Bloody Moon 1980

The 1980s was a very complicated decade for Jess Franco. He was at his creative peak and commercial low. Franco had finally learned how to produce tight and fast commercial pictures as well as anyone, but he was sort of ghettoized to the outskirts of international exploitation and sleaze as the genres had past their prime. The decade saw Roger Corman, Dick Randall and other B-movie producers losing ground in the international and US markets as Cannon Pictures swiftly dominated and then self-destructed as the first global alternative to Hollywood studios. Only a few entities like Troma and Full Moon survived the 1980s (and they're still going!), but you could add Franco to the list of great filmmakers like Argento, Fulci and Rollin who were edged out of the semi-semi-mainstream by big business and shrinking budgets.

Bloody Moon is then easily one of the last great works for Jess as it became a commercial success worldwide as a horror VHS staple and has actually attained a solid fanbase as one of the more interesting and effective slasher movies from the genre's golden age. Its sleazy, stupid, poorly acted, gratuitous and a little dry on action and character. So its right at home with classics like Pieces, Prom Night and The Prowler because the desired audience experience is simply to give them chills and cheap thrills, which Bloody Moon more than excels at.

Its a grim and anxious adventure set at a Spanish vacation spot where American girls are studying abroad (I don't understand why their school is a private resort, but it is). Unfortunately the girls don't realize there's a very disturbing subplot playing out involving an incestuous, scarfaced sociopath and his deeply fucked up family. Its a good concept even if its predictable and all too familiar to slasher fans. The genre has played with incest too many times (Psycho, Halloween, Bay of Blood, Maniac, Don't Go In The House), but this does add a few twists as Franco had worn out the subject himself. The main twist, again telegraphed way too soon, is still interesting and probably a Franco touch as it fits with his tradition of good-looking monsters and monstrous-looking victims. Overall, the script is pretty good by slasher standards and much better than Franco's usual plots. Its structured well, characters are plentiful and realistic, the dialogue is firm and there's enough mayhem to keep you engaged since the languid pacing can't be helped.

Franco's direction might turn off casual horror fans, but Bloody Moon will impress his devotees. Its one of his most gorgeous and, as a full-on horror film, you get lots of moody night shots and shadow-drenched visuals. It works well contrasted with the exotic and bright Spanish locales. Franco has a good budget here so the cast is attractive and talented enough, the camerawork is lively and the production is textured and even a bit stylish. Its a greasy, cheap production but Franco can hide and accentuate it into something resembling his best work. And while Jess wasn't a fan of Bloody Moon's soundtrack, I think it one of the most appropriate, trading jazz and ambient noise for synth and Goblin-style prog-rock. Its funny that mainstream filmgoers will appreciate the relative quickness of this Franco feature while he and his more obsessive fans may complain that its not slow and artificial enough. Its not his most oneiric film, but there is a thick dreamy quality that brings a nightmare tone to even the most silly moments.

I enjoyed Bloody Moon more than the fan-favorite Venus In Furs and I think its better than most 80s slashers. It has this strong film noir visual palette and the characters have chemistry. You can enjoy this as a piece of schlock or as a very artistic commercial film. It works better than Venus because Franco is aged and self-aware enough to inject much needed humor (that doesn't really work btw) and concedes to deliver the gore and flesh that audiences secretly don't mind mixed with their thrillers. At this point in his career, when Franco had to work with horror or dark subjects, he threw out his pretentious leanings and just dialed up the fun to 11 with comic book villains, nymphomaniac bimbos and self-consciously 1-dimensional throwaway characters and scenes. Its campy more than kitsch and a kind of post-modern slasher almost two DECADES before Wes Craven made Scream. Franco was a grumpy veteran at this point taking a cynical piss on this genre while making sure fans still got their money's worth. That makes Bloody Moon unique, smart and important to the horror genre.

And this leads me to my main takeaway: Jess Franco was one of the earliest anti-sentimentalists in cinema. Most of his films feature totally plastic characters and intentionally flat performances. I always assumed this was just the training of a visual stylist who cared nothing about characterization or acting. But I've learned that Franco adored some actors and nurtured some beautiful performances out of them. In his interviews I realized Jesus Franco was a very dismissive, cynical but still passionate person with a bruised ego. He resented people who deemed him inferior and loved to chop them down to size intellectually. He had very little time for society, its biases and taboos. The lack of emotion, sentiment and humanization is so stark but not something you can easily define when you first discover his films. But you feel the contrast in his early work compared to the melodrama that was prevalent in ALL pre-70s cinema. This sociopathic tone hurt some of his commercial work (like the Fu Manchu films, which needed sympathetic protagonists), but his shallow view of humanity plays beautifully in stories featuring whores, vampires, psychos, abusers, damaged protagonists and outsider weirdos. Blood Moon has its villains being about as likable and broad as the victims. Franco liked to humanize so-called evil and dehumanize the so-called good. Its a very disturbing element to his work but it works because his best films were meant to be disturbing. The two crown jewels of his 80s work, Bloody Moon and Faceless, are perfect examples of Franco's cynical view of humanity, both ending on very sour notes. I will be writing about this more in future reviews now that it is so obviously a part of Franco's power and indistinguishable from his cinematic voice.