Buy Talisman on Amazon
Talisman is a Full Moon picture from 1998, aka ‘the good years’, and has received a number of good reviews across the internet. Still, taking a look at the premise and watching the trailer I remained a bit skeptical.
Your basic setup here has 18 year old Elias traveling to a Romanian ‘school’ (where no learning happens) looking for ‘something’, which we later learn is his sister. Through several flashbacks we find out that Elias and his sister were split apart following the untimely death of their parents.
Elias meets up with the usual cast of characters, including Walter Jones of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fame, and a lot of boring crap happens as seems to be a trend with Full Moon movies from this time frame.
As time (slowly) passes, the other male students get picked off one by one, having their hearts ripped out, by a genuinely creepy looking dark angel type fellow and you can kind of put the pieces together as to where this is headed.
Turns out the dark angel needs 7 sacrifices to unleash hell on earth and bring the fall of humanity at the turn of the millennium which, conveniently, is coming up really soon.
Talisman was directed by David DeCoteau under his Victoria Sloan guise and it shows. The style of direction is pure DeCoteau and as always seems to happen, the characters are mostly ‘hunky’ type guys and all of the women are slovenly if not downright ugly.
By the time I got around to watching Talisman I had seen pretty much all of the 97-2000ish Full Moon titles and the plot and characters are pretty much interchangeable at this point. It is baffling to me why this received praise in other reviews because I feel like I’ve already seen the same movie at least 15 times. I guess the other reviewers aren’t die-hard Full Mooners or I’m just an asshole. I’ll leave that open for debate.
The audio/video side of things is kind of a mixed bag. On the negative end of the spectrum, the special effects (if you want to call them that) are beyond lame and the same bit of music is re-hashed throughout the entire movie – really? I wish they would have sprung for some different tunes, hell even another 30 second clip of something..anything different than the Full Moon staple schlock symphonic stabs. On the positive side of things the video, while grainy at 4:3 on my 32″ LCD looks pretty good and along with the lighting adds a definite dark, moody feel to the film that does help out a little bit. Plus there are at least 5 ominous thunderstorms which are always good for a chuckle. The small amount of blood and gore that there is is well done and generally convincing.
Talisman left me pretty disappointed in the end and it’s definitely not something I would recommend to a friend, regardless of how many beers they have consumed. Speaking of disappointing, the copy of Talisman I have is advertised as being a ‘Special Edition’ DVD and well…there’s nothing special about it. We are treated to three options – the movie – the movie’s trailer and a pretty sub-par Video Zone.
Final verdict – pass on it.
**1/2 out of 5.
