Lune de sang

Those were the days... Where this kind of slashers were a reason for staying home on a Friday night when being 12 or 13 years old.

I remember this movie airing on USA NETWORK almost every 6 months, but it wasn't until the 10th time it aired that I decided to watch it. The first 10 minutes are kind of creepy, then the movie gets boring until the expected end. The killer is no way scary, and even the plenty of gore and hot girls doesn't help "BLOODMOON" being a slasher to be remembered.

Just for die hard fans of the genre.

If you want to see the worst Australian movies have to offer then watch this one. This show was launched in Australia with a brilliant promo that worked.... with dire warnings of possible heart problems from viewing and working on fear of public humiliation, the distributors dared viewers that if they were too scared to watch the last half hour of this "the most scariest, frightening, goriest film ever made", they would be refunded their ticket money, the only catch was they had to remain in a roped off area in the lobby signed "I was too chicken to watch". The movie was sheer torture to watch and I'm embarrassed to say the promo sucked me in. If only I had of gone for the refund, as its a 100 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Awful acting, bad scripting, very poor special effects. Some movies are fun to watch because they are awful, this stinker doesnt even entertain and cant even be considered B grade. 0 out of 10

Compared to other serial killer stories, this one is above average ; when "Friday the thirteenth "and stuff like that consists of killing teenagers one by one, teenagers we hardly know before they get slain.

Here,there is a decent screenplay and chiefly , the screenwriters did create characters ;even though we guess who the killer is long before the end ,his behavior makes sense .If the youngsters are rather bland and conventional, the adult characters have some substance : the nun (the ending sees her play the part of the sister of "vertigo" ), the nymphomaniac headmistress and her impotent husband,the biology teacher , the policeman .

The rivalry between the wealthy students who" will become doctors and lawyers and the prole ones" is not fully exploited and it's too bad;but good scenes such as the maleficent relationship between the teacher and his wife, the two girls who try to see the tests before the exam so as to get only As make up for it.

Pretty good entertainment in this Australian thriller.

Not to be confused with Bloody Moon, Jesus Franco's gore feast of 1980; this Australian lensed slasher imitates the popular ‘killer on campus' plotline that's so frequently used by its US counterparts. It's fairly amusing just how much Alec Mills tries to make this as American as he possibly can, but thankfully he refrains from asking the cast to perform unconvincing accents. As a matter of fact, the characters that are actually supposed to be from the States still speak in flawless Aus! Hmmm!

In the small town of Coopers Bay, there are two Hi-schools situated right next door to each other. There's Winchester, an all boys comprehensive and St Elizabeth's, a girl's only Catholic faculty. They are separated by woodland where pupils from both can meet and engage in things that they'd rather their teachers didn't witness! An unseen killer begins murdering the youngsters as they fornicate, strangling them with a length of barbed wire before removing their eyes and burying them under the soil. Mary, the daughter of a Hollywood movie actress, becomes involved when the killer targets her and Kevin, her boyfriend. But who is this twisted psychopath and why does he want to kill all the kids?

Blood Moon opens with a terrific score courtesy of Brian May and some superb cinematography. The dense woods in which the kids are pursued is brilliantly lighted and I was immediately rather impressed by the general production. After a couple of murders, were introduced to a predictable troupe of troublesome teens and our obvious final girl. There's an interesting subplot that sprouts as one of the local poor kids falls for Mary, the daughter of an actress. The rich Winchester boys hate the local working class, so it's almost like a homage to Romeo and Juliet or West side story but without the Rock and Roll (Instead we get ‘reach for the earplugs' Heavy Metal!). Shakespeare and the slasher genre, what a combination! I bet the poor author would turn in his grave!

There's one really gruesome – if not graphic – murder, involving a desk, a young girl's head and a deranged killer! But aside from that, there's hardly any gore and most of the killings are left to our imagination (boo!). The performances are fairly poor throughout, although Leon Lissek gives a decidedly nasty portrayal. Although it mostly keeps things directly by the book, there are a few twists that you probably won't guess and we also get some background on the reasons for the killer's insanity.

British born Alec Mills' lackadaisical direction left a lot to be desired and he failed to generate as much suspense as was needed. He's better when he works as a camera man as he did on Return of the jedi and various James Bond movies through the seventies and eighties. It's a fairly slow-moving story, but when the killer is revealed things begin to perk up right up until it ends rather suddenly leaving one or two unanswered questions. Like what happened to Kevin? Did he survive? Even though the bodies start piling up toward the finale, the story certainly could have benefited from a few more excursions into the well-lighted woodland with the killer and his length of deadly barbed wire. As it stands, there was too little horror and an excessive amount of teen frolics that didn't really do the movie any favours.

You can ignore most of the bad reviews that slate Blood Moon; it really isn't all that bad. Its just that its not particularly memorable, the sort of film that you'll watch once and forget about immediately after. Perfect for some late-night slicing shenanigans on the TV, but hardly worth the effort of hunting down. As far as Australian slashers go, it manages not to feel as cack-handed as Houseboat Horror, To Become One or the over-rated Cut, but then that's still not much of a worthy compliment. Oh and make sure to place them earplugs back in as soon as you see the end credits. The last songs a killer: `Blood moon is rising, stay home tonight' and `Blood Moon arising over building and over hill, take care if you will!' You get the picture!

Bloodmoon (1990)

* (out of 4)

Ozploitation about a serial killer going around an all girls Catholic school where he wraps a piece of barbed wire around the victim's necks. BLOODMOON is one of those films that seemed to build its reputation on hype and then when people actually saw the picture they realized that there really wasn't much to it. The idea of barbed wire being wrapped around someone's neck makes one think that you're about to view something graphic but that's certainly not the case. It almost seems as if the filmmakers watched a few American slashers and decided to copy them. It also seems like they read some negative reviews to stuff like Friday THE 13TH that put the films down for not having any sort of character development. It further seems that the filmmakers wanted to "get it right" so we're given non-stop scenes with so-called character development. There's no other way to put it but this movie is extremely bad from start to finish. There's an incredibly drawn out and downright boring dance sequence, which seems to run as long as the wedding sequence from THE GODFATHER. This scene just keeps going on and on and when it's over you realize that there wasn't a need for it. No need for it is something that most of these scenes here have going for them. The entire picture just drags along and at times you wonder if the filmmakers forgot they were making a horror film. The first hour drags by so poorly that most will probably hit the eject button. The majority of the death scenes take place off camera so we're not given too much there. What little blood there is comes from scenes showing the victim's missing their eyes. The film does offer up quite a bit of nudity but this here isn't enough to save the picture. Fans of the genre will probably be curious about this one due to its hyped reputation but sadly the film itself is quite poor and well worth skipping.