Dead Man's Hand

The Haunted Casino (2007) is a Full Moon Features gem that I recently watched on Tubi. The storyline follows a man who inherits a casino from an uncle. He and his friends go to see the casino and will need to fight for their lives if they ever hope to leave.

This movie is directed by Charles Band (Puppet Master) and stars Wes Armstrong (Jane the Virgin), Sid Haig (The Big Bird Cage), Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes), Kristyn Green (Pretty Cool) and Robin Sydney (The Gingerbread Man).

The cast is really well selected but unfortunately under utilized. Haig's best scenes are at the very end. There's a couples storyline that drags about them not having sex. It gets played out fast. The first good kill scene again are at the very end. There is some worthwhile gore. The end was a bit cheesy.

Overall this is a very average addition to the horror genre that the cast makes worth a viewing. I would score this a 5/10 and recommend seeing it once.

So this movie is by no means amazing, but if, like me, you are a fan of everything Charles Band and his Full Moon Features, the certain charm and charisma, then this is worth a watch. it's certainly one of their better post-2000s movies. obviously the golden years are 89-95. things went downhill but in 99 Band made his magnum opus Blood Dolls. then 2000s Full Moon pretty much turned into a joke churning out Gingerdead Man and Evil Bongs, which i imagine a lot of people like but those ones just aren't my cup of tea. i love his earlier stuff, mixing fantasy and horror, and a profound sense of wonder sneaking somewhere within the film, in a schlocky way. this movie has a little of that. it's well filmed, the setting is pretty good. the acting is surprisingly good. sometimes Band gets some real doozies acting but these people were actually alright. and then of course there's Sid Haig . overall, worth a watch if you subscribe to the Full Moon streaming service and love the good and some of the bad out of their catalogue. if you're not the big of a Full Moon fan then maybe just catch their earlier stuff like Puppet Master, Subspecies, Bad Channels, Doctor Mordrid. or you can dive in Bands Empire Pictures films with Dolls and Trolls and Ghoulies. but if you're far down that full moon rabbit hole, you can do much worse than this film.

People all around the world are full of many wise old sayings or I guess some would call it sage advice.

Prior to watching Full Moon Features latest horrific offering, I wanted to check out their making off featurette and once again the man at the head of affairs, Mr Charles Band as ever was offering up his thoughts and words of wisdom.

As is his want, the full moon rule book appears to state, shoot fast and loose and keep the questions to the barest minimum.

For Mr Band, time is money! The vast majority of his movies these days seem to take less than a week to shoot, and as for any post production time, lord only how long that takes.

However watching 'Dead Man's Hand - Casino Of The Damned' I kept thinking about that phrase, time is money! The movie starts with a very slow and very un-involving prologue with two extras spouting forth about the Myteria casino and it's bloody history, now looking at the timer on my DVD player this took about ten minutes, of course anyone who knows their horror movies will know that these two characters are just two lambs ready for the slaughter, but when the inevitable happens it's a pretty lacklustre affair.

I have pretty much resigned myself to the basic fact that Charles Band is washed up, sure he can serve up a pretty decent concept, but the glory days of Empire Pictures are well and truly long gone and once again his writer in residence, August White has let him down badly! However once again, time is money! and I guess that no matter what shape the script is in, Mr Band, wearing his producer/director cap is not going to waste anytime about trying to address any issues that might arise within the scripting department.

The main star of the movie, or so the main credits after the lengthy prologue would have us believe is the legendary Sid Haig, however he does not appear in the movie until forty plus minutes have dissolved.

Up to that point, rather than deliver some heartpounding moments, I say heartpounding, because the set up within a long abandoned and very much haunted casino is just rife for some good old fashioned William Castle type scares.

Alas no, no such things happen, instead the script calls for character development and lame situations. Now of course without character development we as the audience wouldn't be able to identify with who is who on the screen, but within the first scene proper after the prologue, the characters and their traits are pretty much set up for us.

It must be said that at this point I started to get a little restless, and felt a strange desire to reach for the fast forward button, but owing to my allegiance to Mr Band's movies, no matter how bad they have become, I firmly resisted that temptation.

