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MOON OF THE BLOOD BEAST (2019)

Directed and written by Dustin Ferguson.
Starring Dawna Lee Heising, Julie Anne Prescott, Vida Ghaffari, Mike Ferguson, Ken May, Chelsea Newman, Eric Reingrover, D.T. Carney, Alana Evans, Rob Mulligan, Valerie Mulligan, Raymond Vinsik Williams, Dustin Wonch, & Alan Maxson as the Bloodbeast!
Find out more about this film here!

A vicious beast rises once every ten years to feast on the locals and does to over and over in this bizarre low budget creature feature.

I admire what Dustin Ferguson is attempting to do here. Basically, this is a very thin setup that resembles the JEEPERS CREEPERS lore with a creature that returns every so often to go on a feeding frenzy, followed by the same scene over and over with a different person or set of people getting stalked and attacked by the monster. Every scene is shot through the reddened filter of the creature’s POV. Every scene ends with a dead body covered with blood. Some of them have a trail of blood running from their nether parts, others care simply covered in blood. The creature’s motivation is never really delved into. We know the monster is a town secret and the sheriff is somehow savvy to the monster’s rampage, but that’s about all we are given to work with as far as why this monster kills, what it kills for, and why it exists.

In the middle of this film, which clocks in at less than an hour, there is an extensive scene from low budget genre film star Dawna Lee Heising who is watching 1976’s TRACK OF THE MOON BEAST on TV. I guess, this might suggest that there is some kind of connection between the two films, especially given that so much of TRACK OF THE BEAST is shown in MOON OF THE BLOOD BEAST, but none of it is really explained. Both have monsters roaming the prairie and stalking people. But the creatures don’t really look similar at all.

Speaking of the monster, if you’re looking for that awesome gnarly beast from the poster of MOON OF THE BLOOD BEAST, you won’t find it in the movie itself. It also looks like the monster from TRACK OF THE MOON BEAST which seems to be a cross between Bigfoot and the Creature of the Black Lagoon. This Blood Beast looks more like some guy running around wearing a bad Halloween mask of the horned Davaronian alien from the STAR WARS Cantina scene. There’s no articulation and no real sense to the way the monster looks. Since half of the movie fails to show it and chooses to show it through the monster’s POV, it builds anticipation to actually see the beast by the end. Once the bad look of the monster is shown, it turns out to be completely disappointing and makes you wish they would have stuck to keep to the POV shots.

In terms of story, there really isn’t one. In order to have a story, you really have to have a lead character. A series of monster attack scenes are fine. But they need to be tied together with some kind of protagonist, but apart from a sheriff and a cowboy mercenary who appear twice in the film, it’s just a random parade of one slaughter after another. MOON OF THE BLOOD BEAST has its heart in the right place. It is obvious there is a love of low budget monster movies and creature features of old. Still, even though those films were highly flawed, they still followed the basic blueprint of writing fiction with a protagonist to follow and a beginning, middle, and end. MOON OF THE BLOOD BEAST not only doesn’t deliver those basics, but it also leads up to the reveal of a very lackluster monster. I’d love to have loved this film, but while it provides some fun imagery and a good heart, it failed to deliver any kind of story.
Check out the trailer here!!