La Lune de sang

Bloody Moon is a rare combination of American style slasher and giallo a la Jess Franco.The director most famous for his exploitation films.As far as I can recall the only other film I have seen from him is Venus in Furs.It could very well be that I have seen more titles from him without realizing.He seems to have made quite a few.But one thing I know for sure he is without doubt one of the worst directors I have come across that surprisingly is still very active in the industry.And that can be explained because he has made some films that are in a league of their own .Mostly because he mixes up the genres in a way that is rarely done.What does that mean for Bloody Moon?A slow pace and severe lack of tension and thrills that make it a real task to stay interested.The excessive gory deaths and some clever twists and turns oddly aren't enough to make you overlook that.It doesn't help also that the characters aren't really interesting apart from two key players looking very similar to James Caan and Brad Dourif in their younger years.Now there is one scene that was unexpectedly thrilling involving a little boy.You will find yourself rooting for this boy.It's a mystery in itself that this boy suddenly was so curious that he decided to investigate in the first place.But it shows that Jess Franco is able to create tense scenes.Too bad it is the only one in the whole film that is filled with real tension.With some tighter plotting and direction Bloody Moon could have become a real classic.Now it is an unremarkable hybrid of slasher and giallo that will bore you to death.

okay, so this isn't as good as most Italian Gialli, but to be fair, it is head and shoulders above 90% of American slashers of the early-mid 80's.

Jess Franco certainly delivers the goods with this one, with lots of bloody stabbings (including a girl stabbed in the back, the knife protruding through her nipple), strangulations, a hedge trimer attack, and an awesome band saw decapitation. the German title of this film is "die sage des todes" which translates into "the saw of death" so they must have been impressed too. it's not too original, the basic "girl stalked by a sex maniac" but, Franco filters the standard formula through his own twisted vision and throws in some incest to keep things lively. also, the film ends with a great twist,twist ending that wraps things up nicely, no sequal here! be on the look out for the Franco Cameo at the beginning of the film, he's the doctor.

A derivative but strangely appealing slasher flick from that auteur of Spanish sleaze and zoom lens-inspired madness, Jess Franco, which opens with a masked killer murdering a young girl and being sent to an asylum for the crime - just to prove that Franco's copying HALLOWEEN a little bit too much, we even see POV shots from the killer looking through the eyeholes in his mask! From then on, BLOODY MOON a cheap and nasty swathe through a series of badly-acting young women, as a mysterious villain murders them off one by one. Despite being set in a language school, there are never more than four or five girls around at time, which somewhat betrays Franco's low budget roots. The plot is pretty ludicrous, with a really dumb script - the English dubbing reaches new levels of absurdity with some of the trite dialogue that the girls constantly spew.

The acting isn't much better, and it's obvious that Franco picks his actresses for their looks rather than their acting ability. The identity of the killer is pretty easy to guess, especially seeing that the red herring is so obvious in this case - could it be the mysteriously scarred man who was previously convicted of murder, who constantly lurks around the school watching the girls? I don't think so. Technically, the film is rather poorly made, with sloppy editing and a tendency to shoot scenes in the dark with little lighting, making the viewing experience sometimes a test of endurance rather than genuine entertainment.

So why did I enjoy this movie? Well, it's just plain trash for sure, but Franco never expects you to think it should be anything else. BLOODY MOON is just about a series of young, sometimes naked girls being offed gorily by a perverted murderer, and that's exactly what Franco delivers. His deaths are all mean-spirited and graphically gory, which earned the film some notoriety when released in the UK - in retrospect the effects are all so cheesily staged that the fuss over such "nasties" is simply ludicrous. This is a fun, barmy and genuinely amusing slasher that doesn't pull any punches.

Like most exploitation directors from the eighties, Jesus Franco had his own attempt at creating a ‘Halloween' for the once-bankable slasher market. Spanish-born Franco has helmed over a hundred and eighty movies, using up to sixty pseudonyms and he's still working today, even though he will soon reach his seventy fourth birthday! He is reputedly the sleaziest of all European filmmakers, with a (clearly unconfirmed) reputation for making up to three movies out of one production budget. I personally haven't seen many of his wayward creations, but I'm sure that I have an uncut copy of Faceless somewhere in my collection, which didn't impress me too much. To the best of my knowledge, Bloody Moon has yet to garner an unedited release in the United Kingdom, although there are plenty of anaemic copies floating around that leave out some fun gore. I really doubt it will remain restricted much longer, like many of the video nasties that were once deemed ‘offensive', the shocks have become somewhat thin over the years. I was lucky enough to pick up this uncensored print at a recent film fair, which was originally intended for release in Australia!