Too bad! as the rest of the movie crawled to it's conclusion, which I won't spoil for anyone, just in case like myself, you are a longstanding and oh so suffering fan of Full Moon or indeed the entire works of Charles Band himself.

Of course it has been noted that this movie contains no nudity, but it does have plenty of pretty young women and there is just enough old style gore to keep the mind just about focused but in a nutshell, as soon as this movie had finished, I had pretty much forgotten about it.

Yes Indeed, time is money and in this case both were not well spent! My rating is 1

Someone earlier mentioned that this movie was like an introduction to horror flicks. That pretty much says it I think. To those of us who really enjoy a solid, memorable horror flick this one is a vast disappointment. I fell asleep twice while watching it and had to rewind back to see what I missed. It didn't matter to the continuity though. Some suggestive sex but nothing really bad. Sid Haig is excellent as usual. I think he is the most underused horror actor around who can really be pretty menacing when he's on his game. The special effects involving the apparitions are so bad it really bothers me to think about them. I think I've seen some better homemade ones on Youtube truthfully. If you like crappy movies you should see this one. You won't be disappointed.

You'd have thought that a movie featuring the ever watchable Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding from 'Devil's Rejects') and Michael Berryman (of the same, but also the original Wes Craven's 'Hills have Eyes') combined with a synopsis of a derelict Vegas casino populated by the undead spirits of the criminal underworld, would leap out of the shelves at you like a rabid marmoset, tearing at your attentive glands and filling your pants with excited droplets of uric acid.

You couldn't be more wrong if you were to wear the skin of Mick Hucknall in an Arizona sandstorm. This is a woefully bad movie that would soon have you multi-tuning to QVC for escape if it was aired on Zone Horror. As is traditional to hawk it to the bored younger attention span-deficit generation, we get the usual fare of irritating teenagers of various personalities, i.e. geek, foxy, rebel, good guy/gal, stoner, etc. Amazing how so many demographics end up as friends. The main protagonist, who inherits the casino from his dead mafia great-uncle has more plank on display than a whole aisle at B&Q. His simpering girlfriend seemingly spends the entire movie stuck to him like an icecube to a dog's anus. The rest of the cast would fail a screentest for a porn flick such is their inherent disregard for imparting dialogue with any enthusiasm.

The effects are laughably poor. At one scene the 'foxy chick' encounters an equally sexy female ghost who, prior to dispatching the hormonal annoyance, metamorphoses into a rotten fairground corpse, replete with -get this- eyeballs that roll like one-armed bandits, displaying two death skulls. The soundtrack is hideously inappropriate and seems to have been hived from the abortion floor of 'Diagnosis Murder'. As we'd expect, our plucky heroes & heroines consistently ignore the basic rules of not getting snuffed in a horror movie. Though for this watcher's eyeballs, thankfully none of them did, as it would clearly have prolonged the agonising torment.

Which brings to us to Haig. Clearly this was an easy payday for him, cashing in on his past travails presumably to refurnish his Fresno apartment. Although eminently watchable as always, Haig doesn't even appear to make any semblance of effort ...and he doesn't really have to, surrounded as he is by graduates from a drama school for morons. Sid's no doubt got a few pay days left yet, such is the cultish currency of his demented Spaulding from the great 'Devil's Rejects'. Anyone who's seen his terrifying warning to the small boy in a car he's about to jack will lament the day that he featured in this bucket of bilge. Berryman is simply just himself, locked in that hanging prune of a face, with a lacklustre old look like decommissioned furniture.

In all 'Dead Man's Hand' is something that could (and should) have been circumcised without anaesthetic in order to fit an episode of 'Tales from the Crypt'. Possibly one of the worse and least scary horror movies of the last decade, to rank alongside the stupendously vile 'Catacombs' starring Pink. One can only lick our lips and think of the untold mayhem Rob Zombie could have wreaked with such a storyline. Then again, we probably would have been treated to another scene of Sheri Moon's gyrating bare bottom ...not that we're complaining, eh lads? I'm so sickened by this movie that it will be immediately returned to Poundland for a full refund.