Past Misdeeds: Blood Moon (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

The Old West. A group of travellers on a stagecoach – the freshly married couple of Deputy Marshal Jake (George Blagden) and Sarah Norman (Amber Jean Rowan), baby-faced London Times journalist Henry Lester (George Webster), nervous priest Father Dominic (Kerry Shale), saloon owner Marie (Anna Skellern), and a mysterious gunman named Calhoun (Shaun Dooley) they picked up on the way – make a pit stop in what is supposed to be a station located in what otherwise is a ghost town. Unfortunately, the station owner is spending a bit of time out of town in his new role as a ripped apart corpse, clearly having taken going native in the place a bit too seriously.

Calhoun – not the only white guy in this part of the West suspiciously knowledgeable about Native American monsters – quickly determines the man wasn’t killed by a normal animal but by a skinwalker; the rest of the party doesn’t exactly agree with his assessment. However, this specific dead body and the possible supernatural cause of its death might not be the most pressing of the party’s problems anyway, for they soon find themselves ambushed and captured by notorious outlaws Hank (Corey Johnson) and Jeb (Raffaello Degruttola) Walker, who might not be supernatural, but sure as heck are dangerous enough. Plus, at least one of the Walkers is so crazy, he might as well be a supernatural monster for all the difference it makes.

Of course, then there’s the further complication added to our heroes’ troubles that the station owner was indeed killed by a skinwalker and the creature’s still roaming the area in a very bad mood, particularly since a blood moon is hanging in the sky…

There’s also a subplot about Jake’s cousin, one Marshal Wade (Jack Fox) and his Native American tracker/visionary/witch friend Black Deer (Eleanor Matsuura) in their role as the miniature posse hunting the Walkers, but I honestly couldn’t tell you why these two are even in the movie apart from taking care of some plot setup the film could have handled without introducing two characters who’ll spend most of the film’s running time randomly trundling through the woods and not doing much of interest.

And right here, we’re at the main trouble with Jeremy Wooding’s UK-produced horror western Blood Moon – Alan Wightman’s script simply becomes awkward from time to time, not just by introducing a subplot that takes up more space than is necessary (and adds further characters to a film that already has enough of them just to introduce a bit of exposition, a minor horror scene that has little business being in the plot, and light deus ex machina-ing) but also with moments like Chekov’s Awkwardly Presented Silver Rings near the beginning. You know the rule: “If a werewolf film has a character showing off her silver rings in the first act, they will end up being used for werewolf killing in the third”. That Chekov guy really knew his stuff. These aren’t catastrophic failings as far as this particular film goes, though they do tend to make a movie that puts a western skinwalker twist on a Carpenter-esque siege scenario rather less focused and tight than I’d have liked it to be. On the other hand, whenever Blood Moon works, it does so very well indeed, and it does work more often than not.

Despite including one or two scenes I found rather stagy for my tastes (mostly some of the indoor dialogue concerning Jeb), Wooding directs much of the film with a very sure hand, filming around its probably tiny budget quite elegantly and creatively, and turning the – mostly effective suitmation – monster into a credible threat as well as into a source of suspense that works as a nice catalyst for revealing the tensions between the characters besieged by it. That’s also an area where the script comes into its own in a positive way, giving stock character types just the right minor twists they need to come to life, and providing some fun old west style dialogue that might not be realistic (well, surely is not) but is – apart from a moment or two when it sounds just a bit too silly – a joy to listen to. The majority of the actors not being Americans isn’t much of a problem here, either, because they’re not faking actual American accents here but are using what movies – a lot of them dubbed in Italy – have taught us people sounded like way back when. The core cast is decent, and often better, even if you don’t enjoy artificial accents, the film providing most everyone with a few moments to shine (and perhaps a pleasantly bloody death).


While I’ve done quite a bit of nitpicking in this write-up, I don’t want anyone reading to come to the wrong conclusion about the film: if you’re able to get over its flaws – and there are more than enough virtues on display to make that pretty easy for me – Blood Moon is a fine example of contemporary low budget filmmaking, working in a genre mix that’s gotten a bit more common in the last decade or so but is still far from being overused, and providing  quite a few things to appreciate. That it’s not perfect isn’t really the most horrible thing imaginable (that would be getting ripped to shreds and not even eaten by a skinwalker, I suppose, or having to watch another Paranormal Activity sequel).

On ExB: Blood Moon (2014)

Ah, the horror western – a sub-genre I dearly love, and which has the added advantage of not being too crowded either, so a small production with a bit of talent in front of and behind the camera has a fine opportunity for making an impression.

Does the British Blood Moon belong to this wondrous category? The only way to find out is to click on through to my column over at Exploder Button, the website that isn’t getting suspiciously hairy on the night of the full moon, no sir.

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A Night In The Woods (2011)

And now, the news: three people have disappeared on a camping trip in Dartmoor, and the film we're talking about does of course consist of the video material they left behind.

Said three campers are Kerry (Anna Skellern), her American boyfriend Brody (Scoot McNairy) who loves his cameras and won't ever stop filming in what will become an actual plot point, and her cousin Leo (Andrew Hawley) whom she hasn't seen in more than two years. The trio is the perfect example of a group of people that should really not spend their time alone on the moors or in the woods, at least not without a bunch of therapists nearby. Kerry still has to cope with the death of her father - or rather the childhood abuse her father's death reminds her of. Brody's camera obsession is quite explicitly far from healthy, with voyeurism and an obsession with control that more than just suggest mental illness being the more benevolent interpretations of his behaviour. And Leo and Kerry seem to be cousins who are very, very close for people who haven't seen each other in ages; one might just think they are sharing a secret.

