MOONLIGHT BY THE SEA

A salesman for the Corporation, Albion Moonlight (Sean Allen) crashes his aircraft after being sent on another demanding job. Landing in a New Mexico desert, he loses contact with the sinister, information controlling company and suffers in a delirious fog of memories. Awakening from his reveries, Moonlight is torn between the loyalty to the Corporation that has been programmed into him, and the more natural desires for his estranged wife.

Austerely filmed in black-and-white, MOONLIGHT BY THE SEA begins well enough but quickly strays off track. Opening in a cramped compartment, the film has the intriguing low-tech feel of John Carpenter's little gem DARK STAR (1974) and the imagery - in which Moonlight is literally attached to the walls and ceiling by cables - gives him the appropriate appearance of a puppet attached to strings, and emphasises the relations between labourers and their beurocratic employers. In a nod to such sci-fi classics as George Orwell's 1984, people are monitored with anal precision: Albion learns every facet of his clients' existences before pressing his sales pitch - including watching them via surveillance camera; the salesman, in turn, has his every word recorded and his thoughts are ruthlessly scrutinised by the mysterious higher-ups.

It is when Albion strays outdoors, however, that MOONLIGHT BY THE SEA falters. Despite some stunning panoramas, done with still photographs that are skilfully merged with the filmed exteriors, the bulk of the action is comprised by tight close shots of a disorientated Moonlight. Although an effort is made to reach the inner reality of his character, what follows is a load of stream-of-consciousness babble that comes across as being a tad too emphatic, complete with borderline pretentious dialogue. Overexposed images and - it has to be said - too much oblique editing gives an unappealing, undiluted feel, and these stylistic tropes aren't counteracted by any kind of respite or equilibrium. The overall feel is that of over-exaggeration, and the stylistic overkill unfortunately gives the appearance of a music video more so than a feature film.

Uneventful and dragged out, MOONLIGHT BY THE SEA seems longer than it should be - the scenes in which Albion argues against his co-worker's preoccupation with filing his report crawl along - but the film does manage to say something about such dilemmas as whether we give to much to our jobs at the expense of interpersonal relationships. Reality TV culture, power-mad big business and modern technology, in which governments that can spy on us through our computers and CCTV cameras, are also alluded to in some of the aforementioned sequences, and the film isn't devoid of humour. But ultimately - and despite its level of professionalism - it is a conceited and dull piece of work that didn't leave me as blown away as the reviewer quoted on the blurb was!

Special Features

To go with the director's commentary and trailers, we also get a 'Bonus Film', as the packaging states. This film happens to be Christopher Alan Broastone's masterful second film, MY SKIN (13 minutes long), starring the marvellous Tony Simmons as a cadaverous Death, who harasses a murderer over the telephone for encroaching his territory. Beautifully lit, moodily scored and filled with poetic and macabre dialogue, it's a great little film and should be a major selling point for this DVD!

This pairing reminds me somewhat of Salvation's region 2 disc of Ivan Zuccon's patchy Lovecraft adaptation THE SHUNNED HOUSE that came out a couple of years ago, with the lyrical vampire short BLOOD as a decidedly superior but sadly overlooked 'companion.' Short films should be treated with more respect, especially when they're better than the feature length ones they occupy disk space with!

When I quizzed Broadstone, he told me "MY SKIN won Best Director/Short Film in last year's Cinema Edge Awards, sponsored by Sub Rosa Studios and WickedPixel.com, among others. Part of the award was to be included on the DVD release of the Best Feature winner, which I guess was this MOONLIGHT BY THE SEA movie", but he was never informed of this release. Well promoted, guys!

Review by Matthew Sanderson