Seventh Moon

Despite reading a couple of bad reviews I decided to give this movie a try and I'm glad I did. Some people may feel that the effects weren't terribly good but they didn't need to be; this movie was more about suspense. It's not a slasher movie, it's a movie with a story. It was definitely worth the watch. I was on the edge of my seat a several times, it was quite suspenseful and that's what I like in a scary movie. The acting needs some work but it wasn't so distracting that it took away from the story. There were a couple of times that left me scratching my head in confusion but overall a good movie. Give it a shot, not a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

When this movie came out, I was genuinely hopeful. The concept of hungry ghosts is a central part of the tradition of Chinese Ancestor Worship, and had great potential for an excellent movie melding the supernatural and horror. The script writers even set it during an actual event in the Chinese year, a festival sharing much in common with the true traditions of All Hallows Eve. Unfortunately, that is as far as it went.

The film does not make the error that many movies make substituting gore for horror. There is enough blood to add to the suspense, and increase the tension that is central to this kind of movie. The script is serviceable. The protagonists never engage in the typical "how could they be so stupid" stereotypes of a true horror film. Their actions, at times foolish, were consistent with their characters as urban Americans enjoying their honeymoon in an exotic land. The actions of the other characters in the film are similarly plausible.

The problem is that the movie never really comes together. You vaguely like the young couple, and that's about it. You respect the actions of the only other real player in the movie towards the end, but I doubt he even has a total of ten minutes of screen time. The monsters are scary, and appropriately monstrous. None of this is the makings of great cinema.

My wife, upon the conclusion of the movie, asked me "What's the Point?" She meant it rhetorically, because we both had no trouble understanding what was going on during the movie. Yet that comment sums up succinctly my own reaction upon watching it. It wasn't a waste of 87 minutes of my life, and since the rental was free I don't feel ripped off. It's just very sad when this had the potential to be a very good movie.

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")

Someone is a fan of shaky-cam (or just couldn't afford a steady cam). But not content with annoying the audience with shaky cam, nonsensical jump-cuts were added to not only make the audience nauseated, but annoyed as well. Half the movie is close-ups of people's faces and the other half of the movie is too dark to see anything. Very bad.

The story itself is nothing special. I was looking forward to it because I learned all about "Ghost Month" in Taiwan. The 7th lunar month is when spirits from the netherworld can come and cause mischief in our world, thus all the burning stuff to placate those spirits. It was more annoying than scary, interesting, or suspenseful.

Let's make most of the film so dark and so full of shaky cam closeups that it looks just like a found footage film, but let's not actually make a found footage film!