Needless to say, this is not going to be the most fun camping trip imaginable for anyone on screen, and that's before we come to the folklore surrounding the area the unhappy campers are in. A black huntsman is supposed to hang "sinners" (whatever that may be) from bleeding trees there. It will come as no surprise to anyone than the characters that things won't go well for them. There will be breakdowns, and death, and just possibly a malevolent supernatural force.

Even though Richard Parry's A Night In The Woods keeps quite closely to the form of the POV movie as set down by Blair Witch Project (right to the mostly improvised nature of the dialogue) when my hair had less grey in it, it recommends itself by doing some important and rather interesting things differently.

Mostly, the difference is one of emphasis - where Blair Witch took great care with its characters but did this to make their fear when confronted with the unknown more real, Night is interested in the characters for their own sakes, leaving the supernatural horror part of the equation not exactly an afterthought, but an element that intensifies the characters' troubles instead of the other way round. In fact, it's not clear if there is any supernatural agency working here at all, and the whole affair not just a very normal case of several people losing it with horrible consequences.

In general, I'm not a big admirer of films that don't want to make up their minds if the supernatural in them is real or not, but in Night's case, I actually don't mind, for the exact nature of what is doing what to whom here just isn't important to the film. This one really is all about paranoia, the moments when you realize you don't know the people close to you or yourself as well as you think you do, bad life experiences that lead to even worse decisions later on, the consequences of trauma, and why you really shouldn't go camping with the wrong people in Dartmoor.

For some viewers, the film's highly improvised dialogue and acting will probably be a big turn-off. I think the actors do this rather well, showing some subtleties and complexities of their characters this way that couldn't have been shown in a film going for a more mainstream type of storytelling. It also makes for an interesting contrast with how bad a lot of POV films are at actually drawing interesting characters. Despite the closeness to their protagonists the immediacy of the style suggests, many films of the sub-genre just want warm bodies to screech, cry into the camera and stumble through the dark, giving them as little depth or actual character as the slasher genre did at the worst of times. If you're in luck as a viewer these films can still do something with their cardboard cut-outs, of course, yet it's a pleasant surprise to find a POV movie that is so explicitly character-based.

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Siren (2010)

Not to be confused with all those other Sirens.

Rachel (Anna Skellern), her rather jerky boyfriend Ken (Eoin Macken) and Rachel's old college flame Marco (Anthony Jabre) are going on a yachting trip around some islands off the coast of Tunisia (I think). There's a certain amount of tension in the air, because Rachel and Ken don't really seem of one mind about the direction their relationship is heading in, while Marco still has a major crush on Rachel.

While cruising (or whatever it is that boats do) around an island, Marco spots a man in obvious need of help. Trying to get him on board, the not-that-intrepid sailor also manages to damage the yacht enough to ensure he and his friends will be stuck for at least a day or two. That's only a minor problem for now anyway: the new guest is of much greater immediate import, bleeding from his ears and ranting and raving in French as he does. He falls down dead soon enough, though.

Ken has the bright idea to not take the dead body back to the authorities for fear that he and his friends will be held responsible for the death. So, obviously, it's off to the island to bury the body. It's absolutely reasonable, honestly.

On the island, the trio meets a girl calling herself Silka (Tereza Srbova). She doesn't talk much, and says she doesn't remember a thing about what happened to her or if she even knew the dead guy, but everyone fastly takes a shine on her, which ratchets the sexual tension up another notch. A night of drinking and some rather uncanny singing (did you know the Siren's Song is in English?) ends in off-screen sex between Silka and Rachel, and some unpleasant waking dreams for the boys.

Silka is quite obviously the siren of myth, and she really hasn't much use for men except as murder victims, but she has better plans for Rachel.

Andrew Hull's Siren is a surprisingly decent movie. It's not the most intellectually demanding horror film I've seen, but it's really trying its best to ground its supernatural threat in the psychology of its characters, and though that psychology isn't all that original or surprising, the film still beats your basic hack and slash by miles. Given how many of the film's psychological underpinnings are based on the characters' unspoken and un-acted on sexual desires, I found it a bit surprising Hull didn't decide to go into a more sleazy direction. There's a bit of very tame sex, lots of tense staring and a bit of snogging on screen, but for a film that is about a supernatural creature using and abusing sexuality, it's all very low-key. Perhaps that's an attempt to stay classy. After all, it is really not difficult to imagine how including a lot of sex scenes done in the wrong style could easily drag the film in the direction of the unintentionally funny. However, the film's coyness seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. Now, Siren avoids the ridiculous, but through this avoidance also keeps itself from the potential of becoming actually erotic horror.

Still, Hull manages to create some moments of erotic tension - therefore many more than many other horror films trying to be erotic do - and is also pretty good at staging the fast deterioration of his characters' ability to tell what's real from that what's imagined while still keeping the plot coherent. The latter is so often the point where contemporary supernatural horror fails that this alone makes the film commendable; Siren's air of assured, though not spectacular, professionalism in its basic filmmaking skills is a nice bonus.

The acting's on the level too, never spectacular, but convincing enough even in those moments where truly bad performances would drag the film down. Although it's quite beyond me why you'd want to cast the less able of your two lead actresses as the siren character. The siren, after all, should just burst with charisma or an air of the otherworldly. It's probably a Slavic cheekbone thing I wouldn't understand.

However, all the film's minor flaws do not detract from a simple fact: Siren is pretty good at being the small, unassuming horror film that it is, and - while it's never going to be called a classic - it's a bit closer to the concept of the uncanny than many of its peers.

 

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