Check out Sarah's early review of Blood Moon. She really likes werewolf movies.
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| "Someone take me for a walk!!! I've been cooped up inside all day!!" |
Since many werewolf movies are attached to the cookie-cutter
stigma in Hollywood it's hard to efficiently separate each from the pack, but
if there's anything Uncork'd Entertainment (Blood Moon's production studio) has
taught us, there's an infinity if different combinations to create a stellar
experience for the viewer. Based on the old-timey notion of Indians vs western
gunslingers, Blood Moon is only a peg in the totem pole of
horror-werewolf films, but it's Old West type platform gives it a boost to
propel it past most other dime-a-dozen trope movies.
The scenery is laid out as a One Million Ways To Die In
The West-type loop, minus the gags that are generally used as clock-milking
strategies and replacing them with reliably tame gags and one-liners. A mere
thirty minutes or so only deal with the physicality of the werewolves and the
rest is all speculation and story-building. It seems that the arch nemesis of
the film varies as the movie progresses, but ultimately lands on the arrival of
the “skinwalkers”, which is an equated hybrid of a Navajo person with the
ability to turn into any animal that they desire.
Only the second werewolf film to be shot in the UK, and since
its festival release in 2015, Blood Moon has quickly become a viable fan
favorite, probably because it encompasses so many interwoven storylines. The
main cast is a mixture of wildly talented actors, with The Woman in Black’s Shaun
Dooley, George Blagden (TVs Vikings), Anna Skellern (The Descent II)
and Corey Johnson (Captain Phillips). Jeremy Wooding directs from
an Alan Wightman script.
Blood Moon successfully combines multiple angles of
what one would consider a typical werewolf film and does so with superb writing
and a clean choke hold on what is usually considered normal for its genre. It's
packed with layers of female empowerment in a world where they're typically
damsels in distress, primitively suggesting that they key to surviving an all-out
Navajo “skinwalker” apocalypse begins and ends at the hands of a woman.
Blood Moon is released in the U.S. on September 1st.
-Sarah Shafer
