If, fifteen years ago, I had been told that by 2015
there would be literally dozens of Jess Franco movies available on DVD and
Blu-Ray in often superlative special editions, I would've laughed until it
hurt. But that's exactly what has come to pass. Strange thing is, I now
actually look forward to the damned things! Not because I think Franco is some
misunderstood cinematic genius — on my, no! Far too often a Franco
film is a mighty fine cure for insomnia. Still, I can hardly wait for a
heretofore unknown film from his massive body of work to hit DVD. I've become
fascinated by how he occasionally, almost accidentally, produces something I
like. It's not often that this odd confluence occurs, but when it does I really
enjoy the ride. My interests and Old Uncle Jess' match up on only a few
things —naked women, old horror tales, pulp adventure stories and... naked
women. I'm not one of the many fans of his work who's enamored of the long dull
stretches in which we watch people smoke in jazz clubs while brooding about
their horrible feelings of ennui. In the contest between grass growing and most
of Franco's 1970s output I'll stare at the lawn and pray for rain. But when he
seems to be working with an actual script (instead of making things up as he
shoots) he can string together a pretty entertaining movie. Such is the case
with Bloody Moon. This is, in many ways, not your average Jess Franco
joint. It doesn't play like one of his meandering sexual/jazz explorations in
which people speak in arch sentences that could mean nearly anything while
moping discontentedly around gorgeous European landscapes. It has an actual
story, characters that seem happy, conflicts that are clear and understandable
and a real energy that so many of his more self indulgent movies lack. You
know — like a real film. If your idea of a real film is a slasher
flick, that is.
Bloody Moon opens on a nighttime costume party at a
Spanish villa. Under the glow of a full moon, horribly scarred young
Miguel (Alexander Waechter) is rejected by a woman and takes to watching a
couple have sex in the bushes near the party. Using the guy's discarded Mickey
Mouse mask he fools a girl back to her bungalow on the estate's grounds and
starts to get busy. When the mask comes off she is repulsed by his awful face.
In his sexual rage Miguel stabs the poor girl to death with a pair of scissors.
Cut to five years later, when Miguel is being released from the funny farm into
the custody of his foxy sister Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff). They return to their
home, which just happens to be the large villa where the murder took place.
Interesting. The villa is owned by the aged, wheelchair bound Countess, who
loves her scarred nephew Miguel but hates niece Manuela with a passion. The
Countess believes Manuela to be a greedy, manipulative wench with
eyes for the family fortune, so she announces that Miguel has been made her
sole heir. Interesting.
In the ensuing five years the Countess has allowed hunky
Alvero (Christopher Moosbrugger) to use a section of the villa's grounds to
open a language school. Although the school is not yet profitable, Alvero feels
it soon will be as the number of students continues to grow. The handsome
fellow seems not too sad that the place only seems to attract young, beautiful
(but vacuous) girls to enroll — something that Miguel also notices.
Interesting. Soon enough scar-face is skulking in the bushes, leering at the
silly students and drooling as badly as I was.
The night Miguel comes home there is a full moon and late
that evening, someone creeps into the Countess' bedroom wielding a burning
torch. We see her attacked but then nothing is ever mentioned about it again.
At first this seems strange (and it is), but it gets even stranger later on
when we are shown someone wheeling the old lady around the villa at night. Is
she dead? Is someone parading her corpse around outside to get rid of the odor?
Stop asking questions and just go for the ride!
The lovely Angela (Olivia Pascal) shows up for classes a few
days late and is lodged in Bungalow 13 on the villa's grounds. This being the
place where Miguel's earlier ...event... occurred, coupled with Angela's
slightly more fleshed out personality, point toward her being the apple of our
scissor-happy boy's eye. If she had driven up in a car with tags spelling out
FNLGRL things couldn't be clearer. Complicating things nicely, the incestuous
nature of Miguel and Manuela's relationship gets spelled out when she
titillates the poor lad and then rejects him. Her lament about what others
would think of them seems couched in terms to drive the confused guy to commit
terrible acts. What is this woman up to? The next thing you know a killer
is stalking the villa and schoolgirls are getting knifed. But the first few
bodies pull a disappearing act and one girl is even lured off campus for a date
with large industrial stone-cutting buzz saw! This scene is a real gore
showstopper. Amusing as hell (even though it's not believable for a second), it
shows that Franco and his producers really wanted to go for broke to create
something memorable. And they succeeded as far as I'm concerned — the
few seconds delay for the blood to flow out of the severed neck had me grinning
from ear to ear!
Back at the villa a few different suspects are trotted out
for our inspection: a mentally deficient gardener, a studly young guy who
sleeps with most of the girls, and even Alvero are shown to be possibly in the
wrong place at the right time. But as more attempts on her occur and more girls
go missing, Angela becomes increasingly nervous, jumping at shadows and afraid
to go to sleep at night. Sure that she saw her friend Eva
murdered — even if the body went missing seconds
afterward — she sets out to identify the glimpsed masked killer. Is
it Miguel? Or is the answer stranger than that?
Oh come on! You know it is not Miguel from the moment he
starts hiding in the bushes to watch the bikini clad chicks! It HAS to be
someone else. Unless they're pulling a double bluff one us. No, no! Don't go
that way. That path leads to madness. Plus the film doesn't really warrant too
much thought. It’s got a number of hysterical continuity errors in which people
change clothes from one room to another, no one acts as if there is any danger
until a bloody weapon is near them, no one wonders about the suddenly missing
Countess, a pathetic 'cat scare' is employed and the handmade English signs
around the school are ineptly spelled and endlessly funny. Also, those wary of
animal cruelty on screen should shy away as a snake meets its end from a pair
of garden sheers. The fact that it's a visual play on the scissors as a murder
weapon and could even be seen as a castration metaphor (snake/penis) doesn't
make it any less gruesome.
That's not to say that the film is without its charms. While
still exhibiting Franco's patented threadbare sloppiness it has some darned
good photography courtesy of Juan Soler, and though Franco still relies far too
heavily on the zoom lens to save setups, there are a number of well done shots
throughout the picture. Also, to give the devil his due, the film does actually
have a pretty interesting mystery driving the story. Even though it's evident
pretty early on that Manuela has something to do with the various murders, the
final reveal is still a good one. Overall it's a silly slasher that tries to
pull elements from Halloween (killer POV camera), Friday the 13th (offing
promiscuous girls) and a few others but injects a weird Franco Euro-vibe that
makes it pretty entertaining.
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