Blood Moon Rising is an amazing independent film set somewhere in California. The year is 1969. An ancient curse has spilled over into the world of the ordinary living, with werewolves, vampires, and zombies shedding bucketloads of blood. In short, Tristan (our vampire) is not a bad guy despite his undead status, and he was in love with a girl named Lucy. Tristan's former wife, the daughter of the Devil, doesn't take the news of Tristan's love affair with Lucy very well, and she curses Lucy to become a ravenous werewolf roaming the Earth for all eternity...that is, unless a silver bullet pierces her heart and kills her. Lucy's death brings the daughter of the Devil back from Hell. She returns not just for revenge, but to find a talisman, which, together with a book bound in human flesh and inked in blood (yes, a bit like Evil Dead in that regard, I know) that, if finished by the hand of an unwilling virgin, will unleash Hell on Earth. So, it is up to a hippie chick, Sadie Hawkins, and a comic book-reading soda Jerk, Darrel Lee, to save the world, but not without a little help from a group of indie film rejects shooting a zombie flick in a town called Desolation. To see who wins, and how, you will simply have to get your hands on a copy. Besides, I don't want to ruin it for those of you who are stoked about this film.
Blood Moon Rising is shot in the old Grindhouse horror style. It's not just horror, though. All in all, it is a horror comedy and action adventure, with a feel not too dissimilar to Rodriguez's Planet Terror. The actors do a phenomenal job. The effects, though not top notch, are far from cheesy. And the ones that are cheesy are meant to be that way. In this movie everything is deliberate, even when the dialog stops and the actors mouths are still moving, or when you can't hear what is being said (which only happens in two or three brief parts), or when the screen flares out into that burning reel effect and catapults the watcher to another scene entirely.
If I had to rate Blood Moon Rising on any sort of horror scale, I would give it ten out of ten skulls. And I don't do that with too many films. In fact, I almost never do that. But this one definitely deserves its due credit as a modern Grindhouse masterpiece.
