Binkowski is already a big deal in the indie scene, as he directed the award-winning holiday laugh riot A Christmas Karen. With High Moon At Blackwood, Binkowski delivers such a well-oiled machine that you can’t believe it is indie. He takes the look and feel of an Underworld film, and cowboys it up to the heights of dastardly fashion. Okadigbo’s smoldering dark duster style is gothic AF, with an assortment of stunningly decorated firearms to accessorize. She looks great and kills even better, a requirement for this bloody kind of popcorn quest. The film also earns its R rating with some eye-popping brothel glimpses, giving this that long-missing “not for the kiddies” feel of hard entertainment. It has the strut and the balls of a movie made 25 years ago, which has a lot of currency with the newer generations.
“Binkowski delivers such a well-oiled machine that you can’t believe it is indie.”
Shot in a ghost town set in Yellowstone, Montana, High Moon At Blackwood has got its rustler vibe going right down to the spurs. Binkowski dresses up the town in the type of elegant griminess that screams Old West. Then he employs a day-for-night blue, with heavy shadow play, for the lighting, giving the location an eerie atmosphere to match the building dread. The action is excellent, with the violence going both over the top in creativity and ferocity. There is a lot of fun had with the limitations of firepower when the silver runs low. There are also some drop-dead gorgeous guns, including the ultimate Saturday night steampunk cannon that is unveiled in the third act. Now can you see why this movie screams drive-in? Anyone know anyone with a field they aren’t using?
Let’s talk monsters. Matanane is a fantastic vampire, precisely because he is the Western gentleman version, which rocks. Binkowski follows the Dusk To Dawn playbook of giving the monsters more twisted features as they get more dangerous. The vampire FX used on Matanane is some of the most creative, with the CGI going into some innovative, yet classic-referencing, bat creature faces. The werewolf FX are feral and varied, with a thousand different shades of ugly on display. It is fun to see all the monsters revert to human form after being killed, a nuance Binkowski visits as a theme repeatedly: that the monsters are just people in the end. Heavy, but not as heavy as the bowl I am going to load when I see this again. Because High Moon At Blackwood is a fun movie for a world that has forgotten how to have fun like this. Don’t miss this ride.
High Moon At Blackwood screened at the 2026 The Wild Bunch Film Festival.
"…would kill to see it through a windshield at a drive-in."
