Bloody Moon and the baffling appeal of Jess Franco
An obsession that I can't leave behind
In the mid 1990’s I bought a videotape at a local comic shop what’s labels indicated that it was a collection of early David Cronenberg shorts, including the original Crimes of the Future. I brought it home and popped it into the trusty old VCR, only to find out that the tape had been mislabeled. The movie began with a static shot of a misty country road. From out of the mist stepped a beautiful young woman wearing nothing but a pair of boots, a belt, and a cape. The title card appeared: Female Vampire, it said. Though, I didn’t know it at the time, this was my first exposure to the world’s most prolific director, Jesus Franco, and it would spark an obsession in me that I still can’t shake.
Despite my disappointment that I didn’t get the Cronenberg tape, I kept watching. It was hard not to. Lina Romay was captivating. She was beautiful. She was naked and I am only a man. But for all the simplicity of arousal, the movie’s abundant softcore sex scenes, boobs, and Euro-bush aren’t enough to float an obsession upon. I watched Female Vampire numerous times with equal parts attraction to Franco’s muse and a fascination for the film’s inscrutable allure. Female Vampire is an incomprehensible mess and, I would later come to realize, a certain reappraisal of his previous incomprehensible mess, Vampyros Lesbos. Context goes a long way with Jess Franco, and the death of Soledad Miranda left a hole in his heart that he wouldn’t be able to close until meeting Romay. Female Vampire, like his many remakes of The Awful Doctor Orloff, gave him a chance to re-explore whatever it is that he was trying to do, with a new actress that seemed to inspire him on the same wavelengths as Miranda. I say whatever he was trying to do because you can only speak in vagaries when talking about Franco. He remains one of the most defiantly opaque filmmakers and to pin him down as nothing more than a pervy purveyor of skin flicks is unfair.
Around the same time that I discovered Female Vampire, I also discovered a website called Mortado’s Page of Filth (still active 30 years later!) which was mostly a gallery of its owner’s photography, a dedication to Italian model, Anna Falchi, but most importantly, a bustling threaded message board dedicated to horror movies. It was there that I learned a lot more about Jess Franco but more importantly that I was not alone in my utterly inexplicable fascination with the movie Female Vampire. I placed the title on my for-trade bootleg list and then proceeded to rake in new movies, many of them Franco’s other films, thanks to that title, alone. Four out of five requests for trades asked specifically for Female Vampire. As it would happen, there are many of us out here scratching our heads, watching Jess Franco movies, and trying to understand what this quality is that keeps us coming back. Because I have no problem telling you that I do not particularly care for Jess Franco’s movies and yet, I’ve seen a few dozen of them. On purpose.
Ostensibly, Franco had two modes of production. In his primary mode, he was an auteur. He made movies which spoke to him and spoke from his ego and id. The other mode was gun-for-hire. Jess also had a reputation for working fast and loose and operated along the same lines that you found in people like Roger Corman and Golan/Globus who could take the budget of a single picture and make two or three functional movies with it. When adequately budgeted, Franco made movies like the aforementioned Vampyros Lesbos and Awful Doctor Orloff, which communicated his interests and influences better than the movies made while in mercenary mode. Franco loved eroticism and gothic horror and injected these interests into everything he made with varying degrees of failure and success. But the mercenary output vastly outnumbers the passion projects and its in this place that we end up with Bloody Moon, the weirdest stepchild of Franco’s output.
Bloody Moon, released in 1981, was intended to be a cheap cash-in on the American slasher/body count market. European filmmakers have tried on numerous occasions to tap into the slasher biz. To do so during that window of frantic horror movie consumption was a smart business move. You couldn’t lose. But no matter what they did, none could crack the code. Slasher movies are an explicitly North American commodity and the European attempts, even Jose Larraz’s Edge of the Axe, which lands pretty close to the mark, still feels particularly European and Giallo-ish. Dress it up as American as you like, shoot your movie in American locations, the cultural experiences and attitudes of Spain, France, and Italy are still going to shine through and Bloody Moon doesn’t even make an attempt to mask this failure.
Bloody Moon’s plot follows a liminal track that makes about as much as sense as a Franco movie can be expected to. That is, unless you view it through the lens of a picture trying to adapt Halloween to giallo standards. It’s as though the film’s producer, Wolf Hartwig, sat Franco down for coffee one day and explained Halloween, a movie he hadn’t seen since its release, to the best of his recollection. What follows is Franco’s adaptation of Carpenter: Why did Michael kill his sister? No explanation is offered. Obviously, six year old Michael is in love with her and is enraged by Judith’s competing lover! In Bloody Moon, Miguel, Michael en español, dons a mask, deceives a woman at a party who is to be his stand-in for his sister, and then murders her savagely when she rejects him. The picture picks up with him being released to his sister’s care after a stint in a mental hospital and returns to their estate, which is adjacent to — or is part of, it’s really unclear — a school which seems to only teach Spanish to young German women. By night, the student body gather at a sleazy disco nightclub where they dance violently to terrible music and bicker over who gets to fuck the tennis coach, Antonio, next.
