Blood Moon (2014)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

BLOOD MOON is a tiresome, zero budget, western/horror combo in which a bunch of the usual disparate characters are holed up in an old western town where they find themselves assailed by barely-glimpsed werewolves. Bizarrely, although this film is set in the Old West with some imported American stars (like Corey Johnson), it's actually a British movie filmed on a re-enactment set.Not that we see much of the set, or anything if I'm honest. BLOOD MOON is one of those films that's almost entirely shot in the dark to hide the deficiencies of the budget. The werewolves are barely glimpsed throughout the movie so if you're looking for werewolf action you'll invariably be disappointed. Giving the directorial chores to a guy who has previously made stuff like MOVIE MISTAKES UNCOVERED and THE LEGEND OF DICK AND DOM wasn't necessarily the best idea as the people who wrote and made this seem to have little understanding of what makes either the western or the horror genres tick as BLOOD MOON is a failure in both.The characters are below par and uninteresting and the set-up situations are entirely predictable with characters in-fighting before being forced to work together against a greater evil. It really does say something when the DVD cover is about ten times better than the film itself.

I saw this at my local film society (its first public showing in Kent, where it was made). I thought it was pretty good by any standards (and not just "pretty good for a film that only cost £520,000").If you're expecting state of the art special effects and CGI and an extended gore-fest, you'll be disappointed, but it's highly watchable, engaging, sometimes funny and made me jump more than once! In a Q+A afterwards, the director and the director of photography admitted they had had the same problem that a lot of creature feature makers have - the creature never looks as convincing on screen as you had hoped (we all remember the rubber-looking shark in Jaws!). As a result, their creature is only briefly on screen but its presence and menace are still felt.All the actors give a good performance but I'd maybe highlight Shaun Dooley as Calhoun, looking like a slightly younger Russell Crowe, and Corey Johnson as Hank.I'm not a big horror genre fan myself - if you are, you might find yourself insufficiently scared - but Blood Moon still stands as a well-made indie film. It benefits from having been shot in Laredo, a Western town in the UK recreated by a group of re-enactors - the period detail throughout is much more than skin deep and it's a convincing enough location to have fooled many people into believing it was shot State-side.It's done pretty well on the festival circuit and, as the first British-made Western since "Carry on Cowboy" in 1965 (reputedly), I think it deserves watching.

Blood Moon is a hackneyed B grade werewolf flick with a Western flavour. The premise behind this film has in one form or another been done before.This is by no means the worst interpretation but its by no means the best either. The acting is, by and large, of a very good standard. That said the actors are constrained by the, at times, cheesy stereotypical cowboy characterizations, replete with lots of gormless gun twirling. Even worse again, are the tame and tacky monster effects, that are more comical than scary. Blood Moon had the makings of a half decent horror if only more care had been taken with the special effects and more common sense had been injected into the script. As it stands, this film rates a five out of ten from me.

The poster or synopsis can be misleading, at first glance Blood Moon is a supernatural movie set in wild west. Unfortunately, it's not much more than bantering between random cowboy and thug cliché, as for the supposed werewolf, or skinwalker in this case, it only appears in a fragment of the runtime. This leaves audience with mundane subpar western B-movie action at best.What could be a unique premise unfortunately ends up with barren showing, majority of the characters are plain and lacking any presence. The movie tries to introduce many personalities, such as the young journalist, the usual mysterious gunman, enigmatic shaman and the unlawful hooligans. However, they are not fully fleshed out and the choppy acting makes it hard to invest on any of them, thus making the many subplots even more tedious.At times it almost looks like they are just random people in period reenactment rather than actual cast for a movie. This takes away from the supernatural angle as well, which is incredibly disappointing considering it takes nearly an hour to build-up on the creature's backstory. The characters hype it with oversaturated fire camp stories about this ominous being for two third of the movie.The most decent thing here is its practical effect, the gore looks intimidating and quite eerie. Still, the skinwalker deserves much more than a few bloody shots. When it does appear so briefly the movie uses rapid editing and jerky camera. In fact, it does so for almost the entire action sequences to the point of gunshot looking like timid firecrackers.With no decent pay-off for its arduously long build-up, Blood Moon is lackluster on both action and horror. Staring at actual moon for an hour and half would be a better use of your time.