User reviews

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.

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.

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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.

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")

American couple spend their honeymoon in China but get duped into becoming sacrifices to "Moon Demons". One pet hate of mine is shaky cam and here we have a terrible example. But not only that, the picture is often too dark so see what is going on plus it often blurs. Headache inducing. Plus plot wise it's very minimal. Poor effort.

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.

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.

Amy Smart and Tim Chiou are a vacationing couple in China. Dennis Chan is their smiling tour guide. After a brief credit-sequence he drives them to a remote rural area and vanishes. The two Americans are stranded in the countryside. Suspicious villagers,duplicitous taxi drivers and hungry "moon demons" figure into the rest of the tale.

This is two thirds a good movie, because the last act is a bit weak. But for the most part this is a superior little chiller. Spooky use of sound, silence and darkness.Some have complained of the hand-held camera-work but I was not bothered by it.Along with ALTERED, this is the best film from Eduardo Sanchez.

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.

This is easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen, ever.

Like the user comment before mine, I saw it at Fantastic Fest, an annual must of film festivals, and one year later with 09's fest about to start - I am still compelled to urge people not to waste two hours of their life on this nearly unwatchable waste of celluloid.

The pacing is awful, the action is laughable, and it all culminates in one of the silliest, most disappointing endings Fantastic Fest has ever been privy to. Plus the camera-work is nauseatingly distracting.

There is nothing redeemable about this movie. Exit your browser now and forget you ever heard of it.

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!

The main horror of this film is the horrible shaky cam !

The ceaselessly frenetic photography, the hurried editing and distracting abundance of hellaciously hectic running scenes frequently went waaaaay beyond my eye-brain comfort zone and even Amy Smart's preternaturally cute nose couldn't remedy the actively abrasive look of 'Seventh Moon'. But hey, what do I know, I'm just a reactionary schmendrick who still likes to see the scary monsters in a monster movie!

A couple of hours ago I watched this movie on TV. I thought a horror flick would be something I'd enjoy and started watching this "masterpeice".

Umm I had no idea what was happening. I honestly thought my Cable company was pulling my chain by showing me a DivX port from an pirated cinema viewing.

I did some investigating watched few clips on youtube and fuck me The whole thing is genuenly someones attempt at cinematography. It's horrific and I'm confused how something THIS bad can be released for someone to enjoy it, seeing it here, the amount of stars that it has made me question people's sanity.

The WORST movie experience I've ever had. Screw the director.

I must disagree with everybody who has written a review here ( 3 people to be precise ),and I will try to explain why it is like that.

First of all,to the all the people who have commented about this title I must ask a simple question: Did anyone of you ever watched more than two horror movies in your life?

So the movie is about old Chinese myth that turns out to be real and not a myth at all.The story is very simple and not very original.I have expected more of Eduardo Sanches since I liked ,,Altered,,.And to wait three years for something so average was certainly a disappointment.( Don't get me wrong,I don't think ,,altered,, the greatest movie of all time,but despite budget limitations and a few plot holes it was quite enjoyable and fun little b-movie).

The acting by Amy and Tim was OK,but my biggest problem was the look of moon demons( they were quite lame and ordinary in my opinion ).Some scenes at the end of the movie were a total ripoff of Descent by Neil Marshall.

Overall,this movie can be told in 2 minutes( I mean the story and everything that happens from the beginning to the end ).So the biggest problem of this movie is,like I said before,that it is so average it's painful.

While this certainly isn't the worst movie I have seen,it isn't the best one either.You won't be missing anything if you don't watch it,and if you do you'll say : Oh,well nothing special.

So since this is just an average movie I will give it an average grade 5 of 10.

P.S. Also for a horror movie,this flick isn't scary at all.

"Seventh Moon" is an effective little horror film that does a good job creating paranoia and delivers a good amount of scares. Melissa (Amy Smart) and Yul (Tim Chiou), are honeymooning in China to visit Yul's parents when they get lost in the countryside and end up in a small remote village. Their misfortune coincides with the night of the Seventh Moon, which, in accordance with Chinese Myth means that the gates of hell open and the dead can enter the world of the living.

It's a scary ghost movie that gets the basics right. It stays with a small cast of characters so you can get to know and care about them, It keeps its cards close to the chest to keep you interested and ensure your Imagination plays with some of the quiet moments too. I thought the creature designs were very effective because they are simple, but in a way that is unsettling because you don't quite know what to make of them (unlike say, someone running around with an ax; I might not know what the deal with the person is, but I know what bit to avoid there). I was kept in suspense as to who was going to bite the dust, if anyone and I liked how for the most part you don't see much, except in the shadows until the very end. Once again, letting your imagination play tricks on you and make the terror even more intense. Your imagination can run a little wild while the characters are trying just as hard as you are to figure out who or what is chasing them. While there are a few moments at the end that aren't totally effective, and throughout the movie there are stretches that are poorly shot (to the point where you'll be frantically trying to figure out what exactly is going) it genuinely scared me. That's the objective, it met It's goal and I think you will enjoy it too. There are some good surprises and plenty of fresh material within the frightening "Seventh Moon". (On DVD, November 11, 2012)

Eduardo Sanchez is emerging as the more talented of the Blair Witch directing duo. The other, Daniel Myrick, helmed the disappointments The Believers and Solstice but rebounded with the interesting The Objective. After the enjoyable but slightly uneven Altered, Sanchez follows up with the creepy but flawed Seventh Moon. Really the only thing that keeps this from being a four star flick is the overabundance of unnecessary shaky cam tactics. In the Blair Witch it was tolerable, but here it makes no sense. We can clearly see the creatures attacking our main characters several times during the movie, so there's no need to employ all the shaky cam shenanigans to try to disorient the viewer. Besides that, everything else is quite effective. The remote locale is pretty spooky and you really do feel like you could be hopelessly lost in a place like that. Sanchez is great at this motif and it was present in Blair Witch and somewhat in Altered. Amy Smart screaming at the top of her lungs does get old after a little bit, but it doesn't distract too much from a fun but forgettable little foray into indie horror.