Dark Moon Rising

Never have I felt like writing the words 'Do Not Watch This Movie' over and over again in a review, until now.

If you can make it to the opening credits and still have optimism that this movie might be good, then well done, you did better than we did.

This movie is infuriatingly bad in places and laugh out loud in others. I don't even know where to start with this, there are just so many things wrong with this movie that my head is feeling sore trying to think of them all. I'll stick to the main problems. The story is convoluted, the acting is terrible, the cgi effects are not only bad but also overused as if the director thought we'd want to see more of these rubbish effects than we needed to. It's just one big mess full of characters you don't care about doing things you just want them to finish with so the movie will end.

I watch low budget scifi, horror, fantasy movies and I enjoy lots of them, but this movie is an exercise into how not to approach budget filmmaking. Instead of trying to make some grand fantasy movie full of amazing effects and cool looking leather clad people who look like they've just walked out of The Matrix, and failing at all of those things, the writer/director should of focused on the basics, like getting decent performances from his actors, writing dialogue that sounds like humans might actually say it so we care about what they're saying, and giving us a focused story that made sense.

You can have good movies with bad acting, you can have entertaining movies that have bad stories, you can have engrossing movies that have sub-par CGI effects, what you can't have is bad acting, bad writing and bad effects in one movie and expect people to like it, no matter how many people you get to give fake reviews and vote it a 9 on IMDb.

There are fan made films on Youtube that are free to watch and 100x more enjoyable than this piece of garbage.

This isn't budget or even micro budget filmmaking, it is amateur filmmaking, and not a very good example of it either.

Stay away, Do Not Watch This Movie.

**UPDATE 7th August*** So it looks like someone involved with the movie got upset with the negative reviews from real viewers and felt the need to post even MORE positive fake reviews on the 6th August under the following usernames......

AlvinJEllis AlvinJShort AlvinAScott AlvinaMGrace AltonJJames AlonzoEPuckett AlmaFSampson AllenNThompson AllenJRawlins AllenJGalvin AllanAHallam AlissaPVillarreal AlisonCChavez AlishiaPGonzales

I guess it could be just a coincidence that all 14 users who posted reviews that day had names that started with AL?

***Original review****

31 positive reviews for this movie (at the time of writing), 24 of them all joined IMDb on the same date 2 years and 6 months ago, and all 31 positive reviews were written on the same day, 9th June 2015. Obviously cast & crew were reviewing themselves and thought pretty highly of their work, they shouldn't have....

So the movie starts with 2 women dressed in skin tight black leather and Lycra fighting each other, with no explanation as to why or who is who, making the entire fight scene pointless because I don't care who wins or loses, and then a guy..... appears...... who..... talks...... so...... slow ...... overacting ..... that you immediately hope that he dies in the next scene. Then some more stuff happens and a character walks towards the camera and it goes out of focus briefly because whoever was meant to keep the character in focus didn't, they made a mistake and somehow the director and editor let it make it into the final cut. This is BEFORE the opening credits start.

The effects - When I saw the first werewolf in the opening scene I couldn't tell if it was bad stop motion or bad CGI, either way it looked bad. There are so many CGI effect shots in this that it gives the impression that a bunch of students from the local film school were all promised if they each did a CGI effect of their choice it would be written into the movie. There are too many effects, all of them are bad, and most of them are pointless and only serve to distract from....

The story - I lost interest. It's obviously meant to be one of these teen Mortal Instruments or Twilight type films, it just wasn't written very well. It ended up a muddled and confusing mess with no clear direction and things happening for seemingly no reason other than the writer thought "this would be cool" so he put it in the script, this is especially true for most of the sequences that involve effects, they're pointless and add nothing to the story. Characters do things that you don't understand because their motivations are unclear. You can't empathize with the characters because they aren't written well enough to feel like real people so you just don't end up caring about them. The story came across as an amateur attempt by a writer/director who lacked focus. It was not helped by....

The acting - Just not good. Eric Roberts is the best actor in this movie by a country mile, that should give you all the information that you need to know. There is one guy who sounds like Christian Bale doing his Batman voice whenever he talks, it's really funny to watch even though I think it's meant to be scary or intimidating, the rest of the cast are unbelievable at best, annoying and distracting at worst. I think the only thing we can blame for this is....

