Customer Reviews

Summer's Moon

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The movie starts off very slow. There isn't alot of tension or edge of your seat moments. There is not alot of gore or violence. Summer is looking for her father and ends up meeting a boy who she hooks up with and ends up spending the night with him. Things appear normal until his mother is outside his door listening to him fornicate with Summer. The "creepiness" the boy possesses is his love for gardening; however, it never really explains why he must have garden angels. It explains his reasoning for his garden but not the angels. The mother and son seem to have a "thing" going on between them (yes, they kissed). The father is more sadistic than the son and simply kills women for amusement. The twist was predictable since the film didn't focus on other characters. I did find the end rather amusing and ended up giggling since it had a somewhat happy ending.

summer's moon is very refined, great plot and original. Moves at very good pace and ends with a flair. Not hard core blood bath type flick but has a plot or stoey line, can you inagine that in a horror film. very nicely done. We need more of these .

This movie could have been good, but the acting was SO bad I turned it off after 20 minutes (I can't even believe I watched it that long) I was hoping something would change, the plot was a good, but COULD not even get into any of the characters. I don't recommend this movie.

I am a big fan of Ashley Greene, she is so beautiful. I didn't expect much from this movie but was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed the odd storyline, never done before to my knowledge. I was not a big fan of most of the dialogue, especially between "Summer" and "Tom" but overall it was an ok movie. I would recommend it to anyone who just likes to look at Ashley Greene or likes odd, low budget, B-rated scary movies. Just don't expect too much and you will not be disappointed :}Summer's Moon

This movie had one of my favorite actresses from Twilight in it that made her very dissapointing to me. The writers of this movie gave her no justice of her talents as an actress. One word for this movie "HORRIBLE" and not horror. These writers need to be fired and banned from ever working on another movie again, especially on Chiller TV.

Ashley Greene looks phenomenal in a casual style in this film - much better than she does in Twilight where she wears weird baby doll shirts and just looks stiff.

So here we have this very cute and very pretty young female hitching in what is obviously suburban/rural Canada (Canada just has a look). She seems to be able to take care of herself and ends up spending the night with a pretty boy stranger who turns out to be a serial killer with a killing room in his basement. And his mother is fine with it.

It's all about Ashley surviving a family of sickos including the patriarch played by Rosemary's Baby - yeah, Lucifer, Prince of Lies, Stephen McHattie himself who like John Glover is a standout at playing evil and scary.

In my opinion, this movie is well worth watching.

This movie was a lot better than I thought it would be! I enjoyed the performances of Ashley Greene and Peter Mooney. I thought they had good (albeit twisted) chemistry. I'm not sure why they decided to call the movie "Summer's Moon" as it has nothing to do with a moon. (probably to capitalize on New Moon?) Summer's Blood would've made more sense... although that would've made it sound like a gory horror film, which it certainly isn't.

The most enjoyable performance was by Stephen McHattie, who doesn't arrive until the last 20 minutes, but he definitely makes his presence known. I've watched the movie multiple times and I always look forward to the moment he comes crashing on to the screen.

SUMMER'S MOON (aka: SUMMER'S BLOOD) starts out rather slowly, seemingly going nowhere. Thankfully, things pick up around the mid-point, sending this one into berserker-ville! Ashley Greene's character is believable (while having little to do) as the tough, cynical daughter, searching for her father. Her captors, consisting of yet one more family of weirdos, is fairly menacing. At first, I thought that SUMMER'S MOON was going to be another dull schlocker w/ a captive and her lunatic kidnapper. Well, I was right, sort of... What saves MOON are the veteran actors who play the eeevil parents (Barbara Niven and Stephen McHattie). They are excellent in their roles, especially McHattie who nearly foams at the mouth w/ sadistic glee! Though the "twist" can almost be predicted by opening credits end, it still adds to the story, making the final third quite enjoyable. Also, the climax is great, and makes up for a lot of the early tedium. Ms. Greene redeems herself nicely...

Having bascially tracked this movie down online the very first moment the least bit of information was coming out about it, you could imagine the excitement I felt when I saw it in the New Releases section of Walmart. I fell in love with the trailer, and it looked bloody and a total gore-fest. Which was one of the many reasons I wanted to watch it so much. The next day, I talked to my mom about buying it with my own money. I had to have permission first, considering the fact it was Rated R and that I'm two years under eighteen. I told her the plot. And, believe it or not, I was allowed to buy it! As soon as I got to it the next time, I grabbed it and was ready to watch it alone and soon as I got home. I was kind of disappointed. The acting was a bit cheesy, and the large amount of useless curse words were ridiculous. The sex scene in the begining was a little longer than expected, but it was over in under a minute. Not a big part in it at all.

