Pulpmovies Reviews

Before sitting down to write this review, I took a quick look at the IMDb to get an idea of how the film had gone down elsewhere. Apparently it hasn’t been too popular so far so I find myself going against the grain here because I quite liked it.

Granted, the idea of a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil is a tad overused. It’s also true that many of the characters (John Amos and Jeffrey Combs spring to mind here) are woefully underused. And some of the dialogue is jarringly expositional, to say the least.

But there are also several criticisms levelled at Voodoo Moon that centre on the pace of the film, the lack of gore and the relatively low body count. These complaints, I think, say more about the reviewers’ expectations of the film than about the film itself.

The plot revolves around Cole (Eric Mabius), a trench coat clad demon hunter (I know, shades of Constantine, but bear with me) who returns to Louisiana 20 years after his home town was destroyed. Here, he meets up with the only other survivor of the disaster – his sister, Heather (Charisma Carpenter) – who has the uncanny ability to draw the future.

On the opposing side we have Daniel (Rik Young), who is evil incarnate and has existed in many forms – both before and during the time that the film takes place. Rik Young does do a very good job of portraying Daniel as being very smooth but not the sort of person you want to find yourself on the wrong side of.

Daniel, it emerges, was responsible for the destruction of Cole and Heather’s home town and it’s Daniel that Cole has been chasing for the past twenty years. Although Cole has scored a number of victories, Daniel keeps returning – each time stronger than the last. Cole has concluded that a final showdown is needed, and that it has to happen in the same place as it all started.

Much of the film is taken up by a cat-and-mouse game between Cole, who is trying to draw a collection of friends together for this final confrontation, and Daniel, who is determined to bump off as many of Cole’s friends as possible beforehand.

Although there are several quite explicit scenes, Voodoo Moon is much less of a splatter fest than most modern horror films and, instead, works more as a very atmospheric drama in which much of the narrative is constructed as a series of backstories as Cole’s friends start to come together.

This is a surprisingly effective approach to storytelling but does have a drawback in that, by the climax of the film, we have a lot more characters than anyone really knows what to do with. Fewer characters with much more time spent on each would, in my view, be the biggest single improvement that could be made to this film.

While there is much in Voodoo Moon that can be criticised, I do think that writer/director Kevin VanHook has tried to do something a bit different within the horror genre. And, while it is a bit uneven in places, he is broadly successful.

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