Killer's Moon

Killer’s Moon on the face of it had everything going for it. A busload of schoolgirls break down in the middle of nowhere and are forced to hole up in an old hotel. Meanwhile 4 lunatics have escaped from a nearby hospital. They have been used as guinea pigs in a new therapy and believe they are actually dreaming what is happening, so they don’t care about killing/raping/maiming anybody (although given their pedigrees as lunatics, they wouldn’t care anyway!) and they happen to come across the hotel. A couple of lads who are camping nearby have a go at playing the hero and try and rescue the girls. It was made in the 70s (quite a plus in my book), had dialogue written by the acclaimed author Fay Weldon and had a fair amount of sleaze involved. Sounds like an out and out winner, right? Well no. Not quite. In fact it misfires on most counts which is a real shame. Not that the flick isn’t watchable, it most certainly is, but you get the overall feeling of a missed opportunity.

I do like the general plot point of the lunatics believing themselves to be in a dream and the murders etc just figments of their imagination. But making them lunatics wasn’t the right path to go down. Or multiple antagonists either. It should have been 1 ‘normal’ chap who is the guinea pig, somebody who wouldn’t normally kill, but because it’s only a dream………..

Anyhow, I didn’t make it, Alan Birkenshaw did, and all the faults are his. The highly erratic continuity when it comes to day time and night time stops being amusing after the nth time as it becomes clear that consistency just isn’t cared about. Also, at the lads’ campsite it suddenly switches to woefully obvious studio set with a backdrop of a large lake, which is fine as the location is the Lake District but alas earlier shots prove that there was no lake there at all. This film just keeps falling into Ed Wood territory, and given the fact that it can be quite nasty , it doesn’t have a hope of having the charm of a Wood flick.

This all sounds a bit negative. There are some positives: its heart is in the right place, it really isn’t far away from being a minor cult classic; some of the mood shots also hint at what could have been; there’s a three-legged dog and again, the story isn’t half bad. Oh, and it’s nice to see the British Board Of Certification shot at the beginning branding the film an ‘X’.