You can lobby a lot of criticisms at Jess Franco, and I say that as a fan of his films. Detractors have labeled him a pornographer, a misogynist, a con man, and the devil incarnate. However, when you consider the man behind the work, I can’t help but admire his integrity. Franco could’ve easily coasted his entire career, doing the sort of weirdo Hammer knock-offs that he first made his name with. But he left it all behind, moving to France to escape the censorship of his native Spain, while also foregoing the cushy budgets and box office grosses that he had enjoyed. Yes, he gave this all up to make twisted tales of bondage nuns and lesbian vampires full of gratuitous nudity and S&M, often inspired by his obsession with the works of the Marquis de Sade, which may not strike you as all that noble. But Franco’s dedication to his craft above all else embodies what I love about cult cinema: as I discussed in the Hard Rock Zombies entry, these movies were made by people who stuck to their artistic guns, no matter how noncommercial they were. Above all else, Jess Franco cared about making Jess Franco films. At least for awhile.
Even without knowing the behind the scenes story of today’s film, 1981’s Bloody Moon, you can probably tell just by watching it that this was a money for hire job. Enticed by Wolf Hartwig and Erich Tomek, a pair of German producers with some lofty promises and bucketloads of cash — which were probably very enticing at the time, given the fact that he and his first wife, Nicole Guettard, had just divorced — Franco gave in to the zeitgeist, signing on to craft an American-style teen slasher film for the German marketplace, if you can imagine such a thing. However, it didn’t quite work out that way. To watch Bloody Moon is to watch an idiosyncratic auteur thumb his nose at a genre that he obviously sees as hopelessly formulaic, while also injecting a heaping dose of breathy Eurosleaze into the proceedings, almost as if he can’t help it. In other words, Franco gonna Franco.
We open on, what else, a disco dancing party. Miguel, a Klaus Kinski-looking creepoid with a huge facial scar that resembles fried chicken, is looking at his sister all weird. His sister, Manuela, is like, yo don’t look at me like that, I’m your sister, so yeah, the movie goes THERE immediately. Bummed out over being rejected by his sister, Miguel steals a Mickey Mouse mask and starts to mack on a lady who’s not a blood relative. She invites him back to her bungalow for some horizontal bedroom dancing, but when she takes off his Mickey Mouse mask, she’s, shall we say, less than enthused about Miguel’s fried chicken face. Oh, and she thought that he was her boyfriend, so this is basically how that gag (with like twelve quotation marks around the word gag) from Revenge of the Nerds would turn out in real life. Miguel is also, shall we say, less than enthused by this young lady’s screaming, so he stabs her a bunch of times with a pair of scissors. Glad to see we’ve come so far in terms of dealing with toxic masculinity!
Cut to: five years later. A doctor, played by Jess Franco himself, is like, hey Manuela, your brother is way less murder crazy now, so I’m going to release him into your care, just make sure he’s spared from any sort of excitement, like the constant temptation of having nubile young co-eds around to murder, anyway, byeeeee! Well, oopsies, because as it turns out, Miguel and Manuela live with their invalid billionaire aunt, who leases her land out to an organization called the International Youth Club Boarding School for Languages (you graduate when you’re able to say the name of the school without getting tripped up), which is crawling with gorgeous buh-buh-buh-baaaaaabes who are always dancing sexily and lounging topless around the pool when they’re not learning Spanish for like 5 minutes a day. Great. Things nearly go to hell immediately when, on the train home, Miguel becomes fixated on a young lady named Angela, and when Manuela sees a silk scarf stuck in the window, she somehow thinks that Miguel pushed her out of the train while her back was turned for two seconds. But then Angela gets up, and explains, to these two total strangers, that she had just dropped something on the floor and was bending down to pick it up. This is going somewhere. Cue the next paragraph!
Easily the biggest problem with this movie is the dialogue. This is the rare movie that manages to both show AND tell at the same time, as if we the audience were complete dummies. Characters are constantly talking about their relationships to one another, or narrating events that just happened seconds ago. And the dubbing in this movie…good gravy. Every character talks almost nonstop, no matter what the situation, whether they’re together or alone, in these breathless, dramatically overwrought monologues, delivered at a furious clip, full of the most flowery language. It sounds as though the movie was dubbed by some alien computer technology whose language database consisted of nothing but quotes from John Waters movies.
So as it turns out, Angela is heading to the language school to join her friends in sexy hijinks, but whoops, she has to live in the bungalow where Miguel went all scissor-happy back in the day. And gosh, wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as Miguel makes the scene at this school again, people start turning up dead. Good news, though: this movie delivers on the kills. We get to see the mean old invalid aunt get burned alive in her bed, one of Angela’s friends gets stabbed in the back and the knife pokes out through her nipple, another friend is choked by some sort of like bear trap thing, and then there’s the coup de grace, when yet another friend is beheaded by a giant circular saw. Hell yeah. On the other hand, there’s a really cruel, unnecessary scene in which a snake is beheaded by a pair of garden shears. Leave the critters alone!
For whatever reason, no one believes Angela when she’s like yo all of my friends are being murdered, because she, uh, is reading a murder mystery novel, so it must be all in her imagination? It makes no sense, but then again Angela doesn’t exactly endear herself to us by running around all over creation having a nervous breakdown. I know they can’t all be Ellen Ripley, but cheese and crackers, cut the damsel in distress act, woman! Along the way, we hit all of the major slasher plot moments: the killer POV shots, the jumping cat fakeout scare, the last girl stumbling upon the intricately posed corpses of her friends, etc. You can practically feel Franco smirking each time a scene like this happens. This leads to a final act straight out of a giallo movie, full of crazy twists and double crosses and escalating violence.
And then there is the soundtrack. One lofty promise made by Hartwig & Tomek to Franco was that Pink Floyd were slated to provide the film’s soundtrack. Yes, THAT Pink Floyd. Why Franco would believe that these German snake oil salesmen had corralled the biggest rock band in the world at the time to do a soundtrack for their no-budget horror flick I honestly don’t know. The music was eventually done by an Austrian gentleman named Gerhard Heinz, and Franco has gone on record saying it is his least favorite part of the film. However, I quite enjoy it. There is a great variety of motifs and sounds, from lounge exotica to demonic strings to Stockhausen style bleeps and bloops. And then of course, there is the film’s main theme, which does indeed sound like something that could’ve conceivably been an outtake from the Wish You Were Here sessions.
To wrap up my take on Bloody Moon, I wanna cede the floor to the master himself. Click here to watch an excellent, highly entertaining interview with Franco, shot in his home for Severin’s DVD release of the film from 2007. Beginning in charming fashion with second wife and collaborative muse Lina Romay grabbing her purse and leaving for the afternoon, Franco chain smokes about a thousand cigarettes and regals us with many an entertaining anecdote from behind the scenes of Bloody Moon, including the one promise the producers did keep to him (casting Olivia Pascal as Angela), the true identity of mysterious screenwriter “Rayo Casablanca” (co-producer Erich Tomek), the fact that he indeed did treat the film as more of a tongue-in-cheek venture (much to the producers’ chagrin), and the horrifying and inaccurate title the film was saddled with for its release in Spain (get ready for it…Raped College Girls. Yikes!) It’s sad to watch the interview knowing that Franco would only be with us for another five years. But that’s the thing with artists as prolific and driven as he was: it will take a lifetime to digest the twisted feast that is his body of work. We may have covered an outlier today, but perhaps it’s enough to get you started on exploring the sumptuous, problematic, bizarre, and wonderful world of Jess Franco.