This quality is Bloody Moon’s first of many cinematic crimes and it speaks directly to how disinterested Franco was in making this movie. He didn’t even study the source of what he was trying to emulate, though it does seem clear that the script lifts beats from, again, Halloween. Making a slasher movie isn’t hard. There’s a thousand of them. By 1981 there were a handful of extremely successful slasher movies that operated on an explicit recipe that was easily copied but Franco couldn’t be bothered. Every slasher flick needs a cast that is divided into a couple of camps. You need a group of individuals who exist, explicitly, to be butchered by the film’s killer. They’re usually obnoxious or mean or carry some other broad, stereotypical quality that flags them right away as knife-bait and in the best of cases, you’re relieved when they finally get what’s coming to them. The other camp are your sympathetic characters. This camp contains the final girl and whoever else is close to her that you don’t want to see, but likely will see, murdered. Bloody Moon gives us Angela for the latter, but as an example of a sympathetic character or final girl, she’s weaksauce at best for reasons that neatly unfold over the passing of time. Everyone else in the movie may as well have a dotted line and instructional text over their throats which reads cut here. I can’t think of another movie with a more unpleasant cast than Bloody Moon (Sleepaway Camp, maybe). The men are menacing, from top to bottom. Miguel, patterned after Michael Meyers, is a unspeaking stalker. There’s a simple-minded Igor type who shows up for jump scares here and there. Antonio is a fucking jerk, and the teacher, Alvaro, can’t seem to shake the sneer that’s practically chiseled into his face.
…and then the movie coasts in neutral for a very, very long time. For a picture that clocks in under ninety minutes, Bloody Moon seems to crawl by. It’s an eternity of the yappiest, most grating women in the world. They bicker endlessly in scene after scene of unpunctuated, machine gun dialog what’s tone and energy isn’t even close to the subjects being talked about. It is maddening to watch. The killer eventually getting around to whittling them down, one by one, is doing us all the biggest favor after practically an hour following the first kill. Since it’s following the map set out by Carpenter, Miguel spends a lot of time stalking women like his namesake, but where Meyers was stalking with murderous intent, Franco’s read on the stalking is bizarre. It’s purely a pervy sexual obsession. If you fall for the misdirect, that’s on you.
Character, Eva, is killed in Angela’s apartment and the body is disappeared and what follows is nearly an hour of literally every other character bitterly gaslighting Angela about her whereabouts. Inge, easily the most grating of all the victims-to-be, dies in spectacular fashion but not before cheerfully yammering endlessly for minutes on end as the unseen killer binds her with rope, preparing to send her neck-first into a spinning saw blade. No character death is as satisfying as hers and the simple act of relieving us of having to hear from her again for the film’s remaining running time is so much more valuable than the admittedly awesome kill scene that follows.
Thankfully, the film’s energy picks up as we round the corner toward the big climax, implying that whatever script there was at production time, it was nothing but a couple of loud set-pieces similar to American slasher flicks with brutal kill scenes and a series of gruesome tableau that the killer set up for the final girl. Inge’s death, in particular, is just the greatest and might be my favorite Franco death scene by a mile, featuring a decapitated dummy and a delayed gout of arterial spray that puts the Lone Wolf and Cub movies to shame. But a few things render the final effect utterly powerless. The film’s prescription misdirect is so lazy that if you fall for it at all, you should probably see a doctor. The identity of the real killer is meant to be kept a secret until the final moments but if you didn’t figure it out by the first kill, again, you should see a doctor. You may have suffered a head injury at some point.
But here’s the thing.
There are glimmers of absolute genius in this movie. That Franco effect that fascinates me is fully in place. Try as he might to make an American-style slasher movie, the end-result cant help but be a particularly Spanish riff on giallo but Franco does a couple of absolutely brilliant things that stick with me. His attempt to give Halloween the Franco rebrand is adorable. The very first murder of the killing spree, proper, is set up in the strangest way. Where most gialli do that thing where the camera stalks the victim, as though you’re seeing through the killer’s eyes, the death of Eva is set up in such a strange way to set it apart and differentiate Bloody Moon from the Euro-set. Instead, the camera is offset from the killer at about hip-height and an equal distance to the right so that his entire body invades the left side of the frame. As he advances on the girl, the body doesn’t seem to move at all and the advance toward the victim is robotic and appears to be over-cranked. The effect is unlike anything else in the Franco canon and it’s genuinely uncanny in a way that sows tension. When she’s stabbed, she’s stabbed from behind and the knife pierces her chest, specifically her breast in a nasty close up that speaks to Franco’s sex/death obsession with the Marquis de Sade. He’s speaking in the same language as Armando Crispino did via my recent article about his film Autopsy.
Bloody Moon is ultimately one of Franco’s pay-for-play pictures and even though pacing has never been one of Franco’s strong points, even this one plods by with a casual indifference toward the material. Our final girl, Angela, is literally the final girl, but displays none of the qualities that make a solid heroine. The world of Jess Franco has no room for women-as-heroes. It’s a contemptible idea there. Women in Franco’s world fulfill a couple of roles, most of them predictable, but at their most complex, Franco’s women are wicked and antagonistic. They’re killers and temptresses or they’re yappy morons awaiting their date with horror movie destiny. If Jess watched any of the movies he was expected to emulate with Bloody Moon, the notion of a woman mounting an effective counter attack against a male psycho killer must have struck him as hilarious. Laurie Strode fought back. Nancy Thompson fought back. Alice Hardy fought back. Angela does not. Angels runs and Angela screams. That’s it. In the end, she is simply lucky enough to not get stabbed and if Franco had decided to buck the trend and kill his final girl, we’d have been no less poor for it. She offers zero value to such an anemic movie
Bloody Moon offers little to the viewer. As a Halloween riff, it delivers an awkward misunderstanding of the source material. As a Jess Franco movie it delivers the usual sleazy beats that beg the question, do women in Spain just hang out topless like that? For slasher fans it delivers a dud that’ll have you fast forwarding to the kill scenes, several of which are remarkable for those weird glimmers of Franco fascination that seems to captivate those of us who can’t stop looking at his movies. They’re also nasty enough to have landed on the UK’s notoriously arbitrary Video Nasties list. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have seen the censored version that landed on video store shelves because without those nasty murder scenes intact, there’s not much reason to watch this movie.