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  OCTOBER MOON USA, 2006 Director: Jason Paul Collum Stars: Judith O'Dea, Brinke Stevens, Sean Michael Lambrecht, Jerod Howard, Jeff Dylan Graham Corin (Sean Michael Lambert) is a successful graphic designer hung up on his insolent younger lover Jake (Jeff Dylan Graham). Corin's hard-ass business partner Nancy (Brinke Stevens) has a nose for character, and so she's reluctant to support Corin's devotion to Jake; she also smells a rat when creepy Elliot (Jerod Howard) joins the firm as a trainee. Though engaged to a horrid fiancee (Tina Ona Paukstelis) and under the thumb of his controlling, conservative mother (Judith O'Dea) Elliot's homosexuality is awakened by Corin, who Elliot begins to fall in love with. Unstable Elliot's affections become more and more obvious and he jumps the tracks into Stalker-ville when Corin breaks Elliot's heart by giving him the brush off.
Though October Moon's website talks of the heroics of a rushed, no-budget production and includes review excerpts that praise the movie as enterprising and unexpected, October Moon isn't special enough to rise above its low-rent origins. The storyline is trite, the overall pacing vapid, with a dragged-out buildup to a bloody climax that is too predictable and shrill to be at all scary. Trading way too much on its novelties (gay horror film, features star of the original Night of the Living Dead - O'Dea) which don't translate as attractions with much ease outside the horror-geek world, the movie leaves too much unattended to. Mismatched sight lines, and dialogue that is scripted but which sounds horribly improvised and awkward are just the beginning of the story. Worse, shit piles of gay politik persist through the first two acts, with Corin's dopey devotion to his teeny-bopper boyfriend double-decking some ridiculously contrived we-hate-gays dialogue from Elliot's fiancee and mother. And what a strange choice, to set a weirdo gay stalker loose with some rope and a set of steak knives amid a sea of gay-tolerance platitudes. It is interesting to see a gay horror genre emerge, and find an enthusiastic audience (2004's Hellbent was a sellout attraction of last year's Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film Festival). In my opinion, the occasional horrors of the gay experience lend themselves well to slasher flicks, and how the visceral terrors of the AIDS epidemic washed up as ten years of frothy romantic comedies starring Rupert Everett is anybody's guess. But we can't applaud intentions, and October Moon is an unfortunate example of a misguided sense of invention: making the stalker and his prey gay is an insufficient conceit, especially when so many horror heroes, such as Halloween's Jason, are kind of psycho-drag queens - running around in capes and masks, fixated on a pre-adolescent bonding with a big sister - anyway. Deadly jilted lovers have been with us since day dot (see: "Medea", et al) and a cheap gay version takes nobody anywhere. To think, everyone complained about Cruising! Related Reading Review by Mark Adnum
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Trailer: October Moon
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