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A honeymooning couple fall victim to roaming ghouls in the Chinese countryside when they find themselves in the middle of an ancient ritual.

During the seventh lunar cycle the gates to Hell are opened and the dead are free to roam among the living, or at least that’s the Chinese Myth that Eduardo Sanchez’ film Seventh Moon opens with.  We follow an American couple on the touristy fun of their honeymoon, walking tours of the local markets, participation in the ceremony everyone is taking part in, and they’re having a great time.  Melissa (Amy Smart) and her husband Yul (Chiou) are meant to be headed to Yul’s relatives’ remote village, and having spent the day drinking and fooling around, they both fall asleep in the car on the drive, trusting their tour-guide Ping (Dennis Chan) to safely shepherd them to their destination.

Melissa wakes up eventually, night has fallen and they’re still in the middle of nowhere, Ping is now lost and tells her that he’s going to go find directions at the nearby village.  It never occurs to her that it’s strange to not drive to the village, but whatever, she waits for over an hour with no sign of him, then wakes Yul when a mysterious gonging sound draws her attention.  They head into the village and find numerous animals penned up or otherwise tied and staked as if for an offering, the village appears deserted save for the remains of the incense offerings made earlier in the day.  Voices from the nearby buildings repeating the same things over and over (and not understood by Yul, who’s Cantonese is revealed to be pretty bad), Melissa begins to get spooked, so they head back to the cab, only to find it covered in what one hopes is ‘only’ the blood of an animal.

Yul thinks that the villagers were yelling some kind of invitation, but isn’t sure to whom, so they take the car and try to retrace Ping’s route, rather hopeless as both of them were asleep.  This leads to bickering, but they’re trying to stay calm when a strange broadcast mumbling about blood sacrifices and offerings is picked up by the radio and they nearly hit what appears to be a nude man darting across the road.  They’re of course stuck in the ditch, so Yul tries to get the car moving while Melissa drives, while sounds like a pig being slaughtered ring out form the nearby jungle.  This leads into more bickering about who should’ve been paying attention, why they’re even in the area, etc., all the stupid stress things that people fight over at idiotic times, then they discover a wounded man in the road who croaks out that “they” are coming.  They grab him and pile into the car, which is promptly set upon by a pack of nude pale creatures, vaguely human but very unearthly.  They careen off into the nearby field to try and get away, but the car is soon stuck again, sending them off on foot into an increasingly dangerous night.

Seventh Moon has had a lot made about the style in which it was shot, which is hand-held and outdoors, at night under a full moon and not much else in the way of lighting.  I’d have to agree that I was at something of a loss for a good deal of detail for the latter part of the film, which is both frustrating and obviously a stylistic choice made by Sanchez.  I don’t think it was necessarily a great decision, as I’d certainly like to see more of what’s happening in the film, but as far as feeling like it puts the viewer into the film, lost and squinting in the rural countryside of China, job well done.  I would have to say that my bigger quibble with the film, beyond the stylistic choices would be the feeling that aside from some of the running around here and there, you could easily tell the same story as a 30 minute episode of a television program, or as an episode of Masters Of Horror in whatever iteration it turns up as next.  The film felt like a breezy short premise drawn out to feature length, which in turn made the lack of visual stimulation all that more frustrating, because if it’s not all that engaging story-wise, at least give me something to look at, y’know?

Seventh Moon is released as part of the second wave of Ghost House Underground pictures, and features a commentary from Eduardo Sanchez and Amy Smart, as well as three short featurettes that collectively run around 30 minutes worth of behind the scenes material, entitled, respectively: Ghosts Of Hong Kong: The Making of Seventh Moon, The Pale Figures, and Mysteries Of The Seventh Lunar Month.  Trailers for this and the first wave of Ghost House releases are also included, as well as an odd series of Ghost House Micro Videos setting portions of the current trailers over some fairly generic heavy metal music.

I’m generally a pretty easy mark for Amy Smart’s latest, but this just wasn’t as engaging as I’d hoped it would be, and in giving me so little to look at it just lost my interest even further as the film went on.

Maybe a rental, if you’re just dying to know if it’s as murky as everyone says, but you’ve been warned.

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