Movie Review: “Weedjies: Halloweed Night”

 

   Weedjies! Halloweed Night is a film I normally wouldn’t review on Readers Digested. As much as I enjoy watching my favorite YouTuber or Blogger harp on how bad a film is, it isn’t my current objective for “The List” and it isn’t what I want to accomplish with Full Moon Magic Mondays. I want to talk about the best of Full Moon Features and then, I want to move on to something different. I could review all seven of the Evil Bong films (which I have, in-fact, seen, I might add), for instance, but I can’t justify the expenditure and the effort for a film I don’t believe afforded me a real effort in itself. Weedjies! Halloweed Night will be a special exception.

   Weedjies! Halloweed Night is directed by Danny Draven (a director whose Full Moon film Reel Evil I reviewed a few years ago) and is the first in Full Moon Features’ new series of Deadly Ten movies! If you recall, back in May of this year, I announced my intention to make six novels available on Halloween 2020 through Amazon on Kindle and Paperback, an Exercise N Excess, I called it. This was inspired by Full Moon’s announcement they’d release ten films in February 2020. Of course, like them, I decided it’d be smarter to offer them breathing them, and I adjusted course, hoping to release them all throughout the year. I was inspired after attending a Comic Convention as a vendor that I needed to up the ante, so to speak, and I used their idea as a launchpad. In that respect, I owe Full Moon a level of gratitude, I’ve been a lot more productive the latter half of this year and they helped influence that. That’s why I intend to review all the films from Full Moon Features’ Deadly Ten, starting with October’s film.

   Debuting on the Full Moon Features subscription service on October 21st, 2019, Weedjies begins with a cold open, detailing a victim’s demise at the hands of the dreaded “Weed-G-Board,” before we’re met with our leads. As described in the website’s summary of the film, they’re “three sexy young ladies” and are “throwing a wild Bud Bash party at a haunted hotel with some of their closest friends”. As you can no doubt expect, everything goes awry when a “freakish gaggle of ghoulish ganja smoking gremlins” run a muck. Now, it’s up to our “three young sexy ladies” to either return the creatures back to the “Weed-G-Board” before midnight or turn into Weedjies themselves.

   I had more fun with this film than anticipated, and, in the early-going, I thought to myself it would scrape by as a silly and light-hearted Full Moon movie akin to The Gingerdead ManLucky Charms, and some of the other inconsequential features we’d been brought by Full Moon in the 2000s. The concept, despite the godawful name, is fun. Having Ghoulies-akin creatures searching high-and-low for hijinks at a Halloween-themed party sounds like a satiable way to kickoff Full Moon’s Deadly Ten. The concept of pint-sized abominations killing, and wreaking havoc is Full Moon’s bread-and-butter, after all.

   The actors are neither here nor there, in that, I don’t feel like I can criticize them for clichés or over-the-top delivery because it’s clear that’s what the filmmakers intended. It’s true-to-form in that respect. Full Moon has always had a swishy Hallmark way about it, where the films unravel like a cheesy 80s sitcom. It’s as though their target-demographic is the younger crowd, and yet, they aim themselves at drug-use, nudity, and bloodshed. It’s a peculiarity that often adds a light-heart charm or magic, if you will, to Full Moon. This film feels very cheesy in that respect, and, for the modern-age, it comes ripe with cringy slang and “modern lingo,” but it offered a familiar amusement in its light-heart naivete and laidback-style.

   The Halloween party was decorated with props and memorabilia from Full Moon classics like Subspecies, and it’s fun to see partygoers donning costumes of Gingerdead Man or Batty Boop. In-fact, my favorite scene from Weedjies comes when the creatures are causing mayhem, and, out the elevator, two guys are dressed as Blade and Tunneler (from Puppet Master fame). With a tip of the hat from Blade, the Weedjies continue to go about their business. It was a small detail, but it amused me, if nothing else.

   The music and camerawork were mostly uneventful, but on-point. The score sees Robert Band’s involvement and is enough to take you back to the 90s, capturing an admittedly overbearing, but distinct, nostalgic sound. The special effects are budgeted and, perhaps, even, egregiously so, a fact Full Moon is never afraid to draw attention toward. The visual quality is high-definition and captures everything well, however.

   The worst aspect about Weedjies, unsurprisingly and importantly, is the Weedjies themselves. I found that my optimism for the film flat lined the very moment they showed on the screen. The shtick was never funny nor were the gay couple or was the nurse and man dressed like a baby that found themselves with subplots in a film that’s barely over an hour. This is a film that will coast a lot on its audacity, like Gingerdead Man or Evil Bong, but it’s a concept I would’ve loved to have seen as a minor victory for Full Moon Features. It isn’t bad enough to be a “so bad, it’s good” film per se, instead, it’s a film you’ll forget about soon after. I’d call it a middling film in the curved expectations I have for modern Full Moon Features. “The List,” on the other-hand, has no such curve.

Placement on the List: – The Bads

Offer Food for Thought

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