Dark Moon Rising (2015) Reviews

• Do not trust the glowing reviews for this movie

  harry-kyles2015-08-04

  **UPDATE 7th August*** So it looks like someone involved with the movie got upset with the negative reviews from real viewers and felt the need to post even MORE positive fake reviews on the 6th August under the following usernames...... AlvinJEllis AlvinJShort AlvinAScott AlvinaMGrace AltonJJames AlonzoEPuckett AlmaFSampson AllenNThompson AllenJRawlins AllenJGalvin AllanAHallam AlissaPVillarreal AlisonCChavez AlishiaPGonzales I guess it could be just a coincidence that all 14 users who posted reviews that day had names that started with AL? ***Original review**** 31 positive reviews for this movie (at the time of writing), 24 of them all joined IMDb on the same date 2 years and 6 months ago, and all 31 positive reviews were written on the same day, 9th June 2015. Obviously cast & crew were reviewing themselves and thought pretty highly of their work, they shouldn't have.... So the movie starts with 2 women dressed in skin tight black leather and Lycra fighting each other, with no explanation as to why or who is who, making the entire fight scene pointless because I don't care who wins or loses, and then a guy..... appears...... who..... talks...... so...... slow ...... overacting ..... that you immediately hope that he dies in the next scene. Then some more stuff happens and a character walks towards the camera and it goes out of focus briefly because whoever was meant to keep the character in focus didn't, they made a mistake and somehow the director and editor let it make it into the final cut. This is BEFORE the opening credits start. The effects - When I saw the first werewolf in the opening scene I couldn't tell if it was bad stop motion or bad CGI, either way it looked bad. There are so many CGI effect shots in this that it gives the impression that a bunch of students from the local film school were all promised if they each did a CGI effect of their choice it would be written into the movie. There are too many effects, all of them are bad, and most of them are pointless and only serve to distract from.... The story - I lost interest. It's obviously meant to be one of these teen Mortal Instruments or Twilight type films, it just wasn't written very well. It ended up a muddled and confusing mess with no clear direction and things happening for seemingly no reason other than the writer thought "this would be cool" so he put it in the script, this is especially true for most of the sequences that involve effects, they're pointless and add nothing to the story. Characters do things that you don't understand because their motivations are unclear. You can't empathize with the characters because they aren't written well enough to feel like real people so you just don't end up caring about them. The story came across as an amateur attempt by a writer/director who lacked focus. It was not helped by.... The acting - Just not good. Eric Roberts is the best actor in this movie by a country mile, that should give you all the information that you need to know. There is one guy who sounds like Christian Bale doing his Batman voice whenever he talks, it's really funny to watch even though I think it's meant to be scary or intimidating, the rest of the cast are unbelievable at best, annoying and distracting at worst. I think the only thing we can blame for this is.... The directing - Where to begin? The director of this movie is also the writer, and his weaknesses in one compound the weaknesses in the other. For example, he writes weak dialogue for his actors and gets such bad performances from them as a director that in some scenes he has us hearing what the characters are thinking so they can explain what just happened. "did I really just say that?" thinks a girl who has just said something embarrassing to a guy she's flirting with, and then "nice save Amy!" when she says something cool in the next sentence to him, it reminded me of the type of thing that would happen in the TV show Scrubs. Remember that this is supposed to be a serious horror/fantasy movie, not a light hearted comedy. I can't say anything good about the directing in this movie, I've touched on a couple of the things already, the bad acting, the over reliance on cheap CGI effects, the technical issues like shots going out of focus, an incohesive story, conflicting tones, the list could go on, and at the end of the day these problems fall squarly on the directors shoulders. Someone should tell the director that filmmaking is about getting the basics right, to use a well known saying "you have to crawl before you can walk", this director tried to come out sprinting and fell flat on his face. The final verdict - In case you haven't guessed, I don't rate this movie very highly. If you want a werewolf fix I suggest you watch Ginger Snaps or American Werewolf in London, and I can't believe I would ever write these words, go watch Twilight. That is how bad this movie is, I just recommended Twilight over it. Lows - Acting, directing, story, effects, all worse than most low budget TV shows. Highs - The bad guy who sounds like Christian Bale doing Batman, he really is funny to listen to, by the end of the movie we were in tears laughing every time he spoke. If a tween in the house forces you to watch it I suggest alcohol to lessen the pain and increase the humour of the Batman voice guy - 2/10

