A man with an incredibly scarred face is released from an asylum and not long afterwards several women are murdered in brutal fashion.  Is it the ugly man doing the evil deeds or is he taking the blame?

Judging a Book by its Cover

– So where’s the moon?

– That saw blade really took her by surprise.

Directed by Jess Franco

Starring Olivia Pascal, Cristoph Moosbrugger and Nadja Gerganoff

The film opens with Miguel, a man with a really bad scar covering almost half his face, tricking a woman into having sex with him by wearing a Mickey Mouse mask and impersonating another man.  She removes his mask before things get started and her reaction kills his boner before he grabs a pair of scissors and stabs her repeatedly until her thorax is a gooey mess.

Five years later, Miguel’s sister, Manuela, picks him up from his stint at the loony bin with a stern warning from the doctor not to make mention of the past incident and certainly don’t get him excited — he’s fragile.  Manuela takes him to their hateful aunt’s fashionably large home where Manuela has turned part of it into a school with a male teacher named Alvaro who teaches Spanish.  Miguel professes his love for his sister who teases him just enough but cuts him off before getting serious so Miguel is off to stalk some of the female student body who live nearby instead.

Those same female students start getting killed by a masked assailant who prefers to murder in some pretty outrageous set pieces that start to circle around one particular student, Angela, who sees her friends drop off one by one in horrific ways.  The killer starts off simple by stabbing one girl through the back and through one of her breasts and works up to convincing another student to be tied down in a mill (she thinks it’s kinky) before decapitating her with the mill’s circular saw.  It’s a nightmarish scenario that makes you cringe every second it’s on screen until the decapitated mannequin head is shown afterwards.  Still, for 1981, the kills are quite over the top and mean spirited in comparison to other slashers out at the time.

Jesus “Jess” Franco, purveyor of filthy films of all types, was given the task to make a slasher film given that the subgenre had started becoming immensely popular at the onset of the 80s.  Having been making violent and erotic films for a while at this point, a simple slasher film was pretty tame for Franco in comparison to his previous works (like Mansion of the Living Dead) so he just put a bit of Franco magic in Bloody Moon and the end result is absolutely gratuitous in it’s depiction of gory violence and wall-to-wall female nudity.  Easily recommended for those looking for a more extreme take on the usual American slasher film — if you can deal with the bad dubbing, of course.

TL;DR

Story: 6 – While the dubbing isn’t great, the basic story is a whodunnit involving a horribly scarred man being around female students who get killed in gory fashion.  Sure it could be the ugly man but maybe it’s someone else?

Blood: 8 – The film features a violent stabbing with scissors, the aforementioned knife-through-breast scene, a crispy burning bed, someone stabbed through the neck, a friggin hedgesaw trimmer is involved and oh yeah, a giant circular saw decapitation.  Oh yes, there will be blood.

Nudity: 9 – Pretty sure most of the women get naked at one point or another.  And that’s a good thing.

Overall: 6 – Boobs, blood and a badly dubbed story, Bloody Moon is worth a look for the slasher fan looking for an extra kick.

Trivia

Bloody Moon was on the dreaded UK Video Nasty list of banned films.

Director Franco was told that Pink Floyd was going to do the film’s score.

The film features a snake decapitation and yup, the snake was real.