[yasr_overall_rating]
A group of shape-shifting werewolves descend upon a small town in search of a girl who is re-born once every 2000 years. She holds the key to their survival and all will die who stand in their way.
Eric Roberts’ films should come with an “Enter At Your Own Risk” warning. At the time of writing this review, the actor boasts – get this – 259 titles on his resume, with 34 currently in production, and 11 more in development, amongst them the bound-to-be-classics “Santa’s Boot Camp” and “Sicilian Vampire.” It would take over a month of marathoning through Eric Roberts films, if you were to watch them back-to-back; by the time you reached “A Talking Cat!?!,” you would most probably have given up on cinema forever and/or committed yourself to a mental institution.
Eric Roberts was once fantastic in Andrey Konchalovsky’s 1985 thriller “Runaway Train”. The hard-working man joins the mighty pantheon of once-promising American actors, who, after giving at least one mesmerizing performance, somehow lost their path. There’s Michael Madsen, and his razor-blade dance in “Reservoir Dogs” – despite Tarantino keeping him afloat in intermittent, high-profile projects, Madsen seems to say yes to every horrendous script that lands on his agent’s desk (“Vigilante Diaries,” anyone? No? How about “Lady Psycho Killer?”) Then there’s Tom Sizemore: after his unforgettable turn in “True Romance”, he went through some, ahem, personal stuff, and now his most resent project in production is… “Halloweed,” whose gimmick you can probably guess. I won’t even go into tracing the careers of Gary Busey or Tony Todd – you get the idea.
You also may have noticed that I spent the first two paragraphs avoiding writing about “Dark Moon Rising.” That’s because the career of Eric Roberts (and his revered peers) opens doors to an endlessly more fascinating and complex discussion than anything this lackluster effort can potentially warrant. Roberts is only in a few relatively brief sequences, but his manic scenery-chewing is more vicious than any of the film’s werewolves, at least providing those scenes with a “so-bad-it’s-hilariously-bad” vibe. It’s difficult to figure out whether his character – a werewolf hunter / Vietnam vet – is drunk, or whether Roberts showed up on set annihilated, which makes observing this fiasco moderately fun. The rest of the film is unwatchable.
Where do I start? Do I go into analyzing how the opening scene establishes the prevailing murkiness of the film, which evidently makes the terrible effects – along with the shoddy acting and blurry cinematography – less noticeable? Should I talk about the dialogue, chock-full of lines that were apparently written by an inebriated monkey (“Don’t let your mind create sympathy for the beast” is one of my favorites – and most deeply felt – statements)?
I could talk about the opening credits that spell out the actors’ names, along with their characters’ names (because you will surely not remember them); or the reoccurring “WTF” “mind-surfing” sequences, that plunge the protagonists into a theater-stage-like setting, with a blatantly fake moon and even more blatantly fake floating critters, who vaguely resemble the forest spirits from “Princess Mononoke” or the, um, forest spirits in “Avatar.” I was compelled to discuss the soundtrack, a jarringly intrusive fusion of Gothic rock, drum-and-bass and ear-splitting dub-step.
But what’s the point? Everything in this film – from the central vacuous hole of a performance by Cameron White, who imbues his goth/hipster character with zero personality, to the abundant horror-film cliches that pile on top of each other in a rapid succession – was clearly made by amateurs with no real understanding of narrative structure, character development, forward momentum, lighting, effects, and so on. The climactic showdown (letdown?) at an abandoned factory with an evil guy sporting a Wolverine hairdo puts the final nail in this coffin.
Faintly resembling a very cheap version of those 1990’s Kevin Williamson “teen-slaughter” pics, “Dark Moon Rising” makes “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” look like “The Night of the Hunter” (or “Twilight” look like “Citizen Kane”, or… oh, I could go on forever). If you want to see how to make a good werewolf flick on a tight budget, you’ll be better off checking out Neil Marshall’s “Dog Soldiers.” Rest assured, that one doesn’t have Eric Roberts in it.
Available on DVD & Digital August 4th
