Blood Moon - I Didn't Forget You!

In all the excitement/exhaustion after the festival, there was one film I saw at the Frightfest weekend which I really enjoyed and neglected to mention. It was on one of the Discovery Screens, home to the smaller budget, interesting little films, that the organisers never-the-less want to bring to the world's attention. In previous years we've never made it to the Discovery Screens, lacking the organisational skills to find out about the films that were on there. However, this year we decided to branch out because, a) the Vue made it really easy to get tickets and, b) we'd heard that one of the main screen films (Nymph) was worth missing.

So we found ourselves in Discovery Screen 2 watching Blood Moon a British made, Western set, low budget monster movie. I'd already come across the director, Jeremy Wooding, during my on-going Sean Pertwee mission, as he directed the incredibly fun The Magnificent Eleven, where The Magnificent Seven meets Sunday League football.

This time round it's more The Wolf-man meets Stagecoach, as a group of passengers travelling to a small, frontier town are hijacked by outlaws. While trying to outwit their captors, they discover a much greater threat, a monster that only appears on the night of the blood moon. It's a rattling yarn with a cast of familiar characters, the young newly-wed couple, the sassy business woman, the enigmatic gun-slinger, but with enough little twists to hold your attention and a nice feeling of mounting tension as the monster attacks and the people are slowly picked off.

One of my favourite things about Blood Moon are the sets. It's filmed in the only Western Town in Kent, a place called Laredo, which I am now desperate to visit. The authentic look of the buildings and their content, along with the fabulous costumes make it all the easier to believe that the events are taking place in 1897, Colorado, and not a particularly wet, 21st Century England.

I think the highest praise I can give this film is that at the end I found myself wanting to know what happens next to all the characters, and I would definitely be up for watching Blood Moon 2.

Oh, and everyone we spoke to afterwards said that Nymph was terrible.