Movie Talk: Meridian (1990)

Swinging from the world of hardcore over to something much softer, today we are going to be talking about the Full Moon film, Meridian. I was thinking of some early "dirty" movies that kind of drew me in, and Meridian was one of the first films that came to mind. 

This is an adult fairy tale that mixes magic, sex and a twist on Beauty & The Beast. The cast is led by the amazing Sherilyn Fenn, with B-Movie royalty Charlie Spradling in a supporting role. While this movie is very mild as far as sex and sexuality goes, for many people this was an early exposure to erotica in film. 

I am a huge Full Moon fan. The Puppet Master films are go to comfort movies for me to this day. I remember going to the video store as a kid and getting so excited seeing a new comic book inspired cover on the shelves. While Full Moon is still around, the 90's were their heyday. Being created as as the straight to video genre arm of Paramount, Charles Band created several icon B-movie series, including the already mentioned Puppet Master films, as well as the Subspecies and Trancers films. Meridian was one of the studio's early efforts, and is often overlooked when the studio is discussed. 

The story is pretty simple. Sherilyn Fenn plays Catherine, a young woman who inherits an old castle in Italy (as one does). Upon arriving with her best friend Gina, played by Charlie Spradling, the two women become entangled with a traveling group of performers, led by the magician Lawrence, played by Malcolm Jamieson. He is somehow tied to  Catherine's castle, as well as the strange creature that seems to lurk within its walls. Charles Band regular Phil Fondacaro and Don't Look Now's Hilary Mason also star. 

Meridian is an odd duck. Coming from a studio that was made famous by killer dolls, Meridian is a slightly sexy fairy tale that moves slowly. There are no big scares, or thrills. This is a tortured love story about a hairy beast and Sherilyn Fenn. It feels like a romance novel. It also includes the dubious non-consensual love scenes that are played as erotic that were found in a lot of popular romance novels of the time. More on that below. Meridian was one of the Full Moon movies I couldn't watch. It was considered too adult for me back in the video store days, and there was no way it was going to slip this past my parents. So, as I got older it became one of those movies I needed to track down and watch. While Full Moon's original output is all pretty easy to find now, for a good period of time the movies were tied up in rights hell with Paramount, and could not be found anywhere for years. Old VHS copies of some of the more obscure films, such as Meridian, were near impossible to come by. So for years I had to go by only what I saw in the trailer for this film. The question then became, was Meridian as steamy as the trailers made it look? Did Full Moon really make a softcore flick? 

The answer is no and no. Full Moon did, and still do, occasional produce softcore films under the Surrender Cinema line (formerly known as Torchlight), but Meridian was tame by comparison. Exotic House of Wax and the Femalien movies are much more explicit than Meridian will ever be. The film is squarely R-rated, but pretty tame.

Except for the whole bodice ripper of it all. 

So, spoiler warning I guess. The movie is 35 years old, so... if you haven't watched it yet, its your own fault. 

One of the big set pieces in the film involves Catherine and Gina inviting the traveling performers back to her castle. During dinner the performers drug Catherine and Gina and have their way with them. While that sounds horrific, the scene is shot with this odd, slow motion eroticism that aims to cover up the fact that both women can in no way consent to what is going on. 

Consent issues aside (and I know for most that would be a deal breaker right out the gate) Meridian isn't very good. It isn't terrible, but it feels like such a small movie. At least in its filmed form. Oddly enough, I did get the chance to read the script for this film many years ago. Full Moon used to sell the screenplays of some of their harder to find films on their website, and I snapped this one up, having not seen it back when it first came out (because I was 10, and my parents actually cared what I was watching). The script is surprisingly good! I was blown away by how well it read. So when I finally got a chance to watch the movie I had high expectations. 

Then I watched the movie. 

Let us start with the positive. Sherilyn Fenn and Charlie Spradling give it their all in their roles. If you are a fan of either actresses, you will probably take some enjoyment out of this film. The locations are also very beautiful, with the movie being shot in Italy. There are also some interesting make up effects as far as the beast costume goes. Outside of all that, the movie is strictly mediocre. There are ghosts, beasts, curses, all of that stuff. There is some sex and nudity sprinkled through out, and then... it just kind of ends. When I had finished watching it I was disappointed. Part of me has to wonder, though, if that is because of how much my brain had built it up over the years. It was in essence a forbidden film for me. Realistically it could never live up to what I had built in my mind. This movie was no dirtier than Puppet Master or Subspecies. The trailer just played up the sexy angle more than those two. 

The forbidden nature of Meridian is the reason I even chose to write about it. The movie itself is fairly tamed compared to the other movies talked about on this blog, but for me, and maybe for a lot of kids my age, this was one of those dirty movies that somehow made it into the Blockbuster. Those types of movies, no matter how good or bad they are, tend to hold some power over their viewers. I have had several movies like that over the years. Now, as I am firmly in middle age the magic and mysticism of watching the forbidden has kind of vanished, and the wonder of what a movie like Meridian contained has long been lost. 

Kind of miss that actually. 

Well, this will not be the last time Full Moon shows up here, as some of their Torchlight and Surrender Cinema movies will for sure be showing up on the blog. 

Oh, if you do want to watch this movie, and I wouldn't talk you out of it if you did, it has more recently been re-released on some streaming platforms as The Ravaging. Now that is an eye roller of a title.