WEEDJIES! HALLOWEED NIGHT (2019)

PART OF CHARLES BAND'S ILL-FATED DEADLY TEN. 

Full Moon and Charles Band announced a slate of 10 motion pictures they were going to produce and release as "Charles Band's THE DEADLY TEN" but I think only 5 were actually made and released due to the sudden pandemic which put the skids on those audacious (and warmly anticipated) plans.  The good news is that we DID get such fun films as BLADE: THE IRON CROSS and the quite excellent BLOOD RISE:  SUBSPECIES V.  And this one.  WEEDJIES is heavily into the silly tradition of such Full Moon opuses (op-I?????) as the EVIL BONG or GINGERDEAD MAN movies.  Charles Band's love of (not-so-)small puppet creatures is once again mixed with the rather substantial (now) Full Moon sub-genre of Mary Jane movies for this absolutely bonkers entry in the Full Moon canon.  

Three broke college girls -- Madison (Brett Hargrave), Dallas (Victoria Strange) and Frankie (Y aka Yo Ying) along with nerdy tag-along Claude (Johnny Jay Lee) -- plan on throwing an admission-only 4/20 Halloween party in a haunted hotel.  Science nerd Claude has bred a softball-sized giant bud they like to call 'The Golden Nug' which they hide somewhere in the hotel and make it the prize of a scavenger hunt.  The party is inundated with Halloween-costumed revellers (including Diana Prince aka Darcy the Mail Girl from JOE BOB'S LAST DRIVE-IN, filmmaker David DeCoteau and even Coolduder puts in an appearance ffs!!!).  Meanwhile, the creepy Baron Samedi-esque 'Baroness'  (Denise Milfort) pulls out her awesome-looking Ouija Board

and has the quartet play; the mere act of which causes a passel of wacky puppet creatures called the Weedjies to materialize and cause mayhem in a very GREMLINS manner.  The Weedjies here are bigger than those creatures seen in the PUPPET MASTER or DEMONIC TOYS films; giving them more of a MUPPET MOVIE vibe. 

Also released is the Ganja Ghost (James Adam Tucker) who advises that "You mess wit da Weedjies, they mess wit YOU!".  Yes, the Ganja Ghost is a Rastafarian.  Once the weedjies are released from the board, the four college stoods must catch them and put them back in the board before Halloween night is over or else the weedjies will remain on earth causing chaos and destruction.  Besides that, though, if the weedjies aren't put back in the board by midnight, the 4 college stoods will be trapped inside the board themselves!  Of course, there's absolutely nothing new here but really a movie comprising most of Full Moon's greatest hits. 

Sometimes that is literal as in the costume party scene where we see several Full Moon monsters such as the aforementioned Blade, Pinhead, Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man as partygoers.  And yes, the Weedjies are EXTREMELY reminiscent of GREMLINS in their antics although, of course, they are MUCH more raunchy -- this being a Full Moon film and all.  Oddly, whereas the Weedjies first appear about the same size as Gremlins - one eats its way out of a cake box -- sometimes they appear the size of a child -- i.e. when the Wolf Weedjie rides a tricycle down the Las Vegas Strip -- and sometimes they appear full-sized as a man in a monster suit -- i.e. when one is scratching records on a full-sized turntable.  I don't know if they have the power to change their size or else continuity isn't really a priority in this movie.  Of course, it doesn't need to be in such an over-the-top free-for-all.  I mean, this is really a live-action cartoon; said Wolf Weedjie bangs his head into a dumpster and knocks himself out to the sound of tweety birds on the soundtrack.  Your enjoyment of this film is directly proportional to your tolerance for similar Full Moon fun fests.  This one, for me, was a lot of fun.  In the immortal words of Ganja Ghost:  "Happy Halloween, hope you have!"