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ACTOR
Billy ParishWalter JonesJason AdelmanIlinca Goia
DIRECTOR
David DeCoteau
SYNOPSICS
Talisman (1998) is a English movie. David DeCoteau has directed this movie. Billy Parish,Walter Jones,Jason Adelman,Ilinca Goia are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1998. Talisman (1998) is considered one of the best Horror movie in India and around the world.
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Talisman (1998) Reviews
Talisman: Standard Full Moon stuff
Full Moon were never going to make award winning stuff but regardless they started several successful franchises and made some watchable stuff. Though to be fair considering how fast they pounded films out statistically that was bound to happen. Talisman is one the lesser known works and for good reason. It revolves around a young man sent to an obscure school as students begin to get picked off one by one in an occult ceremony. The stuff is very clichéd, immediately upon seeing a new character I predicted him to be the arrogant popular rich kid and low and behold that's exactly what he turned out to be. Standard weak sfx, mediocre story and phoned in performances galore can be found in this 90 minutes of meh. Not the worst Full Moon production but an instantly forgettable one all the same. The Good: Has that Full Moon charm The Bad: Undeededly homo erotic in places Weak sfx Clichéd Poor finale Things I Learnt From This Movie: If Booboo Stewart and Mark Dacasos had a baby it would look like Billy Parish
Decoteau has done worse!
Granted, this is not one of the better movies to come out of Full Moon since their departure from Paramount. It isn't one of the worst, either. David Decoteau (under alias), directs this seemingly gothic movie. I say "seemingly" because, where is is dark and dreary (which I liked that), it still doesn't develop into the dark, gothic opus it really could have. I have noticed...Quit a few Full Moon films take a really good idea, and destroy it with low budget films, full of bad acting, bad directing and silly scripts. I really feel they should allow outside talent. Anyway, this was a good idea, which is described in other reviews, so I will leave it out. The sets were very dark and gloomy, the cemetary was kinda creepy in that European cemetary kinda way. The Fallen Angel, was kinda silly looking, but worked on the budget. The blood spraying was utterly silly and the 2-dimensional CGI flames were just pitiful. This really could have been a decent movie, given a bigger budget and a director that really understand the subject matter. 5 out of 10
Bizarro-WIP
This plays like a Bizarro-world version of a Women-in-Prison movie. You remember Bizarro world from Superman comic books and Seinfeld episodes: everything is like our earth, but in an imperfect (really whacked-out) way. In this case, the classic Reform School, which in our reality would be full of nubile young girls who get hosed down, is full of nubile young men. There is a food-fight in the dining hall, a lock-down and even a trustee character who apparently is coercing his roommates into providing him with um...companionship. But when the plot should head toward showers and/or a breakout, the inmates/students start getting sacrificed on the apocalyptic demonic altar in the basement and then... Well, it's never as seedy as one might hope, but you've got to give Charles Band credit for trying something different.
I left my heart in Romania.
TALISMAN is yet another late 90s Full Moon release that was filmed on location in Bucharest, Romania (no doubt a cheaper place to produce these 'B' horrors). This one was directed by David DeCoteau under the name "Victoria Sloan," the same alias he used to direct two other Full Moon releases - SHRIEKER (1997) and CURSE OF THE PUPPET MASTER (1998). Now Mr. DeCoteau has had an interesting enough career, I guess. He started out making gay porn under the name "David McCabe" before churning out some popular cult classic 'Scream Queen' movies in the late 80s/early 90s. He then moved on to Full Moon Studios for a period of time before forming his very own studio called Rapid Heart Pictures, which specialize in (awful) homoerotic horror flicks that are basically just thinly-disguised excuses to feature hairless young men running around in their underwear. This effort, which is better than anything DeCoteau would make with Rapid Heart, is more of a happy medium. While there are a couple of the expected underwear scenes here, there's also some blood, a plot, a good filming location and a couple of actors who seem to actually be actors instead of Calvin Klein models who couldn't emote if their life depended on it. At a European boys school, supposedly a place where wealthy people drop off their trouble-making kids, mysterious new student Elias Storm (Billy Parish) has just enrolled. Most of the other students are away at break, aside from about a half-dozen guys. There's a friendly black guy named Jacob (Walter Jones), a bully named Burke (Jason Andelman) and a couple of Eastern European guys who seem to have been horribly dubbed. The school is run by the stern and strict Mrs. Greynitz (Oana Stefanescu), who has a shy, attractive young daughter named Lilia (Ilinca Goia) she forbids the students from talking to. There's also some some bald demon dude who roams the halls, has red glowing eyes and rips out hearts. It all has something to do with a talisman necklace, human sacrifices, the new millennium approaching and flashbacks to when Elias saw his parents trying to perform some ceremony in a graveyard. Unlike what DeCoteau started putting out a few years after this, there are decent sets, OK special effects and a few bloody moments (including eyeballs getting poked out). Though most of the younger male actors are predictably awful, the performances from the Romanian actors - Goica, Stefanescu, Claudiu Trandafir as the school's doctor and (especially) Constantin Barbulescu as the caped demon - help to carry the film pretty well. So while this is nothing special and runs only 72 minutes (barely over an hour if you exclude the credits), it's still watchable for the most part and that's more than I can say for the director's endless series of boxer brief "horror" films of late. For the faithful, you do get some guys doing push-ups in their underwear, but that's about it.
Not terrible, but could've been better
Arriving at a strange European college, a student finds that a summoned demon that is trying to open the gates of Hell to unleash Armageddon on mankind requires his services to complete the ritual and tries to stop it. While this one may not be one of the best entries out there, there's some decent stuff here. One of the better facets here is the film's rather nice mixture of sorcery and black magic, with the rituals being prepared here for the final ceremony, the location being a great setting for some Gothic atmosphere with its darkened hallways, eerie cemetery and expansive rooms within to make for some decent moments at times when this one really gets its solid plot going as there's some general creepiness on display here. There's a lot of mystery wrung out of this that it captivates what little attention that could have been given, and the storyline is pretty clever, giving the viewer the feeling that anything can go wrong. That said, there's still plenty to dislike here, from the exceptionally short running time that barely gives this one an hour-long running time, a rather unimposing supernatural killer that doesn't evoke fear at all, and a rather inane amount of time spent on flashbacks that aren't that exciting or thrilling, and when added to this one's low-budget gloss, comes up rather lacking in the end. Rated R: Violence and some language.