So what do we know about Mothman? Seen around Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1966-67, it would swoop down and stare at people with its glowing red eyes. Generally described as a tall gray shape with no discernible head and giant wings, its sightings seemingly stopped after the December 15, 1967 Silver Bridge disaster that killed 46 people. And depending on where you go on the internet, it’s the loving monster boyfriend to many. Mothman is an iconic cryptid, so it’s such a shame that so many movies about it fucking suck.
Opening with a flashback, a group of friends roughhousing around in a lake cause the accidental drowning death of one friend’s younger brother. Instead of reporting it as an accident, they instead decide to lie and say he hit his head on a rock. To manufacture evidence of this they all take turns hitting a corpse with a rock. Side note, this moment was so dumb that we at Movie Night turned it into an infrequent meme for years.
Anyway, 10 years later and Mrs. Jewel Staite is the one friend who moved away, but her douchebag boss forces her to go back to Point Pleasant to cover the annual Mothman festival. She sees her old friends, who start getting killed off by “Mothman.” I use quotes because this creature clearly has a head with a stretched mouth and crawls out of mirrors to kill people and steal their eyes. Those… are not part of the general Mothman mythos. I’m not quite sure where those ideas came from. Jewel tries to get help from an old man who cut out his eyes because, and I quote, “Mothman must lock eyes with the conspirators before it feasts.” We find out this Mothman was originally Chief Cornstalk, a Native American betrayed and tortured by white men, and he really hates people who cover up murder. For the record, Chief Cornstalk was a real person and some actually believe Mothman a manifestation of his vengeance. Then it turns out the blind guy wants Mothman to wreck havoc across the town to punish everyone. He is killed by Mothman, because internal consistency is for losers. Jewel stabs the creature with a sharpened bone taken from Cornstalk’s remains, and it’s defeated. But when she visits the guy she likes in the hospital after, he sees her eyes glowing red and moths coming out of them. She seems oblivious to this, and the movie ends abruptly.
The only highlight of this really bad movie is Jewel Staite herself. Who doesn’t love Kaylee from Firefly! Well joke’s on you, losers, because I’ve found her adorable for way longer! Ever hear of the kids show Space Cases, where she played a girl from Titan (Saturn’s moon) with rainbow hair? Didn’t think so! Oh yeah, you can totally look it up, and yeah, the lone human student is indeed the original Black Power Ranger. Was it any good? I mean, I do have some nostalgic memories, but doubtful. What does that have to do with a bad movie made 14 years later? Nothing at all, I’m just wasting time talking about literally anything besides this dumb movie that you should definitely not watch.
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