I make no bones about professing my love for Full Moon Pictures. I’ve got just about every one of their movies on DVD (just the Full Moon ones, not the erotica stuff they did) and last year I even attended the “Full Moon Roadshow,” a touring show featuring Full Moon’s founder, Charles Band, giving the audience a behind the scenes view of the making of his pictures (you have to hear some of his Gary Busey stories!).

I even managed to spend enough money during the course of the show that I am now a complimentary executive producer on one of their upcoming films (Gingerdead Man 3: Roller Boogieman)!

Charles Band really introduced some great talent in his earlier films. Megan Ward, Tim Thomerson, Lance Henriksen, David Goyer, Stuart Gordon, Helen Hunt…the list goes on and on!

The Full Moon Pictures I grew up with, that of the 90’s, was almost the movie equivalent of comic books. You know all this big hubbub about the “shared universe” concept Marvel is doing now? Well, Full Moon Pictures was doing this kind of stuff almost 20 years ago! Dollman and Demonic Toys, after appearing in their own films, eventually met each other (Dollman whupped them). The Demonic Toys met the Puppet Master puppets. The Blood Dolls and Jack Deth (from Trancers) popped up in Evil Bong. One of the sidekicks in the fantastic Mandroid went on to his own film, Invisible.

All in all, Full Moon Pictures has meant a lot of fun for me for a long time. Towards the late 90’s, early 2000’s, the brand itself kind of phased out (some kind of drama with distributor Paramount Pictures) and, under separate labels, released a couple of flicks, but nothing with quite the same magic that Full Moon itself had. A couple of shining moments during this period are the underrated and underseen DarkWalker and the William Shatner (yes, the Shatnoid!) flick Groom Lake (which actually had Amy Acker from Angel!).

2009 looks to be a pretty banner year for Full Moon. They’ve got a couple of flicks coming out, including:

• Puppet Master: Axis of Evil
• Demonic Toys 2
• Evil Bong 2: King Bong
• Gingerdead Man 3 (executive produced by me!)
• Bride of the Head of the Family
• Killjoy III
• Killer Eye II

And, my personal favorite…

SKULL HEADS!

How can you look at that poster and not want to see this film?

If you’ve never seen a Full Moon flick, do yourself a favor and pick up some of the older ones. Because of the Paramount drama, they’re a little hard to find at your local Blockbuster, but you can always purchase them at www.fullmoondirect.com. Or, rent Gingerdead Man or Evil Bong. They’re great fun!

Your friendly neighborhood IoMers actually have an upcoming interview with Charles Band where we’re going to talk about all the flicks I mentioned above and so much more!  I’ve met him in person and he’s a great guy who, even after in the business for this long, has a lot of passion for his work and still seems to have fun doing it.