Slated between fantasy/sci-fi/moderately horror this film lays an egg in pretty much all counts. It's a laughable love story between a woman and a man/wolf, a father and son curse and eventual showdown. The screenplay is mediocre at best with a lot of cussing in the dialogue. I was shocked well known actor Chris Mulkey and actress/singer Maria Conchita Alonso signed on for this. Alonso's character as Sherriff is poorly acted and makes no real sense for her being there. Throw in Sid Haig who is known for non-conforming roles and he was fun to see. The music score was slightly misplaced in some scenes but not overly bad. Now the actual werewolves creature is poorly designed, contrasting in how they transform is laughable. No true CGI involvement. I give it a 4 based on scenery alone.

The movie very boringly details the love between Dan and Amy and the fact that Dan is a werewolf with a demented father. Dan is a werewolf in a really bad, wolfman inspired costume. Dan's dad is evil. He kills women constantly just for fun. Dan's dad is coming after him and killing people along the way. Dan has to protect his girlfriend, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, livestock is being killed, by Dan, and the sheriff, aka Maria Conchita Alonzo, who can barely speak any of her lines clearly, bumbles around like an idiot. Even after discovering the existence of werewolves and having Bender sexually assault her in a parking lot, she just lays there with her gun in her hand looking shocked. Bender walks away very slowly, stands and poses, taunts her and, instead of ending the whole thing by putting a well deserved bullet through his head, she just stares, wide eyed, after making sure the safety is on so the gun won't misfire. Amy's dad is angry at the world, constantly trying to fight with everyone, knocking his daughter around, threatening Dan multiple times with his fists and a gun, just out of control aggressive, except towards Bender. In the 'final showdown', which was slow and boring as heck, everyone has a clear shot at Bender, who stands and poses yet again in front of a group of people with guns, and they all just stand there until he finally jumps down behind cover, after five minutes of standing there making idle threats. Then, instead of remaining in a group, everyone splits up, going in a different direction than the one the bad guy went. The folks take some shots at him, firing a ridiculous amount of ammo without reloading a single time. Amy keeps running in circles, literally, in circles, always coming right back to where a protector just told her to run away from. She is constantly popping up in front of Bender, like she's drunk and can't figure out how to run in a straight line. The ending was dumb. Dan walks away, after dropping his shirt because, hey, who needs a shirt when you're walking off into the desert for whatever odd reason. He leaves Amy his car, which she gets out of looking like a female Dan, in a black wifebeater, jeans and a thick black belt with a big buckle. She puts flowers on the road and smiles when she hears a wolf howl. I thought maybe the movie would pick up and show some action sometime in the two hour running time, however, it just kept dragging from one boring, yawn inducing scene to the next, paying way too much attention to the amy's dad's paranoid ramblings and rantings and starlit dates with the sheriff. Then there's be ten seconds of action. Dan's dad kills someone after there's a gratuitous showing of breasts. Then another long twenty minutes of Dan and Amy vowing their love for one another. More ramblings from Amy's dad. More incoherent lines from the sheriff while she drinks tequila on the job and then drives around. Dan's dad kills some hooks after another gratuitous breasts shot. More rambling. A new character pops in and rambles on for ten minutes about his history with Bender, who he discovered was a serial killer. More rambling. Dan turns into a werewolf. Rambling, love, paranoid dad, Bender kills someone, a fortune teller gives Dan some info, love love, rambling, don't shoot the werewolf that's right in front of you, aren't the stars pretty, oh look, a werewolf, let's not shoot him and discuss being paranoid instead. oh, and don't shoot the werewolf, we're going to milk this run time!! The movies was longer and more rambling than this review, which is saying something.

