The Haunted Casino

1st watched 8/4/2012 – 4 out of 10 (Dir-Charles Band): Mediocre scary movie about a haunted casino inherited by an only relative of a great uncle that just happens to have killed five people in the casino and their ghosts are bothering the inheritant and his five friends. The movie starts with what appeared to be an insurance person with an inspector checking out the abandoned Mysterion Casino in Las Vegas for the inheritant, played by Scott Whyte with his girlfriend played by Robin Sydney. The initial visitors get gruesomly murdered by some unknown beings, and then we hear about the inheritant's story as the six friends are camped out in Vegas looking to check out the place. The acting is OK and the storyline is interesting, but I think the movie fails because of it's slow pacing and lack of humor. Director Charles Band is a veteran of low-budget schlock movie-making who sometimes surprises with his combination of the gruesome with tongue-in-cheek humor, but this one kind of just lays there and does very little. There are no writing credits listed in the movie but that was probably done by Band as well, and it seems like it was done off the cuff with some subplots just abandoned. Some of the special effects were interesting and I liked the way the card playing ghost dealer tried to keep the inheritants by making them lose limbs if they lost. The ghost characters came across like in "The Shining" as real people imagined or seen at times and not at others. Sid Haig, with top billing, played a rival casino mobster-like ghost who ofted the grand-uncle in the late sixties with an attached personal vengeance against him, but is just OK in the role. The words mediocre and OK are used a lot in this review because that's what the movie was for me. Not horrible, but just OK – which doesn't make for a very worthwhile movie-viewing experience.

Saw this on Charter on demand. This is a 75 minute movie and nothing and I mean nothing happens until minute 57 leaving you with 18 minutes of pathetic action. Sid Haig and Michael Berryman are in this for 6 or 7 minutes. How did they spend $200,000 on this...as a grad student at UCLA in Theater I can tell you that this easily could have been shot in 2-3 days. They use 2 locations, a hotel room and a casino the size of a 4 bedroom house. Michael Berryman is no longer scary, he looks 110 years old and can barely speak. Sid Haig looks like he just came off a 3 day bender...you can tell that he was looking at cue cards(watch carefully and you'll see. This is a low point even by Full Moon Standards.

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.

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.

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.