Poor Eric Roberts. If being in the shadow of your much-more-successful sister wasn’t enough, the Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee has made some pretty poor choices throughout his career. Not counting his drug use and brushes with the law, the guy has seemingly hopped around between films and television shows like The Dark Knight and Less-Than-Perfect, to Sharktopus and The Human Centipede 3. Granted, the number of projects he’s worked on in recent years is staggering, but the quality of said projects is suspect. Case in point: Dark Moon Rising, another film that tries to add a new twist to the werewolf genre, but quickly turns into a incoherent mess.

Chase (Cameron White) is a small-town college student who finds himself attracted to a new girl in town named Dawn (Stasi Esper). The two keep crossing each other’s paths, and eventually they start to develop feelings for each other. Unbeknownst to Chase, Dawn has a unique set of gifts. Turns out Dawn, besides having heightened strength and supernatural abilities, is a girl who is reborn once every 2000 years who holds the key to the survival of the lycanthrope race. As such, werewolves have descended upon Chase’s town in order to get at Dawn, and will kill anyone who stands in their way. It’s up to Chase and Dawn’s father (and bounty hunter), Henrick (Eric Roberts) to protect Dawn and stop the werewolves from completing their mission.

Obviously, the draw of this film is Roberts, who like in Sharktopus, chews the scenery and gets loaded while doing it like nobody’s business. It’s a shame (though not totally unexpected) that he’s only in the film for what equates to around five minutes, since he hams it up and makes things a little more tolerable in the acting department. I say that because while Roberts is pretty bad, the rest of our leads certainly don’t lend themselves to sympathy or attention. Cameron White looks like he just rolled out of bed with that hair, and as such is pushed around like a mop, and is just as wooden. Stasi Esper isn’t much better, since she mumbles her often putrid lines much like everyone else in the film, and is often drowned out by the music or background noise. Seriously, who did the sound on this one? Probably one of the worst offenders is Matthew Simmons, who plays Gecko. Being one of the lycanthropes, he comes across as looking like a bad Wolverine cosplayer (yes, his hair). Then his badass werewolf voice has him sounding like a possessed Linnea Quigley from Night of the Demons. And no, that’s not a good thing in this day and age. Totally laughable.

Oh yeah, and Billy Blanks is in this one. You know, the man who invented Tae Bo, and who had some awesome 80s hair in TC 2000? Yeah, that guy. Guess times really are tough.

As previously mentioned, the film tries to do a little more than the usual werewolf film by introducing a sort of Near Dark/The Lost Boys romance subplot, while also tossing in superhero-like abilities (such as spitting venom or setting off car alarms while running). It’s as if writer/director Justin Price figured he’d toss a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what stuck. It looks like a lot of that stuff stuck, but unfortunately, makes it seem more like this is fanfiction gone terribly awry.

So yeah, the acting is atrocious and the story is a mess. It could be worse, I guess. Oh wait, it is. If you thought while watching this film that it was hard to follow, you’re not the only one. The editing is downright terrible. It’s as if someone had their elementary school kid who is ADHD edit this one, since many of the transitions are downright impossible to follow. We know that the werewolves are after Dawn, but it’s never clear exactly why other than Dawn being the “chosen one”. Hell, we aren’t even sure if she’s a werewolf! Likewise, we’re never sure if Chase is a werewolf, or part of a line of bounty hunters, or hamster wranglers, or whatever. Characters show up for one scene, then aren’t seen again for the rest of the film. Day turns to night and then back again as shots are sloppily transitioned, terrible electronic music and ambient effects levels are all over the place, and the CGI is horrendous. Seriously, one particular dream sequence (I think it’s a dream sequence) looks completely ridiculous and so obviously trying-too-hard that the urge to flip my desk was never stronger.

Dark Moon Rising is a pile of sh*t. There’s no way around it. Sharktopus was insipid and cheesy, but that’s what it was intended to be. This film is downright insulting to my intelligence. Mashing together multiple ideas that don’t work, terrible production values and awful acting make this more torture than anything to watch. It’s no wonder Eric Roberts probably ended up getting loaded for his scenes, since no sober individual would want to act in a film like this and put it on their filmography. Fans of werewolf films will hate this, as will every other self-respecting horror fan. Avoid this like a dog that just ate its own crap and wants to greet you at the door.