Bloody Moon - 1981 (This Film Rates a D- ) This film opens with Miguel, a facially disfigured man, attempt to deceive and rape a young female only to brutally kill her with a pair of scissors in her boarding room. Five years later he is released from a mental institution in the care of his sister (Manuela) and two others (the bitchy aunt in a wheelchair and Maria, the countess). Manuela runs a boarding school for young women but also has an incestuous relationship with her brother. It also features Angela who is the student now occupying that same room of the murdered student. She starts having auditory and visual hallucinations and witnesses murders. She decides to pack her bags and leave but winds up barricading herself in the room. Angela is tormented and her friends are killed. Come to find out the brother Miguel isn't really the current killer after all. The ending sequence is just crap. Ufff, the dubbing is truly horrid, over dramatic and just full of so much nonsense dialog. The acting is bad and some scenes are just laughable even though not intended to be so. Cheap and poorly done scares that only prolong the agony between kills. Another horrible cat scare tactic at the 1 hour 3 minute mark. The gore effects are decent but not often enough. What was the fake looking boulder thing at the 46:40 minute mark? There are numerous boobie scenes. Great 80's disco style soundtrack that is one of the only highlights to this film.

"Die Säge des Todes" or "Bloody Moon" is a collaboration between West Germany and Spain from 1981, so this film has its 35th anniversary this year. The language is predominantly Spanish (despite Austrian writer Erich Tomek), even if IMDb wants you to believe otherwise. It is probably due to director Jesús Franco and this 90-minute film here is not one of his German-language efforts (with Dietrich for example). The main characters are played by German actors, even if they have Spanish names, but there are also a handful Spanish actors in here playing smaller roles. But it really all isn't that important because it does not matter who is who and where they come from as the script (and the acting too to some extent) turns this one into a really weak showing I must say. There is not that much erotics in here as there is in many of Franco's other works, which may have made this at least a good watch for a horny audience. But the way it finally turned out, it is not a good watch for any audience. The horror components, like severed heads on several occasions, feel rushed in and included just for the sake of shocking people and add very little in terms of the plot or story-telling in general. It was a really boring film and the makers' attempts to make this a scary work or succeed from a thriller perspective did not turn out well at all. Oh yeah, and Olivia Pascal was not half as hot as I remembered her. As a whole, this was a failure with regard to almost everything. I absolutely don't recommend the watch. And don't start with this film if you want to get into Franco's work, because you will probably quit immediately afterward and miss out on some of his better stuff. No idea why this film here is actually among his more known works. Stay away.

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.