Warlock Moon

This appears to be the only film Bill Herbert made which is a great pity as it shows a lot of promise. He wrote, produced and directed this thriller about a naive young student Jenny (Laurie Walters) who allows herself to be picked up by journalist John (Joe Spano). On a picnic date they find themselves at an abandoned health spa where the only occupant is a kind grey haired old lady Agnes (Edna MaCafee). However, nothing is what it seems and soon Laurie is in mortal danger. The two leads are excellent in this hodgepodge of witchcraft, cannibalism and axe wielding maniacs. The photography helps along the spooky atmosphere immensely and the editing is excellent. Unfortunately the bad points outweigh the good ones, the script is muddled, the music score is all over the place and the actress playing the old lady over does it dreadfully. It is much to the credit of Bill Herbert that he manages to create an atmosphere of nightmarish uncertainty despite the obvious constraints of a very low budget.

A young woman is taken for a long scenic drive by a new male friend. As the day grows shorter, they happen upon a seemingly condemned resort which turns out to be occupied by a strange, but welcoming old woman. The young couple decides to stay there overnight, and they learn the horrible history of the old spa...as the elderly woman's story has it, the resort was once a relaxation retreat for the world's elite and powerful, but was closed down after several ritual murders were committed there by a group of Satanists. Predictably, there is similar carnage in store for the new guests, little of which registers as entirely interesting or especially horrifying.

WARLOCK MOON opens with a pretty strong scene, but the promise of a movie as good as that is unfortunately quashed by a wispy story which is paced poorly and never really gains much momentum. Still, it's mighty quirky in a weird low-budget way which may well appease fans of flyball regional horror flicks.

5/10...Forgiven of its shortcomings, there's enough dodgy appeal here to warrant a recommendation to the 70s trash cinema brotherhood.

A college girl from Berkely and her new beau (Laurie Walters and Joe Spano) take a trip for a picnic and wind up at a rundown spa resort. They meet the old biddy living there (Edna MacAfee), but something weird seems to be going on, possibly even sinister.

"Warlock Moon" (1973) starts out with bits reminiscent of "Night of the Living Dead" before eventually taking a path similar to "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" and "Necromancy," the latter with Pamela Franklin and Orson Welles, which was reissued as "The Witching" with extra (unneeded) sensationalistic footage in 1983. Tobe Hooper obviously borrowed from it for his "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," upping the ante in every department.

This is easily the least of these due to its sparse cast and tediously mundane happenings, not to mention the one-dimensional setting of the dilapidated spa resort. Yet there are enough highlights for those interested and it deserves credit as an early slasher before the craze kicked off five years later.

The working title was "Blood Spa" and it was released to TV & video as "Bloody Spa" in the USA & UK. While that's certainly a fitting name, "Warlock Moon" isn't exactly a misnomer, as some maintain. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie, as there are slight spoilers). To explain, certain characters are definitely involved in ritualistic sorcery, including at least one male; and a warlock is a man who practices sorcery, aka witchcraft. As for "Moon," it's obviously nighttime when this ritual is performed, so there's certainly a moon in the sky (regardless of whether or not clouds cover it). 'Moon' in this context would simply refer to the dead of night (pun intended).

Likable Laurie Walters costarred in the amusingly risqué (but eye-rolling) "The Harrad Experiment" just before this and eventually went on to TV fame with Eight Is Enough from 1977-1981 (which I've never seen, but practically everyone has seen pics or clips from that show).

It runs 1 hour, 22 minutes, but there are several minutes of deleted scenes worth checking out on Youtube, particularly the cops pulling the couple over in the first act, which explains a couple of things later on. It was shot at the University of California in Berkeley, which is north of Oakland, and 37 miles southeast of there in Livermore (the spa resort), which is east of Dublin.

GRADE: C+

"Warlock Moon" offered B-movie suspense, coupled with a small budget. The film was made in my hometown of Livermore, CA in 1972, but was held from release until 1975 because of reasons already commented upon by another poster.

The premiere was held at the Vine Cinema in Livermore. As I recall, the theater was packed with teens, mostly from the two high schools in town (Livermore and Granada). It was on a double bill with "The Other." Girls screamed in horror throughout the film, although in hindsight the film had little horror. One teen got tired of the screaming, and told the audience to shut up, which brought some laughs.

It was interesting to see scenes of Livermore on the screen...the public library, the abandoned TB center, the old Vineyard shopping center. If you grew up in Livermore in the 70s, you might remember this little film.

I think it was 1982 when I saw this on late night TV, Channel 2 KTVU from San Francisco Bay Area. I was living in Nevada at the time but thanks to (then) cable TV I was able to enjoy all the gems/classic horror movies that were featured on late night TV from the Bay Area. When one is up at midnight watching TV alone in the dark you tend to remember moments that shock the hell out of you and make you want to dive under your blanket and clutch your pillow for comfort...such as the very opening sequence of this film. The best that can be said about the Shriek Show DVD is that it retains the '70's luster, look and feel that I remember. The print used has not been offered in a flawless transfer and that's fine by me. I love seeing these films as if they were playing on the drive-in screen complete with lines, speckles and reel change 'jumps'. I'm not thrilled, however, upon finding out the Shriek Show DVD has some sort of "bug" where approx. 11 minutes of footage are skipped over and completely missing. I think you can somehow see the footage but you have to scan to it first and then let it play out. Very, very odd and the issue was never resolved with that company as far as I know. I'm sure they're still selling the flawed DVD right now without corrections for the fans of this film. Anyway - a shout out to the filmmakers of this film who posted here: whatever bad experiences you had making this film it was NOT all-for-not! You have some fans who really appreciate the effort and find this film almost essential '70's film viewing. The two lead actors are great, the opening is scary, the middle is intriguing and the ending is a downbeat humdinger. THANK YOU! - A fan forever