**Possible Spoilers**
Say what you like about Jess Franco--he never lets an exploitation bandwagon go by without jumping right on it. Here is his entry in the Slasher/Teenager sub-genre of the early 1980s--complete with disco "music" left over from the 1970s, and produced by the same guy who bankrolled Peckinpah's CROSS OF IRON.
Nubile teenaged girls are being butchered at a European school of languages. The prime suspect is a recently-paroled, sister-fixated miscreant with one murder to his "credit." (His face is disfigured by what looks like slapped-on modeling clay, ready to drop off at any second.) Other suspects include a weird peeping-Tom gardener, a local stud, and a strict professor. (Or maybe it's even the pudgy, badly-dubbed doctor in the opening scenes played by Mr. Franco hisself!!!) The gore effects--BLOODY MOON's reason for being--range from H.G. Lewis-level to disturbingly realistic. In one case, a girl is stabbed in the back...the knife erupts from her right nipple, in close-up...then, in medium shot, her corpse falls with the blade sticking out of her LEFT one. Another victim is run through a sawmill and beheaded; this killing is red and splashy but the obvious use of a mannequin would have made Andy Milligan cringe. Other mayhem is more convincingly staged, in particular a murder by scissors, butchery via electric hedge-clippers and the crushing of a young boy beneath a speeding car. Not to be out-done by such notorious animal-killers as Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, Senor Jess also treats us to the actual decapitation of a snake. For all its flaws and excesses, this is still better staged, scored and photographed than most of Franco's work and for what it's worth, BLOODY MOON is definitely on the director's Top Five.
Say what you like about Jess Franco--he never lets an exploitation bandwagon go by without jumping right on it. Here is his entry in the Slasher/Teenager sub-genre of the early 1980s--complete with disco "music" left over from the 1970s, and produced by the same guy who bankrolled Peckinpah's CROSS OF IRON.
Nubile teenaged girls are being butchered at a European school of languages. The prime suspect is a recently-paroled, sister-fixated miscreant with one murder to his "credit." (His face is disfigured by what looks like slapped-on modeling clay, ready to drop off at any second.) Other suspects include a weird peeping-Tom gardener, a local stud, and a strict professor. (Or maybe it's even the pudgy, badly-dubbed doctor in the opening scenes played by Mr. Franco hisself!!!) The gore effects--BLOODY MOON's reason for being--range from H.G. Lewis-level to disturbingly realistic. In one case, a girl is stabbed in the back...the knife erupts from her right nipple, in close-up...then, in medium shot, her corpse falls with the blade sticking out of her LEFT one. Another victim is run through a sawmill and beheaded; this killing is red and splashy but the obvious use of a mannequin would have made Andy Milligan cringe. Other mayhem is more convincingly staged, in particular a murder by scissors, butchery via electric hedge-clippers and the crushing of a young boy beneath a speeding car. Not to be out-done by such notorious animal-killers as Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, Senor Jess also treats us to the actual decapitation of a snake. For all its flaws and excesses, this is still better staged, scored and photographed than most of Franco's work and for what it's worth, BLOODY MOON is definitely on the director's Top Five.