When you think of European horror you probably first think of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. To a lesser extent, maybe even Jess Franco. And that would be understandable. Despite making almost two-hundred (!!) films as a director, Franco has never been held on the upper echelon like his peers. Of course, that might be because a lot of his films make for rough viewing - and this is despite the fact most of them wallow in sleaziness and depravity. As one of the handful of Franco efforts seeing an uncut DVD release from Severin Films (including Devil Hunter, Mansion of the Living Dead, and others), Bloody Moon is the one I was most interested in revisiting. Having only seen it in my mid-teens, and endlessly making fun of it with my friends, I was curious how Franco's take on American slasher movies would be. The results are a hodgepodge of bizarre moments, heavy-handed humour, and some mediocre gore effects that managed to get this on the U.K.'s "Video Nasty" list.

Meet Miguel (Alexander Waechter), who would be your regular horny guy if he wasn't so burnt on the face. Slinking around the outskirts of a party, Miguel watches everyone having fun and we get to marvel at laughable dancing, lousy disco music, and wooden dialogue galore. But things take a turn for the worse as Miguel, in a pre-credits sequence, stabs a topless girl to death with scissors after she rejected him earlier.

Flash ahead to five years later and Miguel is being released from the asylum and into the care of his sister, Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff). I'm guessing it'd be pretty hard to be a former murderer of a young girl when it turns out your family runs a sort of boarding school for women (the tongue-twistingly named, "International Youth Club Boarding School of Languages") and there's nubile temptation all around. Not to mention that they have to contend with their bitchy wheelchair-bound Aunt - whom we see burnt alive early on in the film, much to my chagrin as her bitchiness would've been a welcome escape from all the random plotting on hand.

Of course, girls around the school start being killed off and Olivia Pascal is tossed into the "heroine" role as Angela, who's a little suspicious of Manuel and our mentally handicapped janitor who seems to show up in random shots for red herring purposes. This gives Franco the opportunity to trot out some gore sequences like when one girl is stabbed through the breast and a girl is decapitated in the infamous (and awful looking, effects wise) buzz saw scene. There's also odd attempts by Franco to give the film some striking imagery, a out-of-left-field incest subplot that threw me for a "what the f*ck?!" loop, and a whole lot of gesticulating by the cast.

Speaking of the cast, Pascal does her best to look scared in the lead role and the other girls do their flirty American girl best before getting knocked-off. Waechter is suitably creepy in his role having to stare off into the distance numerous times sporting weak facial make-up and Gerganoff gets the pleasure of wearing see-through clothes and hitting on her brother numerous times.

Bloody Moon is so random and messy it turns out to be peculiarly watchable stuff. It's a flick that feels totally European in flavour but Franco tries to emulate his American counterparts by having some shots staged through the killer's eyes and having Angela go through the motions of finding dead bodies everywhere while running for her life. You can't help but be entertained by how out there everything is from the aforementioned incest, to everyone's insistence that Angela sleep with the school's man-whore gardener, down to the finale that trots out evil scheming, a neck stabbing, and an electric hedge clipper put to good use.

If you're a fan of Euro-horror, you're going to see this regardless, but if you have any casual interest in them you should get some entertainment from Bloody Moon. It's not a good movie but it clips along and tosses out so many outrageous moments that you can't help but watch - it's probably my favourite 80's Franco movie after Faceless. (Chris Hartley, 9/25/09)

Directed By: Jesus Franco.
Written By: Rayo Casablanca (Erich Tomek).

Starring: Olivia Pascal, Christoph Moosbrugger, Nadja Gerganoff, Jasmin Losensky.

Picture Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: Severin presents Bloody Moon in an uncut form (the print even has its original German title, Die Säge des Todes) and, for a film almost thirty-years-old, it looks pretty good. There's mild grain throughout and some scattered specks but this is a solid transfer - though things get a little loopy during the "claw collar" death scene.

Extras: There's not a lot here but it's enough for fans of the film as we get a trailer and a nineteen-minute interview with a chain-smoking Franco who's actually quite engaging and funny as he tells amusing tales about the film and his career at the time it was made.

Visit Severin Films for more info.