Now available on DVD
Cast:
Amy Smart as Melissa
Tim Chiou as Yul
Dennis Chan as Ping
Directed by Eduardo Sanchez
Review:
Talk about a weird trip through the Chinese countryside.
They have more than just manufacturing prowess and cheap labor in China. They also have a slew of white, naked, undead-devil men running around the countryside that love to terrorize travelers that happen to stumble into their land.
There must be something about having the bad guys painted in colors in Asian horror that I just don’t understand. First, it was Japan’s little blue kids in the Ju-on films (known as The Grudge here in the States), then the all-black kid in Ringu (known as The Ring in the States), and now we have these white undead in Seventh Moon.
Much like these other films, we have no idea why the men in Seventh Moon are white, or naked, or deranged, or have claws all over their body, or why they seem to hate those that aren’t white or naked and hunger to kill them. One thing is for sure, they aren’t cannibals because they just kill the people and then turn them into white, naked people.
The only clue we get is at the beginning with text on the screen that describes a Chinese myth that on the full moon of the seventh lunar month, the dead are free to walk among the living. We learn more about this myth in the special features about Buddha unleashing the gates of hell and the undead looking for the living because they hate them. But in the film, we don’t learn that at all and there is no real purpose here other than to just kill, kill, kill.
That’s fine and dandy. Many horror films (especially slashers) are built on this premise. I just wish it were scarier.
Seventh Moon follows a recently married couple visiting Japan in order to meet the groom’s grandparents. But when they are taken off the wrong path to their destination, they end up in the wrong part of the Chinese countryside.
Soon they are stalked by these naked, white zombies that want to kill them and convert them into their ranks of the undead. In no short order, it becomes a desperate struggle to stay alive. However, too much of the film relies on the hiding from these zombies â in a locked car, in a locked shack, in a house in the countryside, name it. Sure, the first time it is a bit unnerving but after a half hour, it becomes tiresome and completely not scary.
The couple can’t hide forever and when her husband is taken by the undead, she goes to find him but that means visiting the cave where the creatures apparently just hang out waiting for the seventh lunar moon to happen and where they take their victims to convert them into white, naked dudes.
It isn’t that Seventh Moon isn’t a well done production or that the acting is atrocious, the storyline just drags and when we finally get some action you’ve already started thumbing through the cable channels to see what’s on that’s better.
Extras:
The Seventh Moon DVD contains a number of great extras. In fact, it is the reason the DVD gets a better score than it should if it were only the movie.
“Ghost of Hong Kong: The Making of Seventh Moon” gives some really good behind-the-scenes footage of some of the stunt preparation in the film, the costume application of the white, undead dudes and a very odd ceremonial pig slicing (it was already dead and cooked) in order to provide good luck to the production. Some of the more interesting scenes come from when the crew is filming in a small village and they piss off one of the leaders with their strange writings and shooting in an actual cave and the interesting things that must be done to do so.
“The Pale Figures” featurette goes in-depth on the undead white dudes and what went about in the process to make them all spooky and crazy. The dudes had to run naked in the forest for a number of days with just a codpiece. There is a bit of explanation into the reason why the undead are stalking these people in here â they are a result of Budhha opening the gates of hell and letting them run free. And the village is where these undead prey on the living. Fed up with sacrificing their own to these creatures, they lure people from the cities out there to get killed. It would have been nice to have had this bit of info in the movie but at least it is somewhere.
“Mysterious of the Seventh Lunar Month” is a documentary style look at what the myth of the hungry undead is actually all about and again we get info we should have gotten in the film. But this is I believe a special feature made for this DVD although it has been doctored in post-production to look like something from the 70s. It is a cool look and a very spooky featurette â almost better than the film itself and I love the idea of putting an effort into the extras to make them more than just an ordinary interview here or there or some behind the scenes footage.
Other special features include the original trailer, other stuff from Lionsgate trailers and the Ghost House Underground Micro Videos.
