Death Down Under: Bloodmoon

G'day mate- It's time to die!  This slasher film comes to us from Australia, a country that we don't usually associate with the genre.  Is this 1989 film an anomaly or were we just not paying attention?  The plot is simple: a crazy guy kills co-eds.  What's his reason?  It's nothing you haven't seen before, but I will get into that later.  What is Bloodmoon exactly?  Actually, the movie never really addresses it, nor does it explain why it's one word.  It does allow me to review it, so I guess I can just live with it.  To find out why whores gotta die, read on...

Our first kill of the movie comes when two 'teenagers' try to sneak out of an all-girl's school in the middle of the night.  This death- off-screen.  We're off to a great start, guys!

A good chunk of the middle portion of the film is given to a sub-plot involving preppy guys from an all-boy's school fighting with 'townies.'  Does it add anything?  No.  Does it randomly get dropped before the Third Act begins?  Yep.

What are 'Aussie Tubes,' by the way?

About thirty minutes in, the movie accidentally reveals it's killer's face.  Mind you, the actual reveal comes about ten minutes later, but it is a bit silly of you to miss this shot...

So this is our killer- scary, right?  He's a middle-aged schmuck of a teacher who's wife belittles him.  As a result, he kills 'slutty girls' (like his slutty wife, see).  It's goofy, but it does the trick here.

One of our 15 main character is this Police Officer, the kind of guy who works really hard despite the town having so little crime to deal with.  His pay-off comes later.

This film thinks that it's being ironic by randomly cutting to these people singing in Church a couple of times.  It's really just kind of stupid...and forced.

For the climax, our villain sets up the 'townie' and his rich girlfriend, since he hates her...for some reason.  After offing a lot of random people, he gets shot by the cop...who gets stabbed to death.  No happy ending for you.  After that, he goes back for the kill, only for this Nun to throw acid in his face...

...which doesn't kill him either.  Instead, he runs home (since no other cops show up) and pulls a 'Benoit' by killing the wife and himself.  So, in summary, the vicious murder kills many people, murders the nice cop and then dies under his own terms.  The End.

Put another corpse on the barbie!  The plot of this movie is decent, but needed a lot more focus.  The story involves two schools, a murderer, a Nun having a crisis of faith, a romance sub-plot, a sub-plot involving two rival groups and the killer's whole back-story with his wife- who is having an affair with one of the rich guys.  It's no wonder that this film is around 100 minutes long.  If it was any shorter, characters would have to exchange dialogue faster than people in Gilmore Girls!  The meat of this movie is the killer and his plot, so let's focus on that.  His motivation is a bit strange, as he can never muster up the courage to just kill the woman he's mad at.  Not that I'm encouraging that kind of behavior, but it is slightly better than killing random people just because of her!  The fact of the matter is that he, in a way, gets away with all of the crimes.  He dies, but at his own hands.  He kills about a dozen people here, none of whom ever get to strike back at him at all.  What is the moral here?  Kill people and you'll eventually die, provided that you decide to kill yourself?  On the plus side, there aren't 800 sequels out there...or are there?!?  Take us away, main reason that I forgive this film...

Next up, a very ambitious film about zombies throughout history.  Considering that nobody has heard of this movie, you have to question whether or not it's actually good or not!  Stay tuned...