Septième Lune

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.

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.

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.

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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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.