• home
• games
• the lists
• rants & raves
• movies
• bands
• downloads

Seventh Moon

"It's amazing you could achieve that for $5000." - Robert Lambert to Eduardo Sánchez
Starring: Amy Smart, Tim Chou, Dennis Chan, buncha Chinese guys
Rating: 1/10
Directed By: Eduardo Sánchez
Runtime: Far too long

Whenever Magnificent Bastard and I sit over coffee to discuss the site, we always concentrate on unearthing little-seen gems deserving of exposure or long-forgotten classics just available on a modern format. Too many other Not Too Cool sites spend enough internet space reviewing every new piece of crap coming down the pipe so unless we get a cool premier in advance or special event we'll be content to do Japanese Mondo pics and brain-eating slug films, thank you very much. However, as much as we try and pick the upper cream of the crop for you sometimes, like Indy 4, sometimes we must urge you at all costs to avoid certain selections. Most of the time, we bypass crap cinema because we figure who's gonna go see Pulse 2? (Seriously. 8 people hit it's FantasticFest World Premier but I guarantee it was better than this film). Sometimes we get trapped and that's when we offer our version of a public service announcement: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NOT EVEN FOR FREE, GO AND SEE THIS FILM. AT ALL. EVER. Now, seriously, you say, I saw Day X and this can't be as bad. He, he, I say, naive one, RL is in Day X and he's sitting here right now over my shoulder reminding me about things I've tried hard to forget. I also hope Magnificent Bastard writes an addendum to this piece so you can see that we're serious.

The "story" is based on a Chinese legend exemplified in solid J-Horror like Kimyo na Sakasu (The Maid 2005) about the one week of the year the dead have power. The first two days the spirits appear as "corner of the eye" apparitions, not yet having any substance but as days three and four occur the spirits become stronger, moving objects and items until the seventh day when they have full form and can wreak havoc. Eduardo Sánchez, "co-director" of The Blair Witch Project, pares this excellent story down to one day so you have "excitement" with absolutely no set-up. Tim Chou and Amy Smart are an American couple on their honeymoon in China (gasp!) during the ghost festival. Pay attention because this is the only steadycam section in the whole picture. They laugh, tear around and generally make asses out of themselves while the earnest Chinese are praying for their lives. They and their tour guide, Ping (Dennis Chan), head to a far town where they're staying with distant relatives of Mr. Chou, (who is, obviously, Chinese, though he speaks a negligible amount and is married to Amy Smart) but get "lost" on the treacherous roads. Ping offers to head down to a nearby village to seek help. Tim is passed out drunk so Amy lets him. After an hour, Ping does not return. The rest of the tale is our two helpless Americans, stuck in rural China with no understanding of the language or culture paying the price when beset by hungry ghosts.

What really happens is Tim and Amy get out of the car and head to the village for assistance also and from that point on the camera is positioned down and left of our protagonists giving the impression a dog or small child with a digital camera is accompanying them, shaking and running to "catch up" but it's simply not true. Tim and Amy are alone and the ghosts aren't around yet. This continues from about twenty minutes in to the "conclusion" of this ghastly producing mistake. Now the shakey-cam worked in Blair Witch because the "actors" filmed almost everything so when they're running with the camera on it makes sense. No one is running with Tim and Amy. So why is the camera constantly shaking? RL and I noticed it took three camera operators to film this mess and that right there shows a very wasteful pattern that sadly dominates Seventh Moon. You could have had one epileptic do this job in two days.

Ok, you say, so the camera shakes. Yes, however you'll never know because the film is lit by a cell phone or natural light (it's nighttime) so you'll never see the shakey-cam, much less any action on the screen, the principal actors or the ghosts. In the case of the ghosts, it's. a good thing because they're just guys spray-painted white wearing loincloths. Maybe they're trying to evoke The Descent but if so they fail because you can see the cannibals in that film and they look great. These ghosts look lame. According to It Ain't Cool, the most "nail biting" segment involves Tim and Amy taking refuge in the trunk of a Volvo to escape the supernatural. I would like to argue that point. First off, there's a staggering lapse of logic. Tim and Amy figure out that people leave out sacrifices to stop ghost harassment and they technically do leave a Chinese man out of the car to get eaten so they should be left alone. Second, you can't see anything because the only light is trickling in the front window. Thirdly, the camera shakes so much that, when combined with the no light and absurd shit you've already been subjected to that you can't tell what the fuck is happening which is flatly bad filmmaking. If you have a good film, or even a mediocre one, you want people to be able to tell, for the most part, what the fuck happened. So much of this film is obscured by Eduardo's limited talent and vision it becomes a muddy, unwatchable mess. It figures that Eduardo Sánchez would fall back on his one-trick from Blair Witch but to such an unwatchable degree makes us think that he spent all the budget living high off the hog for a few months and just knocked this out in a weekend.

Then there's subtitling choices. I understand the impression was of complete isolation and complete lack of communication to enhance the fear and illustrate Tim's limited understanding of Chinese (we're not stupid, Eduardo). My roommate Terry has a limited understanding of Chinese also and there are tons of places where the subtitles reveal things no first-year Chinese student could know but constantly leaves out translations for words and phrases every first year Chinese students know. Once again a simple device for conveying horror is completely messed up by this film. It can't seem to get anything right.

The denňuement involves Amy Smart navigating a water-filled cave lit only by cell phone and filmed only in shakey-cam, at least, I think that's what's going on, after having to be flat-out told in the last ten minutes that the couple SPOILER (though this piece of shit cannot be spoiled. It sucks ass.) were Ping's sacrifice (no shit?) which is painfully obvious in minute 25 when those wacky kids discover sacrifices to the ghosts laid out in the village. I mean, this thing just degenerates into stupidity almost immediately and never manages to recover - in fact, doesn't even try. The fact this is being marketed hard and passed off as a quality production really proves how low Hollywood's standards have sunk, or the audience's. Nowhere does this get off the cutting room floor and not go direct to video. The fact that this will get a theatrical run should embarrass us all. Not even pre-teens will be scared of this crap.

I could go on for days and cite more specific instances but why bother? I hope I got our point across and by our I mean Terry Kirk, RL, Magnificent Bastard, Geoff Glass and many, many others who wanted to walk out en mass but some of us were waiting for our credit cards to come back and were held hostage until the end. I believe in being thorough so I polled many of my fellow audience-mates after the abomination and nary a good word was spoken. RL even attempted to convey our disappointment to Sr. Sánchez to a decidedly mixed reception. To honor RL, I once again urge our readership strenuously to NOT WATCH SEVENTH MOON and if you do, SPREAD THE WORD OF HOW SHITTY THIS FILM IS ON EVERY REVIEW FORUM YOU CAN FIND. Seriously. Shit like this has to stop. Do your part.

I believe this trailer sums it up. Imagine that the whole film but darker and with more shaking. And not cool at all.




Addendum: Magnificent Bastard's take on Seventh Moon can be found at the end of this little ditty.