Trophy Heads Episode 1: The Official Nerfed Llamas Review – prolonging the magic, one head at a time…
Always on the hunt for new and exciting types of content to absorb, I was needing something short and sweet to review today as my time was exceptionally limited. I knew that Full Moon Features had recently released an episodic TV series title Trophy Heads, but I had not taken much time to learn anything about it. The more I looked into their episodic content, the more it looked like that may be a way that they are going to go long term to compete with the likes of Netflix and Hulu. They have Trophy Heads, a new Elvira series, William Shatner’s Full Moon Fright Night, Trailers From Hell, and a new documentary series coming soon called Haunted Hollywood. All of these shows are available on their streaming service, with new episodes released frequently. Continuing with the break-neck pace of celebrating Full Moon Features and their wide variety of film and TV endeavors all month long, I bring you a review for the first episode of Trophy Heads.
What is Trophy Heads: Trophy Heads is about a deranged man, Max, and his overly enabling mother, who go on a journey to hunt down starlets from Full Moon movies from the 80s and 90s. Max’s goal is simple, to collect the heads of his favorite starlets while reenacting his favorite scene from one of their iconic performances long ago. His mother, always trying to make her boy happy, dutifully assists Max in his chaotic bid to collect them all, murderous Pokémon style. Created and directed by Charles Band (creator of Full Moon Features and many of their franchises), from a script by Roger Barron, Trophy Heads Episode One stars: Adam Noble Roberts (an Improv & Stage Actor), Maria Olsen (Paranormal Activity 3, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief), Darcy DeMoss (Can’t Buy Me Love, Jason Lives: Friday the Thirteenth VI), Carel Struycken (The Addams Family, Men In Black), and Linnea Quigley (Return of the Living Dead, Creepozoids).
What I Liked: At 22 minutes, it feels like you only got a snap shot of what the entire Trophy Heads experience is going to be all about. The potential is definitely there for this to be a unique and thrilling horror story. The set up is clean and easy to follow, as Max is clearly unhealthily obsessed with the women from these b-movies from the 80s and the 90s. His solution is extreme, but it is also well established that he is crazy, so the fact that he snaps and schemes up this bizarre head collecting role-playing hobby is a little left field, but not like Kanye West left field. In the end, his motive for being homicidal is well laid out, and as long as the story goes crazier each episode, this will have been a fine start.
Max’s mom is an odd, but engaging character. Very much an every mom, bringing her son food while he watches TV and checking on how he’s doing, she also is every bit as nuts as he is. When the killing start happening she doesn’t question it for a second, in fact she helps him! What you get is a strange relationship between Max and his mom, almost like Victor Frankenstein and Igor… if Igor was Victor’s mom. It’s kooky, but it works.
What I Didn’t Like: Again, at only 22 minutes, it was hard to get a definitive impression for how the rest of the series will plays out. I wonder if a 45 minute episode format would have been a better fit for Trophy Heads. It’ll be interesting to see if the shorter episode format can continue to entertain, while at the same time offering enough twist and turns to keep things interesting. Time will tell.
Bottom Line: Trophy Heads is an ambitious piece of nostalgia driven horror, and if the insanity ramps up with each episode it could turn out to be a quite thrilling off-beat macabre tale. Episode one is good start to a series that has a lot of potential. When I have time, I’ll try to watch the rest of the series and post reviews for them as well. For those who may want to watch the show in one go, Full Moon has put a super cut of all the episodes together into one feature length video. Trophy Heads is available to watch on Blu-Ray, DVD, and via Full Moon’s streaming service.
Check out the trailer for Trophy Heads and see if you need to catch them all as well:
