Summer's Moon

(2009) Summer's Blood PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

Teen, Summer Mathews (Ashely Green) entering into a small town seeking to reunite with the father she had never met, who she is later befriended by someone by Tom Hoxey (Peter Mooney) who helped her out of a jam. This someone she does know very much then intends to keep her in his home, bound and shackled, eventually exposing eventual dysfunctional of his entire family of actors Barbara Niven and Stephen McHattie.

I do not remember too much about this movie which says a lot about how much I liked this film which maybe could be garbage. In most cases if I give it a rating that low it maybe the result of the bad ending.

How weird it can go, I had never heard of Stephen McHattie before. But a few weeks ago I popped into "pontypool" and now I see him playing again in this flick, and he did well and believable again. But I must say that Ashley Greene best known for the Twilight saga did well too. And by hereby the best is said of this flick. The acting is well but it's all so low on gore or the red stuff. I guess that Lee Demarbre (the director) did better with the black comedy "smash cut" then with this here. It could have been so much messier but sadly, most of the killings are off-screen. I even saw the steady-cam reflecting in a car. Just a flick to watch and unfortunately to forget.

Very basic thriller film with the usual psychopath who for this film is a whole family and even the kidnapped girl is not exactly normal. Let's start from the fact that the female protagonist doesn't have the faintest idea of how to act and renders all the emotions very badly and in a horrendous way. The plot is then very trivial and obvious and in addition to this it is even inconsistent and not very credible so not only have they built a trivial and obvious plot but they have not even managed to make it continuous and credible. But despite this, the film is not totally to be thrown away because it manages to create an atmosphere of great tension throughout its duration, but it is a pity that it is the only thing that the film can do.

Just watched "Summer's Moon" - Non spoiler opinion follows; I wouldn't say this is a typical horror but it certainly was disturbing in parts - but it really depends on your mindset.... I found the 88 minutes pass pretty quickly which is usually a sign that I did enjoy the film. Looking back it had some good moments, kept my interest and had me say to myself a few times..."WTF". Definitely worth watching if you like survival horror/thriller type of genre's.

Having watched "Paranormal Activity" recently which has been hyped up to be one of the scariest films to date, which I don't agree with by the way, this was refreshing and reminded me as a cross between films such as "The Devil's Reject's, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Misery...... As you can see it takes a little from a wide range of movies. 7/10 perhaps! Oh and Ashley Greene is lurvely... ;o)

If you want to know why Ashley Greene never went on to bigger things after "Twilight", this film gives you a pretty good idea. In a film peppered with mediocre performances (apart from Peter Mooney & Steven McHattie), she registers pretty low. It's hard to tell sometimes if an actor is limited by their script, but most of the time you'll find signs of promise by actors even then. It's a shame, because she brought quite a charm to the "Twilight" series that is clearly absent here. This film's strongest attributes are its use of music and cinematography. The story is nothing new either.