Released in 1978, and with a premise that feels like it COULD be brilliant (if laid out correctly), Killer's Moon is a fantastic oddity. I'm not sure I can heartily recommend it to anyone, but I would encourage the curious to seek it out for at least one viewing.
A bus has broken down and left passengers stranded in the Lake District. That's pretty much how the film starts. The passengers are all schoolgirls, with one or two guardians alongside them. Unfortunately, there are also four escaped men in the area, men who have been given some radical treatment for their mental health issues. These men believe they are still asleep and in dreamland, which means they will hurt, abuse, and kill people without a second thought. Because that's what we all do in our dreams, apparently.
Written and directed by Alan Birkinshaw, with some work also done on the screenplay by Fay Weldon (which is very surprising, considering the final product), this is a sleazy and nasty film that ends up somehow backing away from the sleaze and nastiness at key points. Not that it’s tame, and there are moments here that may well trigger and disturb some viewers, but it keeps seeming to work towards some grandiose grotesqueries that it never actually presents.
The music, credited to John Shakespeare and Derek Warne, ends up being a little bonus, with a plinky plonky strangeness, to use the technical term, and a fun reworking of Three Blind Mice. It certainly does more for the film than any of the visuals, which don’t even make great use of the Lake District filming location. And it does a better job than many of the actors.
To be kind to the cast, I will just say that they are a very mixed bag. Nobody really stands out, although the mannered air of the killers allows them to make a strong impression. Whether that impression is positive or negative, that is a different matter entirely. Sadly, nobody else really stands out. The group of young women don’t get to have moments that show them having any personality, beyond an early scene showing someone having enjoyed a bit of nookie in the woods, and the two men who might end up helping to save them, or might end up as victims themselves, could easily have wandered in by accident from some soap opera filming nearby.
A murky mess, and without any truly great kill scenes to at least showcase some practical effects and fake blood, Killer’s Moon has very little going for it. And yet . . . there IS an inherent, strange, charm to the whole thing. The atmosphere, perhaps accidentally, does feel dream-like at times, and it is always fascinating to watch a film that is trying to reach much further than the resources and talent will allow.
Is this good? No. Should you watch it ahead of many classic titles you have been delaying for years? No. Should you watch it at all? Actually . . . yes. Even if you just end up laughing at much of it. I may end up revisiting it soon, and I am certainly looking forward to exploring the extra features on the recent blu-ray release.
4/10
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