[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 13TH
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.
