Written by Kevin VanHook
Starring Eric Mabius, Charisma Carpenter, Rik Young, Jeffrey Combs
Genre: Drama / Horror
Country: Canada / USA
Runtime: 89 minutes
MPAA Rating: Unrated

Evaluation: 1/10
by Greg Ferguson








Kevin VanHook gives me hope for the long and arduous life ahead of me. Just knowing that he is making a career for himself in the film industry despite his utter lack of finesse, talent, skill, imagination and, one must assume, intelligence as well, I feel that my comparably loftier and tangible gifts qualify me, without hint of immodesty, to arguably richer rewards than running my own visual effects studio and being given carte blanche to write, direct, edit, and star in my own films, especially if such films are of the same caliber as his dreadfully banal and tiresome Voodoo Moon. True, some will hasten to remind me that the film industry, as with much of the world, barely qualifies as a meritocracy, but I look to VanHook for hope because I must, since the alternatives would be buying into his ridiculously moribund yet bafflingly profitable vision of cinema, or succumbing to the hopelessness they inspire in the art of film.

Conceived as a religiously-inflected battle between the forces of (Christian) Good and Evil, Voodoo Moon thinks it's much more spiritually opulent and grandiose than it is, revealing VanHook to be a man possessing no more comprehension of his subject matter than a young child in Sunday School would. He's more interested in the puffed-up mythology and "powers" attributed to religion than the actual values or provocative questions which have elevated the most conscientious of us to higher levels of understanding and wisdom. Simply quoting passages from the Bible, showing the cross, and endowing the man you have playing the devil with a Van Dyck does not afford your imagery any amount of power; at best, such things can be overlooked as conceits if the content of your work is worthwhile. Alas, Mr. VanHook, your work is not. What's worse, if that is even plausible at this point, is that his story of a brother and sister who reunite as adults, after their parents are murdered by the devil, to do battle with him while accompanied by a small band of friends, is outright hackneyed and stupid in concept and in its execution. Powers exist for no reason; characters behave with little visible motivation; tangential plots are woven in and go nowhere, dangling like loose threads with frayed ends; and zombies apparently roam the land - in search of a compelling story perhaps, or maybe just "brains," as the old cliche goes. Of course, because this film has none, maybe that's why the film's foremost zombie simply keels over and dies of its own accord. Lucky bastard.

Some films know that they're tacky and even revel in it, but Voodoo Moon has every belief that it is important and no clue that it isn't, which is at times the worst sort of schlock to sit through. The film is like one overlong bad joke - a groaner - that merely inspires pity for the teller because it's so sad to see a person so spectacularly out-of-it. If anything, Kevin VanHook is like the Rupert Pupkin of the D-Grade sci-fi/horror genre; a stale fart of an entertainer with ambition and undeserved success. Though it may be difficult to find the silver lining in this musty brume, I believe it needs to be hope that somewhere in the world there's room for our achievements to match our aspirations and talents - and even that brand of idealism may be too taxing to sustain considering how bad this film is and that VanHook has two more films in the can. However, if there's a silver lining in my negative review, naturally it is that this film can be avoided altogether. Fortunately, that's an easier outcome to reach for those of us who give a damn about film.

(Voodoo Moon was released on DVD on October 6, 2006.)