Dark Moon Rising

Dark Moon Rising / Wolf Moon is a love story... no, it's a story of a reluctant werewolf... no, it's a story of two families coming together... Well, it's a lot of things and not all of them pleasant. First and foremost it's the story of a girl with a single father who happens to fall for the bad boy werewolf drifter and could've ended happily at just that if not for the father's dislike/distrust for the new boyfriend and the fact that the boy's psychopath werewolf father is trying to track him down for a family reunion.

For what it is, the film is decently acted and the story is moderately compelling. The big bad daddy wolf is a genuine monster and regales us with moderate gore, besides being a somewhat likable villain. The boy and girl are passable actors allowing their scenes to outshine their limited talent. The girl's father and the sheriff feel like something ripped out of a low budget Syfy Original (is there any other kind?) but they're not bad beyond possibly being somewhat derivative. The real flaw, through and through, are the horrendous special effects. The transformations are hokey, corny, and completely devoid of any real passion; the costumes are, well, just so obviously costumes that it ruins any thrill. Compared even to the presumably smaller budgeted Werewolf: The Devil's Hound, the special effects in DMR are flat out lousy and inexcusable especially considering the rest of the movie which is pleasant if not good. It's a shame that they decided to completely shunt the werewolf angle in a werewolf movie but, after all, this film is probably more of a teeny romance than anything else.

When you put the line on your DVD sleeve "twilight meets ginger snaps" than you have put the cat with the milk. Immediately you will refer to Twilight and admit it, Twilight was a big insult to the genre. It had nothing to do with horror or vampires or werewolves. It was just a love story with a strange twist. And I must say that this flick is indeed the same story of Twilight but without the vampires. But it clocks in at around 2 hours and that's a bit too long as did the Twilight shite. It's all about a normal girl falling in love with a stranger who appears to be a werewolf. But not only that, there's another werewolf on the loose. This is Dana Minnie's first attempt to make a horror. Being the story a bit too lame it's good on the gory side. The bites and killings are indeed gory and the guys will be amused by some nudity. Based for me a bit too much on Twilight I would tear it down but due the gory bits I gave it a 3. It's not like Twilight for 5 or 6 year old ones, this is for teenager ready to take some red stuff and a lot of love story. The acting was okay and believable but the werewolves were a bit to much of CGI and you could see the use of blue key. If they only had the werewolves done with real effects in stead of CGI it would have been much better.

Slated between fantasy/sci-fi/moderately horror this film lays an egg in pretty much all counts. It's a laughable love story between a woman and a man/wolf, a father and son curse and eventual showdown. The screenplay is mediocre at best with a lot of cussing in the dialogue. I was shocked well known actor Chris Mulkey and actress/singer Maria Conchita Alonso signed on for this. Alonso's character as Sherriff is poorly acted and makes no real sense for her being there. Throw in Sid Haig who is known for non-conforming roles and he was fun to see. The music score was slightly misplaced in some scenes but not overly bad. Now the actual werewolves creature is poorly designed, contrasting in how they transform is laughable. No true CGI involvement. I give it a 4 based on scenery alone.

After a mysterious drifter arrives in town, a woman's burgeoning romance with him becomes threatened when he reveals the deadly curse he falls under and must try to protect her from more of his own kind ravaging the town.

This one wasn't as bad as it could've been as it turned out quite enjoyable. One of the biggest pluses here is the fact that this one manages to really overwhelm with how brutal and vicious the werewolves really are here with this one really getting the most out of it's scenes. Attacking with ferocity and remorselessness, the way a true werewolf should attack in such situations, that leaves this with plenty of vicious and brutal attacks that have people with their faces and chests clawed to pieces, hands bitten off, flesh torn into and devoured and even claw impalings that are quite gruesome and bloody which works quite well here. This also causes many of the attacks to come off as rather chilling and suspenseful with the usage of the werewolf to really toy with his victims here and then go in for the kill so the ambush at the father's house, the police station encounter and the encounter at the car-lot all come off as quite chilling and enjoyable. The big action scene, which is the town's shootout with the werewolf in the desert which devolves into the main brawl between the two werewolves in a brutal, vicious and bloody sequence that eschews spectacle to go for pure carnal brutality as would be the case in such a fight causes this to really become a true highlight that comes off incredibly well here with the amount of action supplementing the brutality. That's really all that works here, as otherwise this one tends to come off with a couple flaws in the fact that this one mainly centers around a romance angle that's highly derivative and ripped off from plenty of other movies. Granted, it never humanizes their bestial modes and keeps them as something to be feared throughout, but the fact remains that it still rips off other movies with the inter-species romance that tends to take up the first hour or so between the two and really causing this one to grind to a halt with it's more intense happenings occurring in such brief snippets it loses it's horror tag at times. This also causes the film to go on way too long for something as simplistic as this plot is because it has to wrap the romance into the proceedings so that it can fully tell that story specifically rather than anything else so that the rest of the movie is stretched out as a result. By using the Wolf-Man style of werewolf make-up rather than the Werewolf style which basically just gives the creatures fangs and fur around the face, it makes the creatures look somewhat laughable at times by not really trying to do anything special with their make-up and just going for the weakest look in the genre. It looks great, but it's still a poor design, and joins the other flaws here to hold this down.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity.

The tragedy of this movie is that it has some really good elements. Some the dialogue is sharp. There are some talented performers involved: Billy Drago, Maria Conchita Alonso and Sid Haig, in particular, have enough screen presence to be compelling even in a low-budget production. Some character exchanges and even a couple of entire scenes are quite good. Alas the remainder of the production is amateur-hour ineptitude. The cinematography is like someone with a camcorder dialed the tint all the way up. The pacing and plot progression are incompetent: characters and concepts are introduced and then ignored for long stretches. The characters' motivations, and the plot as a whole, are trite and often nonsensical. The editing is flabby. There's no stakes, urgency or tension. I'm a sucker for a good werewolf movie - or even a bad one - but this barely qualifies as a movie.