Seventh Moon

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")

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

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.

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.