***This may or may not contain spoilers***

The mother watching her son have sex with a guest she didn't even know about was disturbing. The next morning, as Summer (main character) steals some money from a jar, Tom (other main character; woman's son) appears by the kitchen opening. Flirting at first but when he doesn't let her leave, she begins to feel offensive, pulling a hand gun out of her bag. The mother comes behind her and knocks Summer unconscious. Ouch. Tom says he was just joking that she couldn't leave. Summer wakes up in a darkend basement chained down only in her red t-shirt and black panties in a box of dirt. What the ---? She tries to escape, but, she fails. Tom appears. Summer threatens him and Tom says "Shh! You're upsetting Amber," Who is Amber? You may be thinking. Well, the camera turns to the corner of the basement to find a half-dead girl. Dirty, bloody, and unable to speak. Tom also has a collection of human skulls on a shelf (that is not a joke).

Tom has a "human garden". He keeps women in the basement and over time they are either murdered or die. Tom thinks women are the most beautiful flower of them all (also not a joke). Believing he doesn't even hurt them. At all. Summer spends days trapped in the half-dark basement with dying Amber in the corner. To hurry this up, the family ends up being all serial killers, and if Summer wants to live, she must join them. It is pretty bloody, and it shows very disturbing things. So I wouldn't recommend anyone fourteen and under to watch it. It is full of drama, action, suspense, and a sense of thrilling horror. While it wasn't what I had expected, it truly lives up to the "disturbing" quality.

If you want to know how twisted this movie really is . . . then do watch it.

Summer's Moon (Lee Demabre, 2009)

Like most obsessive film snobs (at least, most obsessive film snobs I know), I keep best- and worst-of lists. I'm a little crazier than most, and have been unduly influenced by guys like David Thomson and Peter Travers, so I recently expanded my hundred-best list to a thousand-best list. (New movies get added to it at least once a month. There's so much out there to watch!) The hundred-worst list, however, is a lot less changeable. It's all half-a-star and zero-star movies, and despite my love of pure, unadulterated crap, I don't see all that many movies that are that horrible. For seven years, Lee Demabre's third film, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, occupied the #2 spot on that list. (It was supplanted a couple of months ago by Brian Yeo's horrid Zombies Ate My Neighbours: The Movie, coincidentally also a Canadian film. Predictably, it now resides at #3.) It is so far beyond terrible that better critics than I will have to invent new words for how beyond terrible it is. Which begs the question of why I'm sitting here writing this reminiscence while watching Demabre's most recent movie, Summer's Moon. And there's one answer: Stephen McHattie. I love Stephen McHattie, and will watch him in anything, from Gray Lady Down (which I saw in the theater! At nine years old!) to A History of Violence to Kaw, and every movie I've seem him in, well, at least he's good.

Plot: Summer (Twilight's Ashley Greene) has grown up without a father, but she wants to find him, thanks to her deteriorating relationship with her mother. So, armed with nothing but an old photograph and a vague idea of where he lives, she heads north. All well and good until she runs into smooth-talking, sexy Tom Hoxey (Family First's Peter Mooney), who ends up being a psycho who has a thing for keeping a "garden" of lovely young transients in his basement, aided and abetted by his equally nutzoid mom (the wonderful Barbara Niven, probably best remembered these days for a role on the TV series Pensacola: Wings of Gold). She's been willing to put up with him doing it for a while, but just before taking Summer, he got a little greedy and took a girl from town, Amber (Carny's Dani Kind), whose father (The Bone Collector's Peter Michael Dillon) has just been sprung from prison and is now looking for her. And to top it all off, Tom's wayward father (McHattie) is coming home...

If you can't see the big plot twist coming five minutes into this movie, you haven't watched enough movies like this. It's painfully obvious, and that's one of the movie's biggest weaknesses; Conradt (a veteran writer of Lifetime Original Movie fare) and Hogan (who wrote the much, much better Lie Still) didn't give us anywhere near a large enough cast to throw in the red herrings necessary to mask the identity of Summer's father. That said, once the writers give us the Big Reveal, which comes about halfway through the movie, and they stop trying to build the ineffective mystery, it actually starts getting good, in a twisted, envelope-pushing kind of way that one doesn't normally see in movies that are essentially made for television (while it did play a few festivals, it's essentially a straight-to-DVD flick that got picked up right quick by Chiller).

I've seen a few reviews for the movie from gushing fans that I'd have to say go way, way too far. "...[O]ne of the most deranged, shocking, and twisted family thrillers ever made..." says the Imagination Films promo material, which makes me wonder if they've ever seen Street Trash or Motel Hell, or, for that matter, that scene in Deliverance from which this sort of thing normally stems. An IMDB reveiwer (who stamps him- or her-self as a Twi-hard from the outset) says s/he "[will] record it on a disk with Thirteen, Deep Winter, and Lords of Dogtown". I haven't seen Deep Winter, but I can attest that this is not as bad as the other two.

Obviously a must for Twi-hards thanks to the Ashley Greene connection, and Stephen McHattie fans will find his over-the-top performance here enjoyable (I kind of thought of Gant Hoxey as the anti-Grant Mazzey, for those of you who recognize the name). Others will probably find it take-or-leave. Demabre has come a long, long way since Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, but he still has a long, long way to go. **