Something like this could have proposed an interesting moment in the film, but it’s passed up in favor of having the two guys whale on each other for a bit. But why should I automatically dislike this guy? He’s just trying to survive, no different than our “hero”.
So they are essentially fighting to survive - they each want to subdue the other and put the body outside to distract the monster. Oh shit, one guy is down! OK, Amy doesn’t seem upset, so it must be the other guy.”Īctually, my one issue with the script is this scene - they are fighting because the monsters need to eat something (so they think anyway), i.e. It must be her husband and that random guy who showed up. “OK, two people seem to be fighting, neither of them are blond so I guess it’s not Amy Smart. why can’t WE know these things? We end up understanding what is happening based on the process of elimination. Amy Smart’s character knows she’s in the woods, and SHE knows there’s a white-painted monster in front of her. it has all the makings of a good survival horror film - but as Mike Nelson once commented over Giant Spider Invasion, it’s a movie "that takes the bold step of not including the audience.” Disorienting us for a scene or two makes sense but for the entire film does not. They get lost, they bicker, they’re disoriented. The couple is on their honeymoon, their tour guide gets lost and disappears after going to ask for directions, and then shit gets freaky when these white humanoid monsters begin to hunt them. It’s actually a pretty scary plot ironically (or intentionally), it’s sort of Blair Witch meets The Descent. You know, for a movie about a goddamn full moon, you’d think it would play a part in the film, such as, I dunno, lighting up the scene.īut like I said, the script isn’t the problem. And even when you do catch a glimpse, the camera shakes around before you can really start to process what it is you are seeing.
You can’t tell who is who when two guys begin fighting you can’t see what Amy Smart is shrieking at hell, you can’t even see a structure that they stumble upon and begin pounding at its door. But when you combine them and present the entire film like that (literally) it just becomes a frustrating experience. The Descent certainly didn’t suffer from darkened images, and Blair didn’t suffer from their refusal to use a tripod. Now all of this stuff is fine in small doses. You DO know that Amy Smart is incredibly beautiful and thus folks in the crowd might want to get a decent look at her every now and then, right? Hell, I don’t think the guy playing her husband ever gets a traditional closeup. Later, the car gets covered in blood and we watch scenes through the same windows, now offering a few holes of visibility in between blood smears/streaks. An early scene set during sundown hours is shot from outside of a car with rolled up, highly reflective windows, so the only time you can see our characters is when the reflection of a dark tree passes through. Sanchez is also obsessed with obscuring the image. You know how sometimes I joke that Peter Hyams thought that x director’s movie was too dark? Shit, x director would say THIS movie was too dark. Everything else is like 90% darkness with only highlights and eyeballs to provide any sort of semblance as to what we are looking at.
There are maybe three total minutes in the film with fully visible images. And since many establishing shots are simply of the damn moon, you can really see how shaky it is when the only visible object on screen is darting around like a goddamn kid with a laser light.īut worse than the shaki-cam (which doesn’t usually bother me) is the complete lack of light in the film. Even simple establishing shots look like they are shot with a handheld camera that has been zoomed in as far as possible, by a guy standing on a truck that is careening down a hill. You remember how people were complaining about Blair’s camerawork making them sick and stuff? That movie is positively Kevin Smith-ian steady compared to this one. But oddly, Eduardo Sanchez’s Seventh Moon suffers not from the script this time (as all of their other solo films have), but with its presentation. Come on guys, you gotta get back together, or else we will never know if it was just a fluke or if you’re really the Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman of horror movies doing decent work without but only truly creating magic with the other (with Dan Myrick’s The Objective being that one Air Supply song Steinman wrote, I guess, though that might be stretching the comparison). And now I begin my, what, 5th review that starts off with how much I love Blair Witch Project and in turn, how rather disappointed I am with one of the directors’ subsequent films.
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