Not my kind of big hairy moon movies….

So much for my decision to stream this werewolf double feature. The hints of werewolf excitement in Dark Moon Rising and Blood Moon don’t even add up to one fun werewolf film.

DARK MOON RISING (2015)

If Twilight were a gory horror fantasy made by someone on drugs, it would probably be Dark Moon Rising. Trendy electro tracks and a few early scenes focusing on college friends give the illusion that this is going to be a cheesy good, Cursed-esque horror flick. But then comes the plot….

A town is being threatened by a werewolf version of a Lost Boys clan. Meanwhile, there’s a pretty boy who looks super homo EMO and is going through a mysterious change. Luckily, there’s a female romantic interest around to hold his hand and make sure he grows his hair in the right direction. We also have Eric Roberts as some sort of drunken werewolf trainer suffering from war flashbacks. Endless disjointed scenes baffle rather than give any sense of what the fuck is going on.

There are wolves, wolfmen, and big, cartoonish CGI werewolves—not sure if they were all just varying states of transformation of the same beings. Loads of astral-like new age sequences cross into an artsy, fantasy film realm that just befuddles my simple “me werewolf, me kill” mentality. The main werewolf threat is this hot-bodied dude who would be super sexy if he didn’t appear to be whacked out on bath salts.

Eventually, he and his pack battle the homo EMO kid and his friends. Supposedly, this is part of a trilogy. I’m advising myself in writing to skip the remaining films.

BLOOD MOON (2014)

It’s 1887—which is a movie’s way of saying, “I’d highly advise you to stop watching right now, Dan.” But I didn’t. I sat through nearly an hour of people in ridiculous period piece costumes, toting guns and talking all old-fashioned. Some people in a saloon are held captive by some outlaws. I really should have stopped watching. I actually just said saloon and outlaws in a blog. Of course, I already threw away all my dignity when I said “befuddled” above.

Finally, at the 50-minute mark, a body is dragged past the front door, and it’s a gory mess. Soon after, there’s a jump scare as the werewolf huffs, puffs, and tries to blow their saloon down. The massive werewolf is fierce as hell looking, and not CGI. You can tell, because his mouth stays frozen in an open snarl like he’s a piece of taxidermy an 1887 cowboy would mount over his fireplace.

A plan is hatched to bait and kill the werewolf and eventually, horses pulling a stagecoach make the werewolf into road kill. First of all, if horses saw a werewolf twice as big as them standing in the road, they would take a detour. Second, horses and a stagecoach wouldn’t be able to smoothly run over an enormous werewolf like it was a speed bump. The horses would be glue, the stagecoach would be kindling, and the big bad wolf would live happily ever after—cooking horse meat over a fire for dinner every night.

Thankfully, Blood Moon doesn’t appear to be the first of a trilogy.