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Bloody Moon (1981)

Dir: Jess Franco

Miguel (Alexander Waechter) is facially disfigured and a bit of a loony.
He’s also having an incestuous relationship with his weird Sister Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff), who like to stare at the moon with her breasts exposed, as she is the only woman that goes near him.
Along with her rich, wheelchair bound, Auntie (María Rubio) Manuela operates a boarding school for young women, ‘Europe's International Youth-Club Boarding School of Languages‘, on the Spanish resort of Costa Del Sol.

When Miguel sexually assaults, and then stabs to death, one of the young women he is sent to a mental asylum for five years.
He is eventually released into the care of his Sister, who is warned by Jess Franco’s Doctor that he might not be too stable (!) “avoid references to that unfortunate night. He might not be cured”. Which is nice to know!
Sure enough the very next scene has him stalk a new student named Angela (Olivia Pascal) on a train back to the school. Nice going Doc, society is save in your hands! Reminds me of modern day Britain in fact.

Manuela’s Aunt dislikes her Niece and refuses to give her full control of the school or any of her money. An annoyed Manuela finds solace in the arms of hunky teacher Alvaro (Christoph Moosbrugger) while the girls have fun with the randy Tennis coach Antonio (Peter Exacoustos) who openly beds the girls.

Miguel is obsessed with Angela and stalks her around the school (while still trying to get off with his Sister), but Angela has bigger problems as all of a sudden her friends are turning up dead…but then the bodies vanish and no one believes her…..

 

Jess Franco’s German produced bandwagon jump into that popular 80’s horror staple, the Slasher film, is a bizarre hybrid of U.S. Slasher murders and European thriller plot (with leanings specifically towards the Italian Giallo film).
It also ended up on the infamous 80‘s ‘Video Nasties’ list in the UK.

The sex starved, mainly obnoxious, teenage cast lined up for the slaughter are only different from the American norm due to the dubbing over of their mainly German voices, where the unseen killer, scheming characters and their plotting are more at home in Gialli.
It’s a potentially effective mixture (as witnessed by the pre-Slasher Giallo groundbreaker “Bay of Blood”) but sadly Franco is up to his usual plodding standards whenever breasts and/or blood or not around.

We do squeeze a few drops of entertainment from the dialogue though, and not just the conversations.
A typically dire song playing over a disco scene cries out the phrase “Shake your baby”…surely not a sensible or safe bit of maternity advice!
And the opening sequence, involving two lovers, has a perfect example of the quality of writing we hear throughout the movie;
Boy: “I’d like to make love with you”.
Girl: “So would I”.
Which beggars the question does she mean that “yes I would like to make love with you too“, or that yes, “I’d like to make love to me as well“?
Girl: “I love your tenderness, yes but be patient with me”.
Boy: “Just let yourself melt into my arms”.
Girl: “Caress me gently, everywhere, everywhere. Yes, like that, like that”.
Pass the bucket!

The opening murder where Miguel goes nutty with a pair of scissors, madly thrusting his weapon into his victim’s belly, as a replacement for the thrusting his other weapon was denied, is nicely messy and pretty well handled, but after that the movie really starts to lose energy as Franco insists on following the mundane characters doing mundane things.

The students, we soon discover, like to lounge around topless by the pool and we have to give thanks for that as for the next 20 minutes nothing happens of any interest at all, as Franco lethargically follows Angela around doing nothing in particular for no good reason.
Not even the promise of a naked taking a bath’ scene delivers anything. In the end I almost found myself screaming at the TV “For Christ sake will someone please die”!
And low! We suddenly have a suitably exploitative knife through the naked breast murder as reward for our teeth grinding patience.
Sadly we have to sit through another 15minutes (yes I was watching the clock) of non-events, stupid dialogue, crap dubbing, piss poor music, hatefully annoying characters and basic tedium until we get a macabre corpse reveal.

So desperate has the film become in fact Franco decides to snip off the head of a live snake, and zoom in on it writhing away on the ground, just to have something, anything, happen.
55 minutes and 3 lousy dead bodies later, we at last get to the real meat of the movie as the killings increase and the blood starts to flow again. But it‘s still not much, and certainly too little, far too late, to ultimately save this dud.

‘There has to be some goodness nestled in the manure though surely’ I hear you cry.
Well, not really.
Some of the killings are okay and certainly bloody at times (the infamous bandsaw killing is nicely sadistic in it’s execution and very bloody, but the FX barely scrape into the acceptable), a smattering of the dialogue is unintentionally amusing (though most is just annoying), the ‘who-dunnit’ plot at least isn’t totally obvious and the thing does have an 80’s Slasher/Euro Trash griminess to it. And we have a chainsaw death by golly.

But the bad certainly outweighs the good and Franco’s out of focus zooms and shockingly comatose Direction, as well as the lousy score, lousy dubbing, unpleasant characters and achingly tedious sequences designed to pad out the running time (which sap the will to live) means that “Bloody Moon” is quite frankly, for 80% of it’s running time, bloody rubbish !