The psychotic family at the centre of this plot makes the Voorhees look like the Flintstones! There's Miguel, the severely disfigured brother with a temperamental temper. His sister Manuela isn't much of an improvement, and their Auntie – the contessa – gets a little hot under the collar too (quite literally)! It all kicks off when Miguel heads off to particularly ‘groovy' dance party to perve on some of the crumpet that's boogieing away to the ‘inspirational' music. Feeling a little left out just standing around watching, he swipes a Latin Casanova's Mickey Mouse mask and heads for the dance floor! (Cue a steady-cam shot through the eyeholes to show that Jesus' done his research!) There he meets a disco bunny that confuses him with her fancy man and after they cut a rug or two for a while, she decides that they should head for her apartment. His ploy seems to have worked, because once inside they begin tearing at each-other's clothes as the unsuspecting women entices him into the sack with lines like `I've been waiting so long' and `Hold me tighter… take me!' As the heat of passion rises between the twosome, off comes Miguel's mask revealing a rather tainted mush! Clearly shocked, the girl struggles off the hulking and clearly disappointed soon-to-become killer, sparking him to retaliate by stabbing her repeatedly with a large pair of scissors… Five years later Miguel is released from an asylum (keeping things in tradition, of course), although the doctor doesn't seem all that convinced that he's recovered, but frees him anyway. He heads back to a Spanish language school where (hey, what d'ya know) the students are all dumb, attractive teens drowning in make-up that seem to constantly talk about how their Latin lovers measure up between the sheets. Sounds like an execution-worthy slasher sin to me! Before long the plot narrows out our ‘surviving girl', obvious because she's the only one that doesn't slut it up as much as the others. Next up the unseen psycho (with a stocking over his head) begins to murder her buddies while at the same time terrorising her with somewhat leisurely threats that include: ‘ I'm gonna cut you in two… like a piece of wood… with a hacksaw (!)' Before long Angela is being constantly stalked by the wacko and it's our job to guess whom it is!

For a director with as many movies under his belt as Franco, he's managed to make this look like some amateur film-student helmed it on his lunch break. The camera-operator looks as if he's had ‘one too many' and the editor either suffered a temporary hands-only disability or he'd also been ‘out on the sherbets' with the cameraman. But just when you decide that you've written Bloody Moon off as a complete disaster, Franco springs back with a couple of plausible set pieces. The scene where the killer places all of Angela's friend's bodies around her chalet whilst he stalks in the shadows was superb, although one has to wonder how it was possible for him to get the corpses there in the first place. She'd spent the last half of the movie with the windows and doors tightly barricaded! But any credibility is desultory, mainly ruined by the endless jerky zoom shots or the comical dubbing that makes Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai's Ninja films look like theatrical masterpieces.

There are long spaces when not a lot happens aside from watching the humorous females struggle to look convincing, and at times things feel like they're moving far too slowly. The only redemption is the murders that at least chuck in some imaginative gore. The renowned decapitation involving a girl unwittingly letting her own self be tied up before she looses her head over (or under) a circular saw is about the most fun of the lot. It's especially amusing because she thinks she's actually going to get drilled (if you know what I mean) and instead she gets sawed and totally screwed! The director really attempts to build the shock-factor when a curious child is methodically run down as the killer escapes in his Mercedes. Another girl is stabbed through the breast so that the blade pops through her nipple and one guy is attacked with a hedge-trimmer, which just about rounds off the best of the tacky effects. My favourite thing about Bloody Moon was the wonderfully cheesy disco-tunes that rock when the cast frequents the nightclubs. Listen out for ‘Shake your baby', which sounds like Rolf Harris has reinvented Presley's Blue Suede Shoes for the holiday resort generation! It's hilarious!

This is honestly pretty poor and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that's not a true slasher collector. It's a twisted beast for sure, but hardly endearing. There are some laughs to be had at the lamely dubbed speech and the endless talk of sex, but if that's want you want then buy a German porno. Someone who can't handle trash cinema probably wouldn't let this get past the five-minute mark and admittedly even I found it hard to keep my interests raised! If you fancy some European slashings, then head over the Mediterranean to Roma where I'm sure you'll find something a little more competent! Put it this way one girl sums the movie up perfectly in her dialogue, `What you saw was not a murderer, but just a dummy!' Exactly

"Bloody Moon" aka. "Die Säge Des Todes" (literal translation: "The Saw Of Death") of 1981 is a gory slasher from exploitation's most prolific filmmaker - Jess Franco. I personally am a big Jess Franco fan, and it must be said that his repertoire of 180+ films ranges from brilliant ("Venus In Furs", "Count Dracula",...) to poor ("Sadomania"). "Bloody Moon" is not one of his truly great movies, but it is definitely a highly entertaining and gruesome flick that should not be missed by fans of gory European Horror exploitation. For Franco standards, this film does not feature a lot of sleaze, but even more gruesome brutality and graphic gore in exchange.

The movie takes place in a language school in Spain, where a bunch of hot German girls are enjoy the sun, alcohol and sex more than practicing the Spanish language. A maniac is loose in the little Iberian paradise, however. A maniac who enjoys murdering pretty young girls in most atrocious ways...

The movie begins a bit slow, but it gets really nasty and brutal later, and actually becomes quite suspenseful. The performances are, of course, not top-notch, but they're not terrible either, and actually quite good regarding what can be expected from young actresses most of whom never appeared in another movie. Furthermore, I found some of the performances amazingly convincing. Sexy Olivia Pascal fits very well in the leading role, for example. Director Franco also once again has a cameo appearance in the beginning of the movie. The eerie score composed by Gerhard Heinz, who has also composed the scores for a bunch of mainstream productions, is probably the greatest aspect of the film, and makes the whole thing a lot more atmospheric.

All said, "Bloody Moon" is a brutal little slasher that I recommend to my fellow Eurohorror buffs, especially Jess Franco fans should not miss it!