Fantastic!
Dreadfully Boring
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
View MoreThere is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
View MoreEduardo Sanchez is emerging as the more talented of the Blair Witch directing duo. The other, Daniel Myrick, helmed the disappointments The Believers and Solstice but rebounded with the interesting The Objective. After the enjoyable but slightly uneven Altered, Sanchez follows up with the creepy but flawed Seventh Moon. Really the only thing that keeps this from being a four star flick is the overabundance of unnecessary shaky cam tactics. In the Blair Witch it was tolerable, but here it makes no sense. We can clearly see the creatures attacking our main characters several times during the movie, so there's no need to employ all the shaky cam shenanigans to try to disorient the viewer. Besides that, everything else is quite effective. The remote locale is pretty spooky and you really do feel like you could be hopelessly lost in a place like that. Sanchez is great at this motif and it was present in Blair Witch and somewhat in Altered. Amy Smart screaming at the top of her lungs does get old after a little bit, but it doesn't distract too much from a fun but forgettable little foray into indie horror.
View MoreI'm not sure why there's this horrible fondness as of late for using hand-held steadycams, but it certainly makes an almost unwatchable mess of what is a very good story, very good acting, and seemingly a good production.The story itself is an engaging one: honeymooners trapped in remote China with the undead seeking their lives. It's strongly steeped in Chinese mysticism, and had me from the get go.The acting was really good. I'd never have thought someone like Amy Smart could pull off a role like this, and she did a great job.Unfortunately, the use of shaky cam just detracts so much from the movie that parts of it are almost incomprehensible. Directors need to realize that this particular technique is being OVERDONE and makes for really bad cinema.Hopefully this trend will soon fade... Otherwise you can't help but wonder how many more movies will be ruined by this technique.
View MoreI'm unable to watch this all the way through because the jiggling camera induced a migraine of Biblical proportions, but the pattern is clear anyway.Two honeymooners, Tim Chiou and Amy Smart, are being driven by an older man named Ping to a remote village but Ping gets lost and stops the car in a spot that is close to a haunted village, or so he says. He leaves the car to get direction and disappears.Chiou and Smart squirm with impatience and finally exit the vehicle themselves to retrieve Ping. The structures in the village are all dark, as is everything else, and the only light comes from Chiou's flashlight.I give the film points for its attempt at hybridization, crossing the cheap American horror movie with a Chinese milieu. I also give it points for being brave enough to try such a stunt on a budget that would not have provided a month's worth of gerbil food.And that's about it. It doesn't appear to me that the dialog was more than just sketched in. Much of the dialog sounds improvised, in the way that John Cassavetes' dialog was improvised, a way that never held any appeal for me -- "What do you mean?" "What do you mean, 'what do you mean?'" Sometimes improvisation can be successfully pulled off when you're using someone who knows his business. Try Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris." But here, neither of the two principles is able to pull it off.And that wobbling, hand-held camera! I curse the day MTV was born.
View Moredon't wast your money, this movie sucks. the movie starts very slow and really never catches up. the story line could have been good, but the movie its self was awful! almost all of it was shot in the dark to the point where you cant see whats going on. if there is a "grade C or d" movie, this should be it. i had never heard of it, was in movie store and seen it was a ghost house production(which i am a HUGE fan of) with Amy smart, i thought it had to be good. truth is, it's not at all. it was like they had a 1,000 dollars to shoot it, and they used 500. i fell a sleep in the middle(no joke!!!) i have to say this is the first ghost house movie i have seen that i didn't like(in fact hate). well Amy smart must be hard up for roles, if she was not, she is now...
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