A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This film presents quite a simplistic story line, hot foreign girls attending a language school and partying & getting into trouble. One by one everyone seems to die, the film doesn't really dull out which is pretty surprising. Lots of kills, and good ones, you really get a good look at it. That being said, the budget was low and take it as it is. I was entertained by the inventiveness of this picture.

A vicious crazed psycho brutally butchers assorted luscious young female students at a boarding school in Spain. Director Jess Franco, working from a suitably sick script by Erich Tomek, keeps the enjoyably twisted story moving along at a steady pace, delivers a handy helping of tacky gore (an uproariously ridiculous decapitation by a giant circular saw and the infamous knife through the breast moment rate as the definite unintentionally sidesplitting splatter highlights), gives the whole thing a snazzy giallo-ish bent (a couple of obvious red herrings, plenty of depraved sexuality, and so on), tosses in a sordid incest subplot for scuzzy good measure, and offers a satisfying smattering of yummy bare distaff skin. The lovely Olivia Pascal makes for an appealing damsel in distress, Alexander Waechter cuts an appropriately creepy figure as a grotesquely disfigured probable suspect, and Jasmin Losensky, Corinna Drews, and Ann-Beate Engelke all supply some mighty delicious eye candy. Juan Soler's competent cinematography boasts a few nifty stylistic flourishes as well as the expected prowling POV camera shots. Gerhard Heinz's wonky thudding'n'throbbing score and the hilariously dated groovy disco soundtrack hit the right-on funky spot. Franco has a small role as a psychiatrist. Granted, Franco fails to generate much in the way of either tension or spooky atmosphere, but fans of undemanding lowbrow slice'n'dice fare should still get a kick out of this seamy little number just the same.

The film begins with facially-scarred Miguel (Alexander Waechter) raping and murdering a girl with a pair of scissors at a masquerade party. He is institutionalised for a number of years, but then released into the care of his sister Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff), whom he used to have a incestuous relationship with. Manuela runs a language Boarding School with her wheelchair-bound mother, who refuses to name Manuela in her will. When Manuela refuses Miguel's advances to resume their relationship, the friends of Angela (Olivia Pascal), whom Miguel's seems to be intrigued by, start disappearing. Angela knows they are being killed and even witnesses a murder, but no-one believes her.When going into a horror film directed by exploitation legend Jess Franco, you know what you're in for. Lots of blood, lots of sleeze, and in particular, lots of tits. Bloody Moon does not fail to disappoint on this front, but unfortunately, it disappoints on practically every other front. On IMDb, he is credited with 194 titles as director, and he has churned out as many exploitation titles as I have s***s after a curry. While I have only seen a small handful of his films (all pretty bad), this is undoubtedly the worst I've seen. As well as ripping off other, more impressive slasher films (Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (1971) and Blood and Black Lace (1964) are two that I noticed), the film is poorly thrown together in a manner to get as much blood and breasts as possible. While that's not a terribly bad or unoriginal idea, all the in-between parts are painfully tedious and dull.If you're in it for the blood, you won't be disappointed. There's plenty of outlandishly staged set-pieces here, most notably the scene in which a woman is decapitated by a power saw. The hilarious thing is that the woman volunteers to be tied down in an abandoned lumber mill, inches away from the giant saw, by a masked man. She says she finds it kinky. Well, maybe she deserves to die for being so f*****g stupid. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention or I was so bored I was considering slitting my wrists, but when the big revelation came at the climax, I failed to see why the killer had to kill the girls in order to achieve their goal. Again, Franco was thinking blood and boobs, and all logic went out the window. Perhaps not the worst Video Nasty on the list so far, but it's certainly up there.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Bloody Moon (1981) ** (out of 4) Original title: Die Sage des TodesSpanish director Jess Franco wasn't shy from jumping into a genre, which was proving popular at the time he did his jumping. This time out the director jumps into the slasher genre after films like Halloween and Friday the 13th had proved to be money-making gold. As the film starts a deformed man kills a woman after she turns down his sexual advances. He's sent to a mental hospital but five years later he is released and soon afterwards more bodies begin to pile up. This film doesn't really work and it's certainly not on the level of the best slashers out there. While it would fall somewhere down by the middle-ground American movies, I'd rank this a little higher since it doesn't limit itself to the certain rules that were in American slashers. As with a lot of Franco's work from this period, it's budget allowed for some nice stuff including the cinematography, which manages to be pretty good here. Another bonus are the special effects, which while some are obviously fake, they still come off looking good. We have a wide range of murders here ranging from simple stabbings to the most famous one where a woman has her head chopped off by a industrial saw. The saw effect is somewhat hit and miss but the gore that pumps out makes for an interesting moment to say the least. It's also interesting at how Franco plays with not only the victim but even the viewer during the scene. The performances are about average for what you'd see in a movie like this but the main reason to view this is simply for Franco's eyes on the genre. The director also doesn't shy away from lifting stuff from other films and that includes the opening sequence of Halloween and Mario Bava's structure to Twitch of the Death Nerve also seems to have been an influence here. Those expecting an American slasher are going to be disappointed but if you're a fan of Spanish cinema or Franco then you'll certainly want to check this out just to see how Uncle Jess handled it differently than what we'd normally see.