I've got nothing with vampires or zombies, but for some (probably Freudian) reason I'm very much into werewolf-movies, so I'm easily lured into buying a DVD when there's a menacing full moon and a wolf-like monster on the cover. Which of course is in no way any guarantee for a good movie and a cause for many disappointments. As was the case here.To begin on the positive side. They came up with a rather original premise: a father and a son both turned werewolf and competing with each other: the father being the real evil one, obviously enjoying his powers, the son being the doomed sufferer of the curse. The choice of actors was a fine one: Max Ryan is imposing and scary even without his werewolf-attire, in this movie he has this Dennis Hopper quality that makes you feel he's bad news even when he's just sitting drinking a beer. I very much liked the dark scenes of him picking up a girl in a bar and later on his aggressive behavior in a brothel. His son Dan is played by Chris Divecchio, and to me he's convincing enough as the tall stranger with the dark secret. Divecchio had charisma, his rugged but attractive looks in combination with a sensitive approach of his role make him some kind of anti-hero that can easily explain the attraction he has to Amy. Not to forget his physique, I don't want to be a hypocrite, every time they made him loose his shirt (which was often!) I was in awe. A special mention goes to the fine musical score, I really loved the beautiful songs! With this the positive ends and the many flaws take over. In a werewolf-movie you can come up with as many deep layers as you will or with Shakespearean dialog or Greek-like tragedy, but in the end it always comes down to: how do they do The Monster. Here this was a big disappointment. Obviously the budget was low so they didn't use CGI but chose for the old man-in-a-suit routine. When this film was made it was 2009 and they really made us watch two guys hopping around in a scary suit of black rubber, lots of fuzzy black hair and a big Halloween-mask. I couldn't believe my eyes, the result was ludicrous. It didn't even look like wolves, it was more like son of King Kong attires, jumping up and down like mean chimpanzees. We even see one of them at some point sitting in the top of a leafless tree howling at the moon. A wolf in the top of a tree!! The transformations from human to wolf (that we've seen the last decades done so well in so many movies) were of equal simplicity: as if someone pushed a button and wham: there's the wolf. Anyway, I have to admit that the mutilated bodies and ripped-off body-parts were done rather good and added at least a tinge of convincing horror and gore.The rest of the casting was a bit uneven. Ginny Weirick was absolutely lovely to look at, and since her part didn't require much more than that, she did reasonably well. Her father was played by veteran Chris Mulkey and he delivered a good job as the professional he is. But who came up with miss Alonso as the sheriff?!? To begin with: why did the movie need a female sheriff anyway? It didn't add anything to the story (her tentative romantic involvement with Amy's father didn't add up to anything either) and she must have been by far the most unconvincing sheriff ever in a serious (intended) movie! She walks with a sway and talks with a drawl as if she's perpetually infatuated by booze, she wears a totally unprofessional shirt that leaves her arms and bosom bare (and I don't recall it being that hot!) and carries her weapon as if she's afraid it will blow up in her hands any minute. And when she's asked to inspect a crime scene where the monster killed a dog she looks as a scared housewife expecting a mouse to jump on her! I won't waste too many words on the ending, that was intended as some sort of epic High Noon-like showdown between father and son werewolves. It's enough to imagine the above described gorilla-suits getting at each other in a blaze of growls and hair. Funny, preposterous or degrading, it depends on how sober you are while watching. My final remarks are for the project in general. There was this heavy blanket of morose pretentiousness over the whole thing that in the end left me totally depressed, which in my opinion shouldn't be the way that you want your public to feel after you present them with a solid horror movie: one should feel impressed, thrilled, full of adrenaline, but not depressed! Apart from the few action-filled moments everything goes irritatingly slow, everyone talks deep and meaningful with each other for many boring minutes, the movie is way too long (over two hours!!), and there's a dreadful want of some humor - the whole thing is taking itself much too seriously!

In a small town in the countryside, the teenager Amy (Ginny Weirick) is overprotected by her widower father John (Chris Mulkey). When she meets the newcomer mechanic Dan (Chris Divecchio), they immediately fall in love for each other. Dan discloses to her that he was cursed when he was a child and turns into a werewolf in the full moon. Meanwhile the local sheriff Sam (Maria Conchita Alonso) is investigating the slaughter of people in bloodshed and the murder of several animals in the farm of Crazy Louis (Sid Haig) apparently by a wolf. Out of the blue, the outsider sheriff Charles Thibodeaux (Billy Drago) arrives in her office and tells that the responsible for the deaths is the mean Bender (Max Ryan), who killed Dan's mother and his wife among other victims many years ago. Bender calls Thibodeaux in the sheriff's office telling that he had abducted Amy and scheduling an encounter in the city ruins with his old enemy; Dan, John, Sam, Louis and Thibodeaux head to the spot for a final confrontation to end the curse. The low budget "Dark Moon Rising" is a reasonable movie about werewolf and with improvements could be better and better. The special effects are decent and the plot avoids the usual clichés. However, there are some flaws and mistakes, like for example: (1) Maria Conchita Alonso is totally miscast in the role of a sheriff, with clumsy movements with the guns. The story would work much better swapping Chris Mulkey in the role of the sheriff and Maria Conchita Alonso in the role of Amy's overprotective mother. (2) There are stupid lines, like for example when John asks Amy about the bruises in her face; she should have answered that Dan had protected her instead of the silly argument with her father. (3) The last showdown is ridiculous, since Thibodeaux should have advised the group that only silver bullet could stop Bender. (4) Also in the final confrontation, Dan was the first to convert in werewolf, but he does not attack his father that easily kills Thibodeaux and Louis. (5) Last but not the least; the conclusion is ridiculous with Dan drifting in the desert leaving his car with Amy, and the girl putting roses on the road. In accordance with the fortune teller, the curse would end with the death of Bender provided Dan has not tasted human flesh and blood. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Lua Negra" ("Black Moon")