Bloody Moon
| Bloody Moon | |
|---|---|
 German film poster | |
| Directed by | Jesús Franco Manera[1] |
| Produced by | Wolf C. Hartwig[1] |
| Screenplay by | Erich Tomek[1] |
| Starring | Olivia Pascal |
| Music by | Gerhard Heinz[1] |
| Edited by | Karl Aulitzky[1] |
Production companies |
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Release dates |
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Running time | 84 minutes[1] |
| Country |
West Germany
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Bloody Moon (German: Die Säge des Todes, literally "The Saw of Death"; also known as The Bloody Moon Murders) is a 1981 German slasher film directed by Jesús Franco.
It is one of the infamous "Video Nasties" to be banned in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s.
Plot
Miguel, a young man with a horribly disfigured face, attempts to trick a girl into sex by pretending to be someone else. When this fails he brutally hacks up the young woman with a pair of scissors. After the crimes, Miguel is institutionalized at a mental asylum for five years.
When his sentence is finished, he is released into the care of his sister, Manuela. Along with their invalid aunt, his incestuous sister Manuela operates a boarding school for young women, called Europe's International Youth-Club Boarding School of Languages, on the Spanish resort of Costa Del Sol.
Miguel is intrigued by Angela, a long-haired brunette, whom he first saw on the train ride from the sanitarium. The creepy Miguel follows her around.
Miguel meets with Manuela to request that they resume their incestuous relationship. She reminds him that it was this relationship that made him emotionally unstable five years earlier. She says they cannot be a couple because nobody understands them: "Only if we could get rid of everyone, then things could go back to the way they were."
Later, Angela's friends are killed one by one. One, while topless, is skewered from behind by a 12-inch knife that exits her right nipple. Another is coerced by a romantic and masked Spaniard who insists on tying her up in an abandoned lumber mill (which according to her is "kinky,") and is decapitated with a large power saw, an effect complete with ample squirting blood from her neck. A young boy is run over midsection by a Mercedes. Another friend is strangled by smoldering fireplace tongs. There is also the real decapitation of a snake. When the girls start to turn up missing, nobody believes Angela that there's a killer on the loose. She had seen the corpse of one girl, and it was gone as soon as she went for help. Confused and scared, Angela finally looks for help from the people who run the school.
Cast
- Olivia Pascal as Angela
- Christoph Moosbrugger as Alvaro
- Nadja Gerganoff as Manuela
- Alexander Waechter as Miguel
- Jasmin Losensky as Inga
- Corinna Drews as Laura
- Ann-Beate Engelke as Eva
- Peter Exacoustos as Antonio
- Antonia García as Elvira
- Beatriz Sancho as Nieto
- María Rubio as Countess Maria Gonzales
- Otto Retzer as Bueno
- Jesús Franco as Doctor
Release
Bloody Moon was released in West Germany on March 27, 1981.[1]
The film was made available on DVD for the first time in the United States by Severin Films in 2008.[2] This version restores all of the gore scenes, including the infamous circular saw, beheading scene.[3]
Music
Much of the Bloody Moon score is an ensemble of instrumental cues and ambient mood pieces composed by Gerhard Heinz in addition to two vocal disco songs. However, the centerpiece to the film's soundtrack is Love in the Shadow, an instrumental romantic theme attributed to Frank Duval that is used as a leitmotif to emphasize sentimental and doleful scenes and is often noted for its ad absurdum recurrence throughout the film. Duval actually adapted the central melody of Love in the Shadow from Love What's Your Face, a popular European romantic ballad that would appear later in 1982 on the Ingrid Kup solo album Feel Me, with whom Duval often performed.
A selection of eight pieces from the soundtrack, without the Duval accompaniments, was released in 2009 on a CD album entitled The Erotic and Painful Obsessions of Jess Franco. In 2015 the complete soundtrack for Bloody Moon, comprising all of Gerhard Heinz's compositions and both versions of Duval's Love in the Shadow, along with the vocal disco songs Holiday Feeling and Disco Nights, was released on a three platter vinyl LP edition from Private Records/Stella International.
Reception
In a contemporary review, Tom Milne reviewed the film in the Monthly Film Bulletin.[4] Milne described the film as "appallingly meretricious schlock which looks as if it has been slung together using discarded out-takes from a dozen different potboilers." and that "The film has no "visible means of support from either plot or characterization, the action simply staggers from one lurid climax to next".[4]
Bloody Moon was received favourably by DVD Verdict.[5]
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Die Säge des Todes". Filmportal.de. Retrieved October 30, 2015.
- ↑ "Bloody Moon (DVD)". severin-films.com. Retrieved 2011-04-18.
- ↑ "Bloody Moon (DVD) review". digital-retribution.com. Retrieved 2011-04-18.
- 1 2 Milne, Tom (1982). "Bloody Moon "(Die Säge des Todes)"". Monthly Film Bulletin (British Film Institute) 49 (576): 91.
- ↑ Sullivan, Gordon (3 November 2008). "DVD Verdict Review – Bloody Moon". DVD Verdict. Retrieved 9 December 2014.
External links
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