Five years ago at a summer camp on the grounds of the Countess Maria Gonzales' (Marķa Rubio) estate, her disfigured nephew Miguel (Alexander Waechter) stabbed a girl to death in bungalow #13. Now his sister Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff) - for whom he has fostered an incestuous attraction - has brought him home after a stay in a psychiatric clinic (run by director Jess Franco himself) just in time for the opening of a language school on the estate for a host of nubile Teutonic coeds run by ladies man Alvaro (Christoph Moosbrugger). Miguel is eager to resume his taboo relationship with Manuela - recently disinherited by her aunt who plans to leave everything to Miguel - but she fears the judgement of others, musing "If we could just get rid of everyone around us, then things could be as they were." Angela (Olivia Pascal, BEHIND CONVENT WALLS) arrives late and is given the isolated bungalow 13, the better for her to be spied upon by Miguel and the countess' nutty, mute, "red herring" servant Bueno (Otto Retzer), romanced by tennis pro Antonio (Peter Exacoustos), and menaced by a stocking-masked assailant who starts slicing and dicing (and sawing) her friends. Corpses pop up around Angela but quickly disappear, and others blame her overactive imagination - she is seen reading Marc Olden's POE MUST DIE before the first murder she witnesses - even as threats on her life accumulate and her classmates keep disappearing. By the time the BLOODY MOON rises in the sky, their may be no one left to see it.

Scripted by producer Erich Tomek under the pseudonym Rayo Casablanca, BLOODY MOON is a West German cash-in on the slasher craze set in an exotic Spanish locale (Alicante) and helmed by a Spanish director (whose history of West German co-productions dates back to the late sixties as he sought work away from Spain under the oppressive reign of Francisco Franco, filming in France, Germany, Portugal, and Switzerland before returning home in the late seventies). Essentially a work-for-hire, Franco's at times absurd treatment of the slasher formula (treating the false scares like cheap laughs rather than ratcheting up the tension) and the comic relief (producer Wolf C. Hartwig was one of the men behind the SCHOOLGIRL REPORT series) feels less more like his own reaction to the script than a genuine desire to lampoon what was then a trend rather than a genre. It feels more like an old dark house thriller with its mystery-reading heroine, a will and scheming relatives, mysterious villa and the rituals of its inhabitants (Manuela baring her breasts to the moon for no reason or taking the wheelchair-bound countess for her moonlight stroll). The climax and rote resolution are rather sloppy, but Franco never really cared for that aspect of his more personal and obsessive films. With its relatively slick camerawork and moody lighting, it might appear to be one of Franco's best-looking films, although quite a few of his Spanish films from this period shot by Juan Soler (and Franco himself) - as well as his Swiss films for Erwin C. Dietrich - were quite accomplished visually compared to his Eurocine productions (it's certainly one of the better-photographed non-studio slasher films). The gore effects are largely laughable (more so thanks to the clarity of the newer transfer) but the sawmill decapitation stands out for being simultaneously wicked and ludicrous. Christina von Blanc - who had previously starred in Franco's superior A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (1973) - appears here briefly as Alvarado's secretary Elvira.

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