Seventh Moon

source: Seventh Moon

source: Seventh Moon

This movie is part of the Ghost House Underground series of horror movies produced by Sam Raimi's company. If you've read any of my previous reviews you would know that he is one of my favorite directors. This movie was also directed by one of the co-creators of "The Blair Witch Project," Eduardo Sanchez. Starring uber-hottie Amy Smart, I had relatively high hopes, but was supremely disappointed. I hoped for steak and got Spam. The whole story is based on an old Chinese myth that on the full moon of the seventh lunar month the gates of hell open and the dead are free to roam the earth and feed. Smart's character, Melissa is on her honeymoon in China with her Chinese husband Yul. She is completely misused and he is just a big whining dufuss. This film is so horribly shot it makes you want to rip your eyes out. Filmed in almost complete darkness, and with shaky hand held cameras. Shooting a horror movie in the dark is nothing new, but for some reason it's just so frustrating to watch. It's hard to tell what's going on, but then even if you did know it wouldn't be that interesting in the first place. In a way its like "Blair Witch" but then again it is also very different. The creatures are not zombies, but ravenous chalk skinned goons. I like the ideas and the myth in this movie, but it completely missed its mark. I will end this unpleasant review by saying that the best thing on the DVD is a five minute featurette in the extras of an old 1980's Chinese television special on the seventh moon myth.

SEVENTH MOON is another missed opportunity from director Eduardo Sanchez, the man who brought us THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT back in 1999. It's quickly becoming obvious that Sanchez was a one-hit wonder and his subsequent movies have been forgettable at best. This is the worst I've seen from him, a stupid, all but plotless exercise in would-be scares, in which a miscast Amy Smart and her husband head off to China during the 'hungry ghost' festival. They encounter spirits and malignant beings while there, but the whole thing is shot in near pitch blackness so more often than not you have no idea what's going on. It's just two actors, a camera, and jumps here and there. Smart's incessant screaming becomes wearisome early on and the film just goes on and on and on without ending, so it's a good cure for insomnia. I'm afraid I hated every minute of it.

This movie isn't original, but it does what it was set to do: scare people. Unfortunately, it is such a continuous cliché that I could not get enjoyment out of it, and that means it failed. The plot is as simple as possible: Cute blonde with blue eyes goes to China with her Chinese fiancée, but one that is tall and talking with an American accent and probably stepping foot for the first time in China. they are terribly happy, she is all smiles and laughter and save the planet and all. She even gives expensive gifts to their Chinese driver. Fast forward a few minutes later when they are lost in their cab in some remote Chinese village, with no driver in sight and a pint of blood poured over the car and they are not happy anymore. They drive like idiots, shout at each other, cursing and panicking. Who would have thought that those words could come out of that cute little blond mouth? A few minutes later, white skinned demons probably related to the monsters in Descent are hunting them and so they are driving even worse, shouting even louder and cursing even worse. The demons aren't happy either. Bottom line: if this would have appeared in 2000, it would have been a good movie. In the 90's it would have been brilliant, even if we had all those cannibal hillbilly movies in the American wilderness. I guess Chinese actors are simply cheaper. And so did this movie feel now, in 2010.

In accordance with the Chinese Myth, on the full moon of the seventh lunar month, the gates of hell open and the spirits of the dead are freed to roam among the living. Melissa (Amy Smart) and her husband Yul (Tim Chiou) are spending their honeymoon in the month of the ghosts in China, where they intend to visit his relatives. They participate in the Senwun (Ghost Festival) during the day, where they drink a lot of booze, and their driver Ping (Dennis Chan) heads to Anxian when the nights falls. A couple of hours later, Ping parks his car and tells that he is lost. He asks the couple to wait for him in his car while he asks for directions in a small village in the countryside. One hour later, Melissa and Yul decide to seek out Ping in the village, and they see the houses closed with live offering and the locals saying something in Cantonese. Yul does not understand what they are saying and the couple returns to the car and drive away trying to find the way back to the city. Sooner they meet a stranger, Wei, wounded on the road and Melissa decides to help the man. They are attacked by creepy creatures and they discover that the spirits of the dead are hunting the living. Melissa and Yul try to find a way to protect themselves and survive the hellish night. "Seventh Moon" is a forgettable low-budget horror movie with a reasonable story and basically four characters only. Unfortunately the camera work is awful, with excessive use of closes and blurred while showing the fiends, maybe due to the limited budget for special effects. My vote is four. Title (Brazil): "A Maldição da Sétima Lua" ("The Curse of the 7th Moon")

