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Released by: Full Moon Features
Released on: 2/22/2011
Director: Charles Band
Cast: Sid Haig, Michael Berryman, Scott White, Kristyn Green
Year: 2007
Purchase from Amazon
The Movie:
Matthew (Scott White) is the sole heir to his uncle's closed casino in Las Vegas, Dragna's Mysterio Casino. He takes his girlfriend Paige (Kristyn Green) and four other friends (the nerdy girl, the annoying funny guy, the princess, and her douchebag boyfriend who can't get an erection) on a road trip to have a look-see at the casino and determine if anything can be done with it.
Once they arrive they learn the dump is haunted by the ghosts of some nasty types that Matthew's grandfather has killed right there in the casino. Roy 'The Word' Donahue (Sid Haig) and his lackey Gil Wachetta (Michael Berryman) plus a few others who were part of whatever it was that caused the old man to kill them inhabit the place and keep the snoopers away. See, there's silver hidden somewhere in the casino and in the 40 years since the they were killed, the ghosts can seem to find it (but Matthew finds it on the first try). At any rate the cool and hip youngsters become trapped in the casino and the ghosts take the time to explain to them why they are in peril. It appears they want the souls of the visitors in repayment for being murdered, and so the youths play casino games for their very lives.
That's about it. Right off the bat a couple of strangers get killed and then it takes forever for the movie to get going. Then nothing happens until the 50-minute mark of this 80-minute movie, and then nothing much happens until the last 10 or 15 minutes. There's a lot of sit-around-and-wait going on here with a payoff that can hardly be called one. Sid Haig and Michael Berryman are criminally underused, the story pokes along at a snail's pace, and the foam and rubber puppet effects are awful. Sorry, but they are. The acting is okay overall, the technical aspects seems competent enough, and the sets look great…but none of this makes a lot of difference because what happens on screen is just lame. It seems there is an attempt at some atmosphere here, but mention of The Shining by one of the characters seems more like just a ploy to make the viewer think about that movie.
Originally titled “Dead Man's Hand: Casino of the Damnedâ€, it wouldn't be outside the realm of reason to think they changed the title in the hopes to fool anyone who saw this abysmal waste under that title into watching it again. A thin story padded to fill a feature-length running time, this movie may have been better as a Tales from the Darkside episode.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The disc presents the movie in letterboxed format in 4:3, so it has the lovely black space all around it the action So if you have a little widesceen television, you'd better sit close or zoom it in. When the activity is in brightness, the image is ok, although artifacts are visible. When the activity is in the darkness, as most of the movie is (or low light anyway), the image is murky and sometimes tough to see. It doesn't look like much more than a video to DVD transfer, something someone can do with a home video camera. The audio is a Dolby Digital 2.0 track and sounds fine. No problems to mention.
The extras include nine trailers for other Full Moon movies (see screen cap below for titles if you care), and a featurette “Haunted Casino - Behind the Scenesâ€, which runs 13:36. It's an okay watch. Actors and the director talk about the movie, the budget constraints, and Wild Bill Hickock. The movie's big finale involves the infamous “Dead Man's Hand†that Hickock was allegedly holding when he was murdered, and practically everyone interviewed mentions that. At any rate, if the movie does it for you, this piece is a nice bookend.
The Final Word:
Just a bad movie. Waste of time. Instead of making three crappy $50,000 movies, maybe the filmmakers should pool their money and make a decent $150,000 movie. Great films have been made for far less than that. Unless you're a Full Moon fanatic or someone who has to watch everything ghost related, you won't miss a thing by skipping this one.
