Under a Gibbous Moon

If you havn’t seen this movie, there’ll be some mild spoilers

In honor of Halloween, I’d figure I’d review a movie that punishes you for now honoring Halloween :)

The movie itself has a long and sorted history, I remember seeing a trailer for it a couple of years ago, but then it just disappeared into Movie Limbo. I have read various reason as to why this movie was never given a theatrical release, but regardless, they did finally release it.

The stories, together, encompass about every Halloween theme that there is: curses, serial killers, werewolves, vampires, zombies and demons.

The stories tend to inter cut themselves during each telling. In the principal’s story, the neighbor that he argues with while he is trying to bury the bodies is the same person who will be visited by Sam in the closing story. The people who almost run over the girl in the opening scene are the werewolves from the third story. These are done very unobtrusively, many you won’t realize are happening at the time. This really bring about a strong cohesiveness in what are otherwise very dissimilar tales preventing the movie from becoming merely another Tales from the Crypt type movie.

The most unique tale, by far, this the final one. Kreeg’s tale plays off as a Halloween version of A Christmas Carol. My only complaint with it, is that I would have had him desperately offer the candy bar to Sam at the end instead of him getting it almost by accident.

The Principal Wilkin’s, the serial killer, betrays your expectations of the bat, with a poisoning instead of the stabbing so strongly hinted at. His attempts to bury the bodies becomes so humorous that it seems that it is trying to offset what seems certain to be a very dark ending, but this turns out to be merely a macabre one instead. The main problem with this story is that it has a major case of fridge logic. After you see the twist ending, you start to wonder why Wilkin’s was so concerned that his son not see him burying the bodies.

The Little Red Riding hood story was played so straight that I really didn’t see the end coming, though I did think that it dragged on way to long. I didn’t time it, but it felt like the longest of all the stories and the gratuitous nudity at the end felt really really gratuitous (while there isn’t a lot of nudity in this movie all of it looks like it was placed there by studio executives as none of it has anything to do with any of the stories).

The urban legend story was the most predictable of the lot but, because I like zombie movies, I enjoyed it anyway.

After all the praise that was heaped upon this movie, I am happy to say that it is well deserved. Even the criticism that I mentioned about pale in comparison to the horror genre’s usual faults. If you are looking for a good Halloween flick for tonight, I highly recommend this one and don’t forget; don’t blow out the Jack ‘o Lantern before midnight!