31 Days of Halloween 2017: Cold Moon (now playing at Tower City Cinemas)

[31 Days of Halloween 2017: COLD MOON opens today in Cleveland exclusively at Tower City Cinemas.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

The late writer Michael McDowell is best known these days, if at all, for co-writing the screenplay to BEETLEJUICE, which led to further film work in the nineties. But during the eighties, he cranked out a number of pulpy horror novels, including the then ubiquitous “Blackwater” series. Early in his career he wrote the novel ‘Cold Moon Over Babylon’, published as a paperback original in 1980. That novel has now been adapted into the film COLD MOON by director Griff Furst and his co-writer, Jack Snyder.

At first, COLD MOON plays like a fairly typical seventies gothic slasher movie, something along the lines of BLOOD AND LACE or THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, perhaps. That means unlike a FRIDAY THE 13^TH eighties style slasher, there’s more emphasis on character, place, and subtext. We sense there will be a little more meat on its cinematic bones than just seeing how high a body count the killer can rack up, and what interesting forms the deaths might take.

31 Days of Halloween 2014: Blood Lake: Attack of the Killer Lampreys

*Note: This year for our annual 31 Days of Halloween marathon of horror movie reviews, rather than write about old favorites, we're focusing on modern horror films that haven't had a wide theatrical release. So for the entire month of October, we will be dealing with horror fare that you can find in the “New Release” section of Netflix or (if you still have one) your local video store. So instead of nostalgic appreciations and recommendations, this promises to be more of a “the good, the bad, and the ugly” kind of affair. Hopefully more good than bad and ugly, but that remains to be seen.

Review by Bob Ignizio

The film BLOOD LAKE: ATTACK OF THE LAMPREYS most closely resembles is Joe Dante's original 1978 PIRANHA, easily the best of the JAWS rip-offs of that era. PIRANHA benefited mightily from Dante's stylish direction and humorous sensibility, and a script by John Sayles that was almost too good for a low budget rubber fish movie. By comparison BLOOD LAKE's script, by Delondra Williams and Anna Rasmussen, feels like the outline to Sayles' screenplay before the characters got fleshed out and all the fun, quirky bits of business were added in. And if director James Cullen Bressack has anything that could be considered a style, he hides it well here. I guess you don't have time to put much of a stamp on your work when you're cranking out seven movies a year, though.