Devils Moon

Like the other reviewers here, I stumbled across this movie in one of the Mill Creek/Pendulum Pictures Box Sets. Namely the "Tombs of Terror" set that comes with many other masterfully terrible films, such as The Vulture's Eye or The Traveler (that one I actually enjoyed admittedly). The Devil's Moon is not quite as terrible as The Vulture's Eye and not quite as enjoyably zany as The Traveler. But it does have its enjoyably terrible qualities worth a bad film aficionado's time.

A guy gets fired and dopes around a bit. The lady that fired him is kidnapped by a serial killing necrophiliac. The guy that got fired and his ex boss and Serial Killing Necrophiliac all end up in the woods together and it becomes a fight for survival. Unbeknownst to them, a small coven of goth girls/witches, in the same forest, summon up a demon baby and all hell breaks loose.

The problems with this movie are many. The worst offenders being the sound and the dark and murky picture. The sound is quite literally all over the place. I made the mistake of turning the volume up at the beginning of the film only to immediately regret it. Whenever a woman screams it gets so loud that it might just blow out your speakers, and your ear drums. As for the picture quality, it is absolutely atrocious. I can tolerate grainy, digitalized picture. But it is hard to tolerate it when it is so dark even turning the brightness up on the TV won't work. It's a struggle to get through when all the best moments are in the darkness.

Having said that, there are some hilariously terrible moments in the movie that should make someone either chuckle, or turn the movie off outright. Such as the demon baby scene. It bursts out like an Alien Chestburster, and proceeds to fly after and attack one of the goth girl witches. It's the best moment in the movie, actually...

Look, giving this movie a 5 out of 10 is very generous. But in comparison to many of the other films in this set, I think 5 is pretty appropriate. Look for Trent Haaga of Troma fame as Cletus, one of the random rednecks thrown into the film to help pad out the runtime.

Devil's Moon is another nearly unredeemable movie from the Tomb of Terrors box set. It starts with the killing and fresh corpse-raping of a naked woman while the man chants an incantation. Next we meet the main characters an insufferable, unlikable office worker and the insufferable, unlikable boss lady who fires him. This film is filled exclusively with unlikable characters. There's two bumbling, backwoods bumpkins who try to add comic relief but just come off as awful, unfunny stereotypes. Trent Haaga plays one of them and is better than this. There's also a stereotypical token angry all the time for no discernible reason black guy who constantly spews ignorance, arrogance, racism, and vulgarity. There's also some goth chicks who want to perform some sort of ritual in the woods, apparently one of them is Tiffany Shepis but I didn't even recognize her.

The unlikable fired guy and the woman who fired him end up in the woods with the killer from the beginning and try to escape demons or something. It's very hard to tell what is going on because most of the forest/horror scenes are filmed in impenetrable darkness. The dialogue is often too low to hear but don't turn up the volume. Late in the movie there's lots of annoying screeching and screaming for some reason and it'll blow out your speakers or rupture your ear drums at high volume. Just playing the whole thing on mute and fast forward would be a good idea. There's a sliver of decency here in some gore scenes including a chest-bursting demon baby, a nice decapitation and some zombie violence. The movie actually wastes time describing how zombies act and how to kill them to a character presumably for the audiences benefit. This feels like padding in a movie that really didn't need any. At 90 minutes this is mostly excruciating and talented people involved in the low budget film industry like Trent Haaga, Tiffany Shepis, Timothy Muskatell, and Chad Ferrin should all be ashamed of their involvement in Devil's Moon.