip, they wander into the cellars to see Lilya standing there with a come-hither look, Then the bat-winged demon vanishes off the amulet, and ta-dah! The Dark Angel is there, “defibrillating” both boys.

Now, there aren’t that many extra characters here to inflate the body count, so in between mysterious demonic attacks, Elias continues his investigations, eventually taking Dr. Jerod into his confidence. Jerod’s not just a theologian; he’s the kind of theologian who has head of great-uncle Stefan Sturma, an “insane” occultist who was trying to bring about the end of the world by satanic forces. Elias reveals to Jerod that he sought out this school because he received an anonymous letter stating that his sister, who had disappeared that day in the cemetery, was alive and well. Which explains his attempts to find out more about Lilya, above and beyond every other boy’s efforts to get to know her better.

“Naw, I was think you’d be better as the Mauve Ranger. If you know what I mean.”

Because we’re familiar with Benjamin Carr scripts, we’re not at all surprised when certain elements finally up, most especially the “Arbitrary Rules of the Occult.” In this case, yes, the Dark Angel (Theriel by name) is being summoned up to start a demonic armageddon. To do that, he must kill seven sacrifices with that heart-pulling maneuver of his — a fortuitous number, given the population of the school during this winter break. Oh, and it’s all going to culminate on the eve of the millennium, which is only mentioned three-quarters of the way through the movie. Given how many feature films used the millennial apocalypticism as their selling point, it’s almost bizarre that Talisman reserves all mention of that fact until so late in the game. At least it isn’t an overly complicated scheme, as such things go.

As with most David DeCoteau films from that timeframe, the production is mostly competent, with a few glaring errors to show how little margin there was for reshoots or other niceties. (Or for heating; the actors’ breath steams in most of the scenes, prompting a line about Mrs. Greynitz keeping the place cold on purpose.) There are a number of continuity gaffes, mostly concerning whether the little demon is on or off the talisman in any given shot. Most noticeably, however, is the scene in which Burke and his cohorts conduct their Tighty-Whity Push-Up Tournament; in the course of a single two-minute scene, a medium clip of a boy doing a pushup is used FOUR times to make up for what must have been pretty inadequate coverage. (And yes, it DOES strike me as uncharacteristic for DeCoteau to run short of footage displaying young men in their Fruit of the Looms.)

“Him, just my chaperone. Try to ignore him.”

Overall, the movie’s somewhat less disappointing than Shrieker or Totem or most of its contemporaries, probably because it doesn’t start off promising much. There’s a talisman; there’s a demon. There you go. But between the homoerotic bullying and the incest subplot that starts pretty late and goes nowhere, I can’t help but imagine what this movie would have been like if it had been made ten or twenty years earlier by Italians. Now THAT would be a movie.

• body count: 11
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• visible boom mikes: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0