Seventh 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.

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.

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

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 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.