Jul 7, 2022
Die Säge des Todes (Bloody Moon, 1981)
"That's not all: a girl in the very same bungalow was murdered brutally in her bed!"
"Honestly, how gruesome; that's a bit far-fetched."
"No, I heard about it, it's a fact. The killer used a pair of scissors and just kept stabbing her!"
"I'll have nightmares if you go on telling all your horror stories, you've quite a repertoire of chilling tales."
#Die Säge des Todes#bloody moon#jesús franco#slasher film#horror imagery tw#video nasty#1981#jess franco#erich tomek#olivia pascal#christoph moosbrugger#nadja gerganoff#jasmin losensky#corinna drews#alexander waechter#maría rubio#antonia garcía#ann beate engelke#peter exacoustos#otto retzer#schlocky west german and spanish coproduction which was presumably just another paycheck for old uncle Jess but which earnt a certain#amount of notoriety over here by ending up on the video nasties list. it isn't hard to see why; the fx are both gruesome and convincing and#as always with Franco there's a surfeit of sex and violence. there's also one scene of (i suspect) real animal cruelty‚ tho i haven't read#anything in online reviews about it (but it does look upsettingly real). the plot is old hokum and borrows liberally from both contemporary#US slashers and older euro splatter (particularly Bava's A Bay of Blood and Martino's Torso). the script is frequently dreadful and the#lack of continuity embarrassing but i will say this is the best looking Franco film I've ever seen. he absolutely nails the 80s gaudy#holiday aesthetic. not for the faint of heart (there's a circular saw scene which i imagine was the key reason this was banned) but of#minor interest for its place on the nasties list and as a Franco film which actually looks pretty good (albeit with fluctuations in picture#quality during scenes of violence; I assume that's down to original gore footage being lost after censorship and exisitng only in inferior#format). also features a killer in Micky Mouse mask; Franco was lucky he didn’t get sued to death‚ those disney boys are litigious as hell
