PREDATORY MOON

PREDATORY MOON (2017)

Directed by Shiva Rodriguez 

Written by Shiva Rodriguez

Starring Chris Morrissey, Jonathan Foster, D. Duckie Rodriguez, Jeffrey Crisp, Lowrie Fawley, Mel Heflin

From IMDb:

"Kyle Reading is a zoologist who has been studying wild animal attacks across the country in hopes of finding ways to prevent them. When a young boy is allegedly killed by a bear in Florida, Kyle launches his own investigation. He quickly turns his attention to Dean Clout, the child's uncle, who somehow survived the vicious attack. Dean, infamous for being the town drunk, remembers very little about his brush with the bear. Found unconscious in the woods, he only recalls that he and the boy were left there by a friend who went to run an errand and never came back. But in the weeks following the attack, Dean begins to drop some of his bad habits and pick up some strange new ones. Kyle is convinced that Dean was actually attacked by a werewolf and wants to help him deal with his new condition while keeping the rest of his family safe. He knows that the lycanthropic disease runs in a twenty-eight day cycle and that Dean is running out of time. Unfortunately for Kyle, there is someone who has been keeping a close eye on him. Someone who sees an advantage to having a stranger in town who cries "werewolf"."

A few years back I must've been going thru a period where I had a little extra cash. I contributed a few bucks to an Indiegogo campaign for a werewolf movie because, well...werewolves.

A few weeks back I was browsing new titles available to stream with Amazon Prime when this movie caught my eye because, well...werewolves.

Lo and behold, the reason it sounded familiar is because this is the movie I ponied up some of my hard-earned cash for so they could do some practical werewolf effects.

What did my $15 get me?

 

Let's face it, I've talked about some low-budget movies on here, and haven't been especially nice to them. But for the most part, they were movies I felt had no real reason not to be better. Either because of the cast or the budget or whatever.

This movie was made down in Florida for less than $30,000 according to writer/director Shiva Rodriguez, so you really have to use a different scale comparing it to something like LYCANTHROPE which had probably twenty-five times the budget.

Technically, there were some obvious issues right off the bat that almost turned me off the film. Apparently all the audio was done using the camera mic. The dialog from anyone not directly in front of and facing the camera was noticeably muddied, and if they were off-camera they were barely audible. Sometimes the music would drown the actors out. But I "paid" fifteen bucks for this so I turned on the captions and stuck it out. Once or twice there were shots that weren't completely in focus. And of course, it had the whole shot-on-video look going on. On the plus side, there were many shots of local wildlife intercut with the action that helped bring the location to life (insert another rag on the "Amazon jungle" of LYCANTHROPE here).

The cast, as expected, didn't have a professional level of polish. Some were better than others, and most of them did better in some scenes than others, but they gave it their all. Again, you can't really judge them against more mainstream works. Tho judged against stuff like HOWLING 7: NEW MOON RISING and the 1995 WEREWOLF (also known as ARIZONA WEREWOLF), both of which also had considerably more cash to work with, this film more than holds its own.


The Indiegogo campaign was aimed at getting some money together for actual, practical effects, and it showed. Plenty of slashed/bitten victims, with the occasional stray body part tossed around. And of course a full on, furry werewolf. Comparable to THE HOWLING or AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON? No, of course not, but servicable. And once again, better than some other films I've seen.

For those keeping track of such things, not only was there gore aplenty, but also several full-frontal nudes scenes (male and female - like I said, they gave it their all). They even took a shot at an actual transformation.

While it's only just now been released, the bulk of the film was done several years back and shows enough promise that I'd be interested in seeing where the cast and crew have gone from there. Shiva Rodriguez admits on her site that picking a feature-length werewolf film as her first film was probably biting off more than she could chew (a werewolf pun, maybe?) but no doubt it taught them all a lot to take forward.


TL/DR - a decent, micro-budgeted first effort that shows promise and, well...werewolves.