| Product: |
Killer's Moon (DVD) |
| Date: |
12.12.07 (133 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Well, the music's pretty good.
Disadvantages: The acting, the plot, the script, the direction...
(A review of just the film. I'm not aware of this being available in any format at the moment.)
This is a sleazy, peculiar and often hilarious British horror movie from 1978. By that time, the British film industry was in terminal decline. The few horrors being made had none of the charm of Hammer. This is the era of Exposé, Inseminoid and other disreputable postscripts - films that ramp up the outrageousness in a desperate attempt to be noticed. Killer's Moon is one of the most obscure of British horrors, but it's slowly clawing itself a cult following; hopefully it'll get a DVD release someday.
Four escaped psychopathic murderers on LSD - who are convinced they are dreaming - terrorise a coachload of schoolgirls stranded in the Lake District. That's pretty much it, although there are studly tourists camping nearby to provide last minute rescues, and a three-legged dog, for some reason.
"Blood on the moon, one mangled dog, one missing axe, and one lost girl who just found a body at the wrong end of the axe - how's that for the great English outdoors?"
The script is ridiculous. It's largely made up of stalk-and-slash dialogue clichés, deployed without any thought as to their effect. Characters say things that we're obviously meant to expect them to say, even if in doing so they discuss plot developments they have no way of knowing about. But for all the lousy dialogue, things often get gratifyingly weird, even absurdist. There's one exchange that's genuinely Pinteresque. The director, Alan Birkinshaw, says that his sister, novelist Fay Weldon, helped with some of the dialogue, which might explain why it has a bit more weird flair than you'd expect. In fact some of it is downright insane.
"She's a white slaver!"
"There's no such thing. The market's been spoiled by enthusiastic amateurs. My daddy says so."
It doesn't help the film that all the characters in peril are either broad comic stereotypes or pretty schoolgirls. The prim, ineffectual teachers, the Scottish gamekeeper who doesn't like city folk and the chirpy coach driver could all come from some nightmare 70s sitcom. The heroic campers are ugly and ridiculous, and are always leaving defenceless women alone in areas known to be crawling with murderous thugs. The girls themselves (none of whom looks a day under 23) are irritating, with their exaggerated squeals of what's meant to be innocent, girlish delight. The acting is uniformly poor - everyone's line readings are slightly over-emphasised, as if the performers are worried we won't realise what emotions they're experiencing unless they make them a bit too loud. I don't think I recognised any of the victim actors at all (one girl looks a bit like Diana Spencer; it's not really her, though).
"My god! In *my* dreams I murder freely, pillage, loot and rape!"
The psychos aren't much better. An ugly lot, they're on the run from a psychiatric hospital where they were the subject of vague LSD-lucid-dreaming experiments (this is explained in a clumsily inserted scene in a government office. This is one of the film's many plot holes - if the government knows these men are roaming the Lake District, why aren't there any policemen out looking for them?). The madmen get a rather more portentous line in poor dialogue, and at least look as if they're enjoying themselves. They're dressed in white jumpsuits - one also wears a bowler hat; obviously someone had seen A Clockwork Orange and thought no one would notice the similarities. One of the murderers is actually a recognisable actor: David Jackson, the least memorable member of Blake's Seven. He's the only cast member whose IMDB listing requires you to scroll down to read it all.
"Do you dream in colour, Mr Trubshaw?"
"Whenever possible, Mr Muldoon. I like the flesh tints."
The film itself is directed and edited with competence but little flair. There's a surprising amount of location shooting in the Lake District, and while it doesn't make much of the beautiful scenery, it at least provides a nice backdrop. The impressive hotel is obviously a real location, too. I liked the music a lot, sometimes inappropriately mournful but more usually a crazy melange of acid jazz and snippets of nursery rhymes. I'd happily buy a soundtrack album.
"Mr Psychiatrist? Are you there?"
"Go to hell you bastard, you're mad!"
"Now what sort of a reply is that from a National Health psychiatrist? I should have gone private..."
The film's few good points aren't really the issue, although they're nice enough bonuses. But there are yet more bad points - the tent is larger on the inside than the outside, and some exterior scenes are obviously filmed in a studio with a cloth-backdrop sky. I'm always banging on about day-for-night filming, but here it's shockingly poor, randomly switching between day and night between shots. It's really the film's basic craziness that draws me in - the weird ways it dives off at tangents that are neither expected nor sensible. It juggles a large number of characters, and has to find things for all of them to do. Even if it means characters have to put themselves in danger for no reason other than plot furtherance, it's still fascinating to watch what could be a pretty straightforward story flounder madly around out of something like desperation.
"Why would someone kill a gamekeeper with an axe? I was only going out to make a telephone call!"
As horror it doesn't work - it's predictably unscary. The direction and editing don't allow for suspense. Characters just wander into peril with no forewarning. It's impossible to give a hoot about any of the characters since they are, at best, one dimensional. There's one charred corpse and a bit of unconvincing stabbing, but this isn't a splatter fest. Although it's a film that might still run into censorship troubles, it wouldn't be for the gore. It's the film's attitude that's contentious. It's very, shall we say, of its time.
"Look, you were only raped. As long as you don't tell anyone about it you'll be alright [...] And if we ever get out of this alive, well... maybe we'll both live to be wives and mothers."
The unbelievable piece of dialogue quoted above should give you some idea of where this film is coming from. It presents rape as titillation (as a lot of films of the era did), which is not good whichever way you look at it. The schoolgirls, who spend most of the film in their nighties, are a mildly disturbing mix of badly-acted childishness (one of them even has a teddy bear, for goodness' sake) and blatant sexuality (they're all clearly older than school-age, and breasts are liberally displayed). How willing you are to tolerate such things will determine how you react to Killer's Moon. I stared in disbelief but ultimately found myself laughing, albeit slightly less heartily than usual. The sheer ineptitude, added to the feeling that there's a very strange film trying to break through, just about salvage this in my opinion (but my opinion has inevitably been tainted by overexposure to this kind of thing).
"Well I'm frightened! No I'm not, I'm excited. Ohhh, I don't know what I am!"
Killer's Moon is a badly disjointed film that tries to scare and titillate and fails on both counts. The LSD-dream concept is interesting but not really explored; other than that (and the three-legged dog) there's nothing new. The gore sequences aren't gory or imaginative enough and the supposedly sexy bits are let down by poor performances and dubious morality. But I do have a soft spot for Killer's Moon, mainly because of the loopier script elements. It's absolutely ridiculous, especially when you consider it was made the same year as Halloween. But it's somehow rather satisfying to think that at least a few people were trying to keep the flame of low-budget exploitation alive in this country as the film industry headed inexorably towards a decade of Channel 4-produced pretension. I'd happily buy this if anyone does ever manage to get it out on DVD. I suspect I'd be in a minority, though.
Summary: An obscure but peculiar late 70s British sleaze-a-thon
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