[Summer's Moon]
Plot:A young woman who is eager to find her estranged father, sets out on a cross-country journey. When she encounters a slight run-in with the law, a local handyman rescues her much to her amazement. It's an unusual connection, but she is quickly charmed and accepts his invitation to spend the night. The following morning she is in for a rude awakening when he decides to change the rules of attraction and traps her inside his house. Taken prisoner in the demented stranger's basement, Summer's dream has come to a bitter end and her real-life nightmare has only just begun.

Cast:Ashley Greene, Stephen McHattie, Barbara Niven, Peter Mooney.

My Thoughts:More hillbilly horror.

Review:I knew going in to "Summer's Moon" that I was in for a bad time, and that's exactly what I got, not surprisingly. The film stars Ashley Greene as Summer, a teenage girl who is searching for her father. The search takes her to a small town which holds many secrets, among which being a family of crazies who like to hold people hostage and torture them. Summer finds her way into this family when she flees a cop after shoplifting some items from a local kwik-e-mart. The guy who gives her cover from the cop turns out to be a part of this wacked out family, and this tragic twist of events puts Summer closer to her birth father than she might think.

"Summer's Moon" is just another screwed up, twisted, and psycho-related take on small town U.S.A. and it's residents. They could've retitled the movie "White Trash With Problems" and no one would've know the difference. You can just tell this movie was a poorly put together piece of cliche garbage, which plugged Ashley Greene into the lead role to further strengthen her body of work, and also because "Twilight:New Moon' was coming up, and the producers of this movie, by releasing it a week exactly from "New Moon"s November 20th release date, felt confident they could ride that films coattails into some decent numbers for "Summer's Moon" DVD units sold and or rented.

This movie is pointless drivvel, over-sexualizing young women and furthermore, piling a big heaping pan full of torture-porn on top of all of that. Yummy, yum, yum....a recipe for sheer cinematic disaster! I honestly cannot find one positive thing to say about this movie. Ashley Greene tries her best maybe? She does indeed try to give a decent performance in the film, but can we really be sure that it's Ashley's acting skills shining through here?

After all, if you walked in on friends watching this movie, you'd swear it was another "Texas Chainsaw" or "Wrong Turn" sequel, until you looked really closely and recognized that the girl from "Twilight" is in the movie. Upon which you'd then say, "Whoa...my bad, thought it was another Texas Chainsaw sequel." Which is a testament to how strikingly similar this movie is to those films. Lets go down the list shall we? Rural America setting...CHECK! Crazy hillbilly family...CHECK! Scenes of incest...DOUBLE CHECK! Lots of screaming and yelling...CHECK!

Young girls being tortured in a dark, dank, basement...CHECK! Yeah, everything seems to be indeed in order for a total ripoff of almost every indie psychobilly flick to hit DVD this year, and probably last year too. Stephen McHattie (Pontypool), makes an appearance in this movie as well. And while it doesn't help to make the movie any better quality wise, McHattie does a decent job of ripping off R. Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt character, and also Bill Moseley's Otis Driftwood character from "TCM" and "Corpses" respectively. But is he impressive?

No. Is this film impressive? HELL NO. There is however a slight twist at the end of the film which develops early on in the movie, and that twist, as anti-cliche as it is, is like a drop in the bucket when compared to how crappy and totally awful this film was. "Summer's Moon" is nothing more than a starring vehicle for "Twilight"s Ashley Greene. Although despite her getting 95% of the screentime in the movie, this is one picture I'm sure she'll pretend she didn't have any part in when her career really hits the big time. It's that bad.

Positives:The moment the film finally ended.

Negatives:Cliche script, recycled story about rural nutjobs terrorizing normal people, and a lack of entertainment value, or good taste for that matter.

Overall:Half a star out of four.





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