OKAY, I was a fan of the Blair Witch Project, I'm still a fan, loved the movie, loved the way they promoted the movie, pure genius! Hell, I even liked Blair Witch 2, OK story, good dialogue...great cast. Unfortunately, I watched Altered, a boring...clichéd...way overrated farce of a movie that should never have been made. Then, Mr. Sanchez lowered himself even more by making the atrocious Ghost House Underground film: Seventh Moon. It started out promising and lost its pull about 20 minutes in. Any aspiring film maker - whether a student or not - can achieve making a film of this type. I mean, 97% of the film was shot in total darkness. I won't even get into the fact that Mr. Sanchez obviously stole many scenes from The Descent and then in the final scenes blatantly slapped viewers in the face by being "artsy" & "eccentric". I'm disappointed, utterly disappointed in Mr. Sanchez - being a huge fan of Blair Witch even to this day - I'm sorry to say that I am boycotting all future movies by this director. "George Clooney once killed the Batman franchise. Rob Zombie did the impossible and killed Michael Myers & the Halloween franchise. And Ding-Dong-Blair-Witch-is-dead and Sanchez has destroyed his audience!" Alfred: "Some people just want to watch the world burn!"

I just finished watching this movie. The story was decent, the acting was actually pretty good, and, unlike most horror movies coming out these days, it didn't look like it was shot on home video. However, the camera work in this movie absolutely killed it for me. I already can't stand the 'shaky cam' technique when its in documentary style movies, but seeing it in any other style of movie really aggravates me. The lighting in this movie is horrible, the camera shakes so much you can't see what's going on, and its constantly zoomed in so close to everything that you can't make out much of anything when the camera *isn't* shaking all over the place. Not one time do you get a clear shot of the ghosts. A pretty good movie, but in my opinion the camera work completely ruined it. One step above awful.

I didn't know what to expect going into this. To be honest I had it in the back of my head that it would be just one more crappy Asian-style ghost story about some girl with long black hair. Luckily it was not, but it's still certainly not without it's faults. OK, well to be fair this is *kind of* an Asian ghost story, but not the kind done to death since about 2000. It's based on the Chinese myth that under the full moon in the seventh month of the lunar year the dead can cross over to the land of the living. Fair enough...just like Halloween in some countries. But these things aren't some wussy little ghost...they're more like humanoid demons. So it scores some cool points for concept. Now for the bad news... I'm not normally one to pick on technical aspects of a movie, but there are some pretty major problems here. First is the lighting, or rather the lack of it. Many parts of this movie are so dark that it's not even scary. You have no clue what's going on because you can't see a damn thing. And then there's the camera work. A good part of this is filmed with that shaky handicam. While that's something I'd expect from some fake documentary-style film (it's still annoying even then, but it's a bit more understandable), it's just about unacceptable to use it this much in a film like this. I suppose someone thought it would give a sense of terror or something to the movie. They were wrong. So basically you're left with a seemingly cool premise all but ruined by someone's attempt to make the film something that it wasn't. Truth be told, that kind of sucks. But in the end it's not too bad.

Part of the Ghost House Underground DVD series, Seventh Moon is based on the Chinese legend that on the full moon of the seventh lunar month, the gates of hell open and the dead can enter the realm of the living. The film opens in China where we are introduced to newlyweds Melissa and Yul (Amy Smart and Chiou) as they walk the streets of China acting as regular and normal as any tourist – taking in the culture and enjoying the ethnical differences. When Melissa and Yul are left by their guide, Ping, in a remote ancient village, their night of terror takes them through puzzling occurrences and face to face with some ghastly creatures. As with most horrors, the tension and the events that lead to eventual terror takes time to build. It starts with their car being splattered with blood while the couple were investigating outside of the village. Smartly, the couple don't' try and stay to figure out why they were targeted. Instead, they get in their car and try and hi-tail it out of dodge. But when a mysterious figure runs in front of their vehicle driving them off the road, Amy and Yul are soon on foot trying to evade the deadly beings that are in pursuit. Seventh Moon is directed by Eduardo Sánchez who directed The Blair Witch Project in 1999 and the under appreciated Altered in 2006. Sánchez emulates his Blair Witch debut by shooting Seventh Moon with hand-held cameras and quick edits. This can get awfully annoying if you are not in the mood for unsteady camera work. Although the atmosphere and the intense mood of the film gets high marks, the film fails by not offering anything new to the genre. Spooky as it was at times, the shaky camera doesn't allow the audience to get to know the characters as well as a steady-cam. It is bad enough that the setting all takes place at night where visibility is poor to begin with. Couple the setting with the constant shaking and un-centered camera efforts, and there isn't any time for emotional investment amongst all the other distractions to care whether the two leads live or die. The first half being watchable and the second half evoking a 'please-hurry-I-have-things-to-do' response, Seventh Moon (which copied way too much from The Descent) is just average. And in this genre, that just doesn't cut it. www.killerreviews.com www.robertsreviews.com