• Unmitigated garbage

  gothicsoldier2015-07-24

  This film is awful. This film is beyond all descriptors or adjectives that could be used to imply how awful it is. The dialogue is garbage. The plot is garbage. The CGI is garbage. The acting is garbage. The Music is garbage. The execution is garbage. Nothing in this movie makes any sense. It has no internal logic. It neither sets any internal rules for how its universe is supposed to work, nor would it follow them if it did. This film is the living incarnation of a 15-year old Goth kid's notebook sketches being realized with a budget enough to put CGI in. The main cast dress like anime characters in a world populated by people dressed like normal human beings. They speak hokey garbage dialogue that sounds like it was intended to be deep. Garbage Nu- Metal-Lite plays throughout it constantly. If you like shoddy Linkin Park knockoffs, maybe the music is for you. Everything about this movie was garbage, from beginning to end. Don't let the myriad positive reviews previously here fool you - pure astroturfing by a marketing firm or the cast and crew themselves. Dozens of accounts created years ago with one review: Dark Moon Rising, using common talking points, and mentioning renting it on DVD in reviews all submitted the same day, long before the DVD is set to be released. So not only is this movie the work of hacks, but also frauds. Every part of this is garbage, do not debase yourself by watching it.

• If you care about yourself, you will never watch this piece of garbage

  sike-tb2015-08-05

  I had great expectations from this flick. It was announced like a very good wolf movie. When I saw 8,8 rate on IMDb,my happiness was over the top. It took me 2 minutes to realize what piece of garbage is this. CGI, acting, directing, script everything is terrible. The worst movie I have watch for a long time. I keep asking my self who can give money for something like this. How can someone sign himself as a director and writer for something terrible as this. And acting, what can I say. It's not B movie it is Z movie category. So if you care about yourself and about your time, skip this insult to the movie and save your nerves and time.

• Can you trust any low budget film with an 8.8 BEFORE it's released and every review is glowing?

  MartinHafer2015-07-23

  I am not going to give this film a score, as I have to admit I couldn't finish watching it. It's a pretty bad film and I felt like I was wasting my time and had no intention of reviewing it here on IMDb. Imagine my surprise when I checked the IMDb page and found it has an overall rating of 8.8 (higher than GONE WITH THE WIND or CASABLANCA) and NOTHING but very, very glowing reviews....even though the film hasn't even come out yet. While I would hesitate to say it in most cases, it does make you question the voracity of the reviews--especially since many of these reviewers have watched and reviewed the exact same small group of films. What are the odds?! The bottom line is that this is a cheapo horror film with some rather poor CGI ...so how can it get nothing but 7, 8, 9 and 10 scores as well as accolades such as GREAT, GREAT MIX, FORGET THE BAD REVIEWS (even though as of today, no negative reviews have been posted and mine will be the first) and AMAZING. It's also very odd that when you read through the reviews chronologically, they mostly are in alphabetical order--and the Cs come in bunches as well as the Bs. It's also strange that the film has been rated over 4500 times...yet it hasn't yet debuted! Caveat Emptor--buyer beware! UPDATE: As of 8/11, the score has dropped to 6.6. This is still WAY out of proportion to the quality of the movie but I suspect as times passes and more folks see it that the score will continue to drop. UPDATE: A year and a half later, it's 5.2. Still WAY too high (because it's inflated due to the fake reviews) but getting closer to where it should be.

• Needs a silver bullet

  freqeteq2015-08-05

  Never have I felt like writing the words 'Do Not Watch This Movie' over and over again in a review, until now. If you can make it to the opening credits and still have optimism that this movie might be good, then well done, you did better than we did. This movie is infuriatingly bad in places and laugh out loud in others. I don't even know where to start with this, there are just so many things wrong with this movie that my head is feeling sore trying to think of them all. I'll stick to the main problems. The story is convoluted, the acting is terrible, the cgi effects are not only bad but also overused as if the director thought we'd want to see more of these rubbish effects than we needed to. It's just one big mess full of characters you don't care about doing things you just want them to finish with so the movie will end. I watch low budget scifi, horror, fantasy movies and I enjoy lots of them, but this movie is an exercise into how not to approach budget filmmaking. Instead of trying to make some grand fantasy movie full of amazing effects and cool looking leather clad people who look like they've just walked out of The Matrix, and failing at all of those things, the writer/director should of focused on the basics, like getting decent performances from his actors, writing dialogue that sounds like humans might actually say it so we care about what they're saying, and giving us a focused story that made sense. You can have good movies with bad acting, you can have entertaining movies that have bad stories, you can have engrossing movies that have sub-par CGI effects, what you can't have is bad acting, bad writing and bad effects in one movie and expect people to like it, no matter how many people you get to give fake reviews and vote it a 9 on IMDb. There are fan made films on Youtube that are free to watch and 100x more enjoyable than this piece of garbage. This isn't budget or even micro budget filmmaking, it is amateur filmmaking, and not a very good example of it either. Stay away, Do Not Watch This Movie.