Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

NateWatchesCoolMovies Summer's Moon, also given the slightly less exotic title Summer Blood, is a fascinating little family centered psycho sexual treat, starring an actress who previously hadn't ventures into such intense territory. Ashley Greene is a porcelain beauty best known for those Twilight train wrecks, and its that marketing style these filmmakers have latched onto because of her involvement. The poster has a hazy hue that almost hints at the dreaded vampiric sparkle we've come to loathe. It's picturesque to be sure, but doesn't really provide any warning to the disturbing, gritty and uncomfortably intimate nature ofnthe story. Greene plays Summer, a wayward drifter who arrives in a small bucolic burg, out to find the father she never knew. Enter the Hoxeys, an I'll adjusted family of serial killers claiming to be her long lost family, and beckoning her into depravity with all the charm and hospitality that small town folks can muster. Her brother Tom (Peter Mooney) keeps a kidnapped girl in the basement as a plaything and sleeps with his unstable mother (Barbara Nixon), and that's but a taste of the horror that Summer has waded into. The film takes on new virility when the resident patriarch Gant Hoxey blows back into town, played with visceral ferocity by veteran tough guy Stephen Mchattie. Intense is the word for this guy (ever catch his cameo in A History Of Violence? Christ), and he's a beast as Gant, Summer's estranged father, a man who functions on violence and feeds of fear. The film examines how a clan of murderers might indeed function, right down to twisted lover's spats and drama right out of an R rated Addams Family special. Greene nicely shatters her teen image by bringing us a broken protagonist who finds her dark enger through resilience and torment, the blackness that sweeps over her soul clearly visible, loomed over by Mchattie's grim reaper influence. Murder and the desire to do so is regarded as a genetic trait in this film, ed along the line of kin, generation to generation, wreaking havoc in the process. A film that I underestimated going in, a terrific horror entry that takes its it's with character and suspense, slow burning up to a spectacularly gory third act filled with tension, blood and Mchattie, that icy voiced devil who steals every scene he's in. Well worth your time.

complications123 First up, anyone reading this should be well aware that this movie is nothing but trash. And yet, there are degrees of trash. I'd rather fall in compost than rotting diapers. The acting is uneven, especially for our female lead, the camera work is dubious with its sort of floating grayness, and much of the dialogue is unnecessary, repetitive, at times inane, and narratively much is left to the imagination. The film did however hold my interest, purely because it so overtly dealt with perhaps the greatest modern taboo; incest.As other reviewers have mentioned, "Summer's Moon" walks the line between horror and thriller, but never quite commits to either making for a somewhat bland presentation. The best thing the film had going for itself was its bold and unapologetic prevalence of incest. Whereas a shock factor such as this should've been pushed to the extreme, evoking all sorts of disturbing and grotesque feelings, it's left on the backburner as sort of the "oh no!" of the movie. The implications of incest are what are so shocking and disgusting to people. These characters however are somewhat immune to it. Not ignorant of or oblivious to, but immune to. It never impacts any of the characters in the way that it would impact an audience. The implications of mother/son, father/daughter, and brother/sister are more than enough to have the film banned in several countries. "Summer's Moon" never exploits the atrocity the way it should have being that incest is such a focal point of the plot and indeed it would seem one or more characters' sole motivational force.I wish I could say that what the film ed up in the realm of psychological mayhem was made up for in gratuitous gore, but what little blood is shown isn't even as grisly as most prime time TV shows. There's never really any sense of dread or tension; certainly the script is to blame but the actors also had a very hard time emoting anything other than childish fear with such a whopping dose of abject curiosity thrown in that none of the characters are particularly convincing in their respective roles. Summer is just a little too nonchalant about being a prisoner, and Tom and Mom are just a little too aloof about keeping captives. There's just no indication that the characters themselves have any motivation, as if they had sprouted up in a vacuum and were plopped into this bizarre situation.Finally, initially significant portions of the film end up stuck with no context. The "garden" was at first a bit eerie, mysterious, weird enough I thought there might be some half-decent reveal later on, but Tom's revolving door of girl-slaves gets shoved aside with no explanation about any of it or its relevance to Summer, who is clearly serving another purpose. And while psycho-Dad was easily the best actor of the lot, what exactly was the mechanism of his lunacy? Did he methodically plan out this whole scenario just to rape his teenage daughter ad infinitum? What did ANY of the film have to do with him killing random women? What purpose did the kidnapping of the last girl play at all? So many incidents are isolated that it can be tough to piece together the arrow of causality.So, "Summer's Moon," you get a bit of a nod for diving right down into the incest, but somehow you got lost focusing on the murky reflection of the water rather than embracing it's depth and terror.

dschmeding "Summers Blood" starts out not too bad... I liked the overall look and the acting, yet there was some technical downsides on the bad dubbing and the editing became atrocious in the end with tons of senseless dissolves. What at first looks like a slow movie with a hidden secret turns into a mess of its own. The movie opens up with a hitchhiking girl ending up captured in a strange family after a pretty unconvincing one night stand. Her psycho lover keeps her in his "garden" in the basement along with another girl who just sits and babbles and then dies.You wonder about what that garden is supposed to mean, why the mother is acting strange while it plays a fake love story between the girl and her capturer who has a soft spot for her. As soon as the drop that the guys dad is out and coming home and the girl tells her story about how she came to town looking for her father you know everything thats coming up.And thats the funny thing about the movie... everything that is mysterious is dropped on the sidelines while everything else is predictable about one third in the movie. It all ends up random like they made the plot up on the fly while filming it culminating in one of the most ridiculous movie endings ever. I thought my DVD was broken and skipped a few minutes to the credits but the movie really just end. Stay away from this farce. There is no depth in the characters, their actions are not explained and for a horror movie this one seriously lacks either atmosphere or gore and can't make up for it with the lame incest story and "evil knife loving daddy".

Gareth Critchfield My girlfriend wanted to buy me a horror DVD. It was between the Orphan and Summer's moon...unfortunately she decided on Summer's moon, and boy didn't we both regret it that evening! It really is a waste of time. Sure the film was produced in a short amount of time, but so have some classic movies and without huge budgets also. I keep reading people's reviews that say how good the acting was and i had to check i was actually reviewing the same movie. Okay, maybe it wasn't the worst i have ever seen and to be fair Marlon Brando would have been hard pushed to produce any moment of clarity and substance with the script these poor actors and actresses were given! By far one of the poorest, most boring and stupid dialogues produced. The story was regurgitated trash, but not quality trash that has the honesty to realise its a bit crap and so consequently and refreshingly has a little laugh at the films expense too, but just drab nonsense with a typical big busted girl thrown in with half a recognizable name to try and help lift the films credentials and the size of the audience who may like it. Even by looking at the DVD cover art you can tell this is a bad movie. It kind of reminded me of the sort of film someone who really loved Buffy may enjoy, and there is nothing wrong with that but honestly if you like your horror/thrillers films with any element of grittyness, realism, with scary moments, honest fun, moving, violent, gory, blackly funny, unpredictable, with any original thought or seemingly any love for film making such as good photography, dialogue blah, blah, blah then this isn't going to ring your bells! Be scared...be very very scared, at how bored you may become! The movie should give away a free gift if you stay awake long enough to make it to the ending!