Hot Off the First Twilight Movie, Ashley Greene was Slumming It Already.
Main Cast: Ashley Green
Director: Lee Demarbre
Holy crap, I know it’s a Canadian movie, but even so this was just bad in every sense of the word. Evern the usually awesome Stephen McHattie (Pontypool) wasn’t able to save this movie.
We start with Summer (Ashley Green, Twilight) who has just discovered her mother has been in contact with the father Summer never knew. Wanting to meet the man her mother never wanted to see again, Summer takes off to the small town he calls home. When she gets there, she’s saved from the cops (she was shoplifting food) by a local boy named Tom who takes Summer out for something to eat and some beers, then takes her home to his place for the night. She tries to leave in the morning, but Tom tells her she’s never leaving. His mother knocks her out and when Summer wakes up she finds herself chained up in the basement as part of Tom’s “garden”. Also chained up is a local girl named Amber.
So far so good, the setup is pretty good. As the movie goes on, Tom’s attitude toward Summer changes, and it doesn’t take a genius to know the long-lost father she seeks is Tom’s father as well. Gant (McHattie) has been away for a while, not sure where or why, but apparently he takes off for long periods of time, but now that he knows he’s got a daughter, he’s on his way back.
Meanwhile, Summer keeps trying, and failing, to escape, even when Amber’s father shows up at the farm, inquiring about his daughter, whom no one has seen for two months.
While the idea for Summer’s Moon (or Summer’s Blood, depending on which version, I guess) isn’t a terrible one, the execution here was so so so bad.
First there’s Sean Hogan’s script. Hogan wrote and directed the “House and Home” segment of the anthology film Little Deaths, which I recall being one of the better segments. But here he’s just absolutely terrible. The dialogue he’s forced upon these poor people…so little of it feels even slightly natural, it’s ridiculous.
Of course, the emotionless, yet overacting doesn’t help. I’ll never be one to insist the Twilight movies are populated with great actors, but come on, Ashley Greene. I really liked her in The Apparition, even though the last ten minutes of that movie sucked so huge. But in this one, it’s almost like director Lee Demarbre (Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter), called Action, then went back to sleep and couldn’t be bothered to review the footage later. Greene, however, wasn’t the only terrible one. EVERYONE in this movie sucked.
But maybe it was the ADR. I know sometimes actors have to go back and dub in their dialogue afterward, but in this movie, it was every single line. The entire thing just sounded off. It sounded fake. And none of the delivery seemed to match the “acting” onscreen. I mean, it sounded like it was trying to, but you could tell it was all dubbed in later, and the effect takes you out of the movie.
I had a feeling this was going to be a cheap nothing movie, being given an undeserved 15 minutes of fame based on Greene’s appearance in the Twilight movies, and I was right. I just didn’t know it was going to be THAT bad. Good Lord. While I don’t necessarily think she went on to star in better movies after this one, this is still a pretty big smudge on anyone’s resume. Even out of morbid curiosity, Summer’s Moon isn’t worth the 91 minutes of your life.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
Leave a Reply