Director: Dustin Ferguson
Writer: Dustin Ferguson
Stars: Dawna Lee Heising, Vida Ghaffari, Julie Anne Prescott
Run Time: 1 Hour, 10 Minutes
Link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Movie-Television-Studio/SCS-Entertainment-110238557159478/
Synopsis
We start out with some off-color film footage of Satanists, pentagrams, and devilish artwork. We quickly cut to a bright, happy, fun-looking beach location. We then cut to a hitchhiking girl who gets dropped off on an isolated-looking trail. She takes photos of flowers, while we get a point-of-view shot of something watching her. Something with blood-red vision. It comes out of hiding, and she gets a photo of it before it chases her down. It drags her off and we hear bones crunching as the credits roll.
Frank the sheriff reads about the murder in the newspaper, and he whines that the reporters “are going to mess up another investigation.” A man brings a photo of the monster that killed her to the sheriff, and he explains that “The beast is back!” Sheriff Frank tells the man to get lost. Meanwhile, a guy is out jogging, and we get a glimpse of the creature this time before he feeds.
That night, a group of stoners in a tent are talking about the first attack. They laugh about the beast, not realizing the beast is right outside their tent. They say the town is protected by a demon; every ten years during the cycle of the harvest moon, it goes roaming for sacrifices. The three run off in different directions, but somehow, the Blood Beast chases down all of them.
A couple of girls run out of gas on the road and decide to walk the final two miles to town. They know the hitch hiker died right near here but surely the killer has moved on, right?
The next day, the sheriff hears about all the mayhem, and so does the man with the photo of the Blood Beast. They all know what’s going on, so what are they going to do about it? The hunt is on…
Commentary
It’s another low-budget film, but this one is good. The photography is quite sharp and it all looks pretty good. The audio is a little spotty in the indoor scenes, but it’s mostly shot outdoors, so that’s not a huge gripe. They make the most of the monster makeup/mask effect by showing it mostly in glimpses and quick shots, some at night. And most of the time, we see things from his perspective anyway.
There are a lot of clips from “Track of the Moon Beast,” one of those low-budget pseudo-werewolf films from 1976 that wasn’t very good but seemed to have gotten a lot of play back in the day. I admit that I thought of this movie when looking at the title of this film, as I hadn’t forgotten about it. There’s some fairly extensive segments of the film included here as a woman watches the old film on TV; the two stories have a lot of similarities. I recognized what they were doing right away, but Kevin, who wasn’t familiar with the original thought it was confusing.
I put this one off for a long time because the trailers made it look simply awful. It actually was far better than we expected, although the ending was extremely sudden. There were good gore shots, nice crunching and munching, lots of creative kills, and everything was clear and easy to see. That ending though was just so abruptly cut off and