Full Moon is currently known as a purveyor of schlock but that didn’t happen overnight. While sillier than Charles Band’s previous production company, Empire pictures, they still aspired to something approaching respectability. For the most part these early attempts succeeded but he flew too close to the sun with this softcore horror film Gothic romance, Meridian.
A young woman, Catherine, moves back to her home in a castle in Italy to find herself the target of a curse. She meets a sexy magician at a traveling show and invites him and his cohorts back to her castle. There the pelvic wizard uses his fornication magic upon her and they both thrust in the air six inches from one another’s groins while she fulfills the nudity clause in her contract.
But in a shocking twist, the sexy wizard has an evil twin brother, and also he’s immortal, and also he turns into a sexy bigfoot, and also he wants Catherine to kill him so that he can end the curse that his evil twin got placed upon them when he killed Catherine’s ancestor. She takes council from ghosts and moons over the Yeti with the soulful eyes. Never trust a man in a shirt with poofy sleeves, Catherine!
Sex scenes are frequent and long and if you’ve ever wondered what Masters of the Universe’s Beast Man would look like in the throes of orgasm then by all means, give this a watch. This movie tries its hardest to be serious and soulful and sensuous but it’s actually kind of ridiculous. Meridian is basically Charles Band trying to make a Werner Herzog movie and that works out about as well as you would imagine. This movie would be goofy without sexy bigfoots, but it has one so it’s goofier still.
The acting is decent and the chintzy electronic score occasionally manages to be as haunting as it wants to be, and the movie is even filmed in a real castle. Between this, Subspecies and Castle Freak, I can’t help but wonder how Charles Band finagles his way into making so many terrible movies in living pieces of history.
Watch, Toss, Or Buy? Toss it.
If You Liked This, Watch: Angela is the Fireworks Woman (1975), Twilight (2008), The Phantom of the Opera (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991)