Although
he is probably best known as the screenwriter of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare
Before Christmas, horror fans considered the late Michael McDowell one of
the best writers of 1980s paperback originals. (Of course, those awesomely
lurid covers always helped.) Maybe he should have had a chance to adapt himself
or maybe you just had to be there. Whatever the case, something definitely
seems to be lost in translation in Griff Furst’s Cold Moon (trailer
here),
based on McDowell’s Cold Moon Over
Babylon, which opens tomorrow in New York.
The
Larkin family blueberry farm is poised on the brink of foreclosure by the
Redfields’ bank, but they have more pressing issues. Jerry’s little sister
Margaret is missing and will soon be discover dead, lashed to her bike in the
river and surprisingly four months pregnant. As we soon learn in flashbacks,
the killer also happens to be the father: Nathan Redfield, the disappointing
son and heir of James Redfield, the patriarchal banker cut from the same cloth
as Lionel Barrymore in It’s a Wonderful
Life (and presumably the author of The
Celestine Prophecy).
The
sociopathic Redfield thinks he got away clean, but Margaret’s spirit starts
haunting him after it is raised by some sort of snake demon. Inconveniently, Grandma
Evelyn Larkin also has visions of Nathan Larkin killing her granddaughter,
which she shares with pretty much everyone in town. Soon the stress of Margaret’s
haunting and Evelyn’s lawsuit talk has Redfield killing again and again. It
gets to the point where he needs to recruit his horrified but complaint younger
brother to help juggle the balls in his cover-ups and frame-jobs. Fortunately, Sheriff
Ted Hale is dumber than a bag of hammers and his daughter Belinda works as some
sort of bikini-clad part-time companion to old man Redfield.
Cold Moon is kind of fun in
a ludicrous one-darned-thing-after-another kind of way, but logic, common
sense, and convincing CGI are in short supply throughout it all. Furst manages
to class up the joint with accomplished screen-thesps, including Candy Clark
(Oscar nominee for American Graffiti)
as Ms. Evelyn and Emmy winner Christopher Lloyd (who is becoming a horror movie
regular after I Am Not a Serial Killer and
The Sound) as really Old Man
Redfield. You have to give Josh Stewart credit for freaking out with gusto as
Nathan Redfield, but could Frank Whaley’s Sheriff Hale be anymore plodding?
Fans will also be disappointed Tommy “The Room” Wiseau’s heralded appearance is
an incidental, non-speaking, blink-and-you-missed-it cameo.