The directing - Where to begin? The director of this movie is also the writer, and his weaknesses in one compound the weaknesses in the other. For example, he writes weak dialogue for his actors and gets such bad performances from them as a director that in some scenes he has us hearing what the characters are thinking so they can explain what just happened. "did I really just say that?" thinks a girl who has just said something embarrassing to a guy she's flirting with, and then "nice save Amy!" when she says something cool in the next sentence to him, it reminded me of the type of thing that would happen in the TV show Scrubs. Remember that this is supposed to be a serious horror/fantasy movie, not a light hearted comedy. I can't say anything good about the directing in this movie, I've touched on a couple of the things already, the bad acting, the over reliance on cheap CGI effects, the technical issues like shots going out of focus, an incohesive story, conflicting tones, the list could go on, and at the end of the day these problems fall squarly on the directors shoulders. Someone should tell the director that filmmaking is about getting the basics right, to use a well known saying "you have to crawl before you can walk", this director tried to come out sprinting and fell flat on his face.

The final verdict - In case you haven't guessed, I don't rate this movie very highly. If you want a werewolf fix I suggest you watch Ginger Snaps or American Werewolf in London, and I can't believe I would ever write these words, go watch Twilight. That is how bad this movie is, I just recommended Twilight over it.

Lows - Acting, directing, story, effects, all worse than most low budget TV shows.

Highs - The bad guy who sounds like Christian Bale doing Batman, he really is funny to listen to, by the end of the movie we were in tears laughing every time he spoke.

If a tween in the house forces you to watch it I suggest alcohol to lessen the pain and increase the humour of the Batman voice guy - 2/10

"A group of shape-shifting werewolves descend upon a small town in search of a girl who is re-born once every 2000 years. She holds the key to their survival and all will die who stand in their way."

Read the above summary, because that is the ONLY explanation that you will get this ENTIRE movie. I wish I could give this a 0.

I have no clue what this movie was even about. Apparently some Werewolves with Gypsy powers are camped out in the woods, and occasionally eating people? The main character looks like he was plucked out of Final Fantasy 8 and thrown into a werewolf movie with 0 plot.

And then the main female role "Le Dawn" is in his imagination? Or she's a werewolf? Or she's a fairy? I don't even know. And then the main character gets teleported all over the place, and wakes up drooling. Is he a werewolf or something too? I don't know. Then he gets recruited by werewolf hunters? Who knows what the hell they were. The main character even asked for an explanation. And some drunk is like "I was in Vietnam, here have a flashback".

And mixed into all of this "movie" are scenes of a poorly CGI'ed werewolf randomly eating people. The werewolf is clearly arthritic, and no explanation is given as to how an old, arthritic werewolf is able to catch people.

And better still, why did they pick a cameraman who has cerebral palsy? Why didn't the main character buy a shirt that isn't ripped down the front? Why didn't the person who made this movie take 10 minutes to come up with an actual plot? Why did they superimpose the person's thoughts into dialect that was as equally incoherent as the rest of the movie? Why is everyone dressed emo? Why do werewolves have Gypsy powers?

This movie is by far the worst movie that I have ever had the disastrous pleasure of viewing. In fact, it was so bad I couldn't finish all of it. The rating that this movie has gotten could not have come from REAL people who actually "watched" the movie because no one in their right mind would rate this movie above a 1.

An example of how bad this movie is can be viewed in the make out scene that takes place by the railroad tracks. While they are in the back seat of the car you can clearly see the boom mike right behind the actor, and then watch as it follows him out of the car. How does this happen when there's not one but two editor's for the movie.

Another thing that really makes this movie terrible is the acting from not one, or even a couple of the star's but ALL of the actor's. While I am sure that the director was the reason for most of the utterly poor performances, I can honestly say that these kids can not act at all. Hence the reason you will have NEVER heard of any of them and after this movie bomb, will probably never hear from any of them again.

I don't normally write reviews, but when I noticed that this movie was given an 8.8 out of 10 with over 5,000 people voting, I couldn't keep to myself. In all honesty, the people who voted for this pile of steaming . . . Are better actor's than the people who were cast in the movie because in the beginning at least they were believable or I would not have even wasted my time on this twisted train wreck of a movie.

If you are sitting up one night and you have nothing to do, keep doing that because it's more entertaining than watching this movie. I wish IMDb had decimal points in their rating system because this movie doesn't even deserve the "1" that I Gave it. Oh well, time to go "ralph".

DO NOT BELIEVE THE FALSE REVIEWS. This film was awful from the start. The acting was dreadful, the effects were utter pants, it was like watching a very cheap version of Twilight with a little blood in it. If you are going to watch this film because of the rating like i did, don't. No spoiler's in this review, i was just glad the film wasn't on for that long, i couldn't wait for it to finish. If you want to see a great werewolf film, go and watch such films as Wer, An American Werewolf In London, any one f these two will make you happy that you have watched them unlike this film. I would only give this film, a 2 rating maybe a 3 if pushed for it.