Seventh Moon

In Seventh Moon, a couple is spending their honeymoon in China. The movie opens at a street festival to honor the spirits of ghost legends, and they’re checking out the activities, burning papers with wishes/prayers on them, and sampling local food and drink. They meet back up with their tour guide/driver and he drives them into the country and gets lost. Their driver goes to find help at this old creepy house and doesn’t return after an hour, so the couple goes and looks for him in the dark.
The house they stop at appears to be some sort of random slaughter house with cages for animals around the perimeter, but there is blood everywhere—turns out the animals were sacrifices to keep the spirits away. The couple gets back in the missing driver’s car and takes off, but they don’t know how they got to the slaughterhouse. Frankly, the wife is a bitch that has issue with her husband falling asleep during the multiple-hour drive and blames him for them being lost. Then she gets all smart-assed and impatient when he tries to find a radio station and has trouble translating it for her. A random human–shaped figure runs out of the woods in front of their (stolen) car and they swerve off the road and get stuck. They get unstuck and begin arguing again. She blames him for being Chinese and wanting to go to China for their honeymoon—told you she was a bitch.

They end up hitting a random person on the road and they throw the guy into the back of the (still stolen) car. They start to hear things in the woods and these pale-skinned things end up chasing them. They come across another house in the woods and go inside. The guy they hit attacks them and tries to get the couple to sacrifice themselves, or those pale-skinned creatures are going to come in and get them all. There’s lots of yelling and punching and running and darkness and suspense and bone crunching. Then it gets weird(er).

The spooky creatures hear a whispering voice that makes them leave, but makes the husband think it’s a good idea to go to find their lair. There are candles everywhere, and chanting. Then the couples’ clothes start coming off, like some creepy monster orgy. Turns out this capturing of tourists is a regular thing for Chinese monsters. Who would have known?! The husband is still needed for the sacrifice, to save his wife from the monsters. But will his sacrifice really save her? I won’t ruin it for you.

This film is very dark—and I don’t mean the humor, I mean the lighting. It made CSI look like it was filmed on a sunny day at the equator at noon. I spent several minutes reversing the film to rewatch scenes that I was unable to make out. There are long sequences of no action but heavy breathing, which I’m assuming were meant to build suspense, but ended up making the film longer and boring. The camera work is really shaky since it’s handheld (this film is from the director of The Blair Witch Project—you’d think the guy made enough money off that film to buy a tripod or something). The plot itself wasn’t clear, which was magnified exponentially by the aforementioned lighting issue and unsteady camera work. I don’t even have any suggestions as to how to make this film better (aside from brightening it a notch or two)—it’s just a lot of sub-par things compounded to make a pretty poor film. Personally, I was more scared by the trailer than the actual film—the trailer makes this film look like it will scare the hell out of you, but it didn’t even come close.