Musarañas (2014)

I was looking forward to Musarañas (2014).  It is co-executive produced by Álex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang (who also plays a small part), reuniting them from Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (Witching and Bitching) (2013) with actress Macarena Gómez and actor Hugo Silva.  Musarañas is co-directed by Juanfer Andrés (he also contributed to the screenplay) and Esteban Roel. Musarañas is a confused film, a little too familiar in its plot and a little too convenient when it needs to be.

In 1950s Spain, Montse (Macarena Gómez) cares for her younger sister, played by Nadia de Santiago.  Montse works from her home as a dressmaker and is an agoraphobic, wholly dependent upon her younger sister for assistance.  At the opening of Musarañas, her younger sister has just turned eighteen and is showing strong signs of independence:  she works outside the home; and Montse has noticed, from her window, her younger sister conversing with a young man in the street.  The sisters’ mother died during the birth of the youngest and the two were raised by their strict, religious father.  He has since disappeared, leaving the rearing of Montse’s younger sister upon herself.  Her father’s religious conviction is strong within Montse, and when her younger sister arrives late one evening, Montse takes to corporal punishment upon her.  In the morning, Montse begs for her sister’s forgiveness, but it seems their tenure together is destined to end.  The handsome upstairs neighbor, Carlos (Hugo Silva), injures himself falling down the stairs and he knocks at Montse’s door seeking help.  She puts Carlos in the spare room, and tends weakly to his wounds.  She promises his recovery, yet Montse begins drugging him.  Her younger sister wants to escape and is determined to help Carlos leave, as well.

Musarañas is Montse’s film.  She is the protagonist and the antagonist of the film.  Almost the entire film takes place in Montse’s flat and when the film ventures outside, it is only into the landing outside or Carlos’s flat upstairs.  Andrés and Roel expend quite a bit of time fleshing out her character and making her sympathetic to the audience.  It is revealed that her father was extremely abusive towards her and she had to endure this for quite some time.  Understandably, she is agoraphobic and fearful as her father kept a tight grip upon her.  When Carlos comes into her home, one can see why she is keeping him close.  In a romantic sense, this is really only Montse’s opportunity to fall in love.  Of course, Montse is also completely unhinged; so when Musarañas needs her to become a monster, she becomes one.  In a move, like a schism, all of the sudden Nadia de Santiago’s character (whose name is never uttered by the way) will become the protagonist:  she attempts to protect Carlos from Montse, and it is the younger sister with whom Carlos falls in love.  When Carlos’s disappearance attracts the police and his fiancé, Elisa (Bang), Montse begins a murder spree.  With each subsequent corpse that she has to hide in her flat, Montse becomes desperate and ruthless.  In the gory final act, Montse does not appear as a person at all.  Conveniently, Musarañas attempts a reconciliation between the sisters in the final minutes, and a revelation occurs between them that was painfully obvious to the viewer from the opening minutes.

Macarena Gómez, as Montse, gives a stellar performance.  She is the sole reason for seeing Musarañas.  No other character is treated with any sensitivity.  Musarañas begins as a fascinating character study but quickly and conveniently decides by its third act to become a bloody horror movie.  Adept filmmakers could have blended the two, but Andrés and Roel were not up to the task.  A pity.

Maya (1989)

Maya (1989) is an Italian horror film by producer Maurizio Tedesco and director Marcello Avallone, the duo who brought the similarly-themed film of a previous year, Specters (1987). Maya is a film definitely of its era: not so much as an Italian horror obscurity but rather as a direct-to-video horror, common throughout American video stores: there is a bit of violent gore peppered throughout, along with some eye-catching softcore sex and nudity, and finally, quite a bit of bullshit mixes with the plot and the characters.

Maya begins strong.  Professor Slivak (William Berger) lives in the shadow of a Mayan pyramid and is being plagued with nightmares about sacrifices once given atop the pyramid millennia ago.  He awakens one morning, and convinced he must confront the ancient evil, Slivak begins his journey by car.  En route he spies a striking-looking child who steps in front of his vehicle.  Slivak exits the car to tend to the injured child, but the child is not injured or dead: the child frightens Slivak with a flash of its eyes.  The child is an omen of the evil to come.  At the base of the pyramid, Slivak slowly ascends its stairs.  At the top near the sacrificial altar, he is slain.  His chest is cut open and his heart removed.

Enter Peter (Peter Phelps).  Peter is a good-looking layabout who is fucking gorgeous local Jahaira (Mariangélica Ayala).  He likes to smoke weed, drink booze, and take long walks in the rain.  He also has a gambling problem which has put him in debt, much to the chagrin of the local expatriate community, including local cantina owner, Sid (Antonello Fassari) and his bar maid, Laura (Mirella D’Angelo).  The announcement of Slivak’s murder looms over the village, who are coincidentally preparing a commemorative event at the Mayan pyramid.  Slivak’s daughter, Lisa (Mariella Valentini) arrives to identify her father’s corpse and she remains in the village to find his murderer.  Lisa enlists the help of Peter but is hindered throughout her investigation.  Everyone is reticent to talk to her, despite the fact that more people are murdered up until the commencement of the village ceremony.

The aim of Maya is definitely the American market: it clearly wants to plant itself in a video box to snuggle up on the shelves of its American counterparts.  I remember reading (or watching) an interview with Umberto Lenzi who described his later, late-eighties films in the “American-style.”  The Italians knew the foreign market was much stronger than the domestic one.  Maya has a Utilitarian, focused visual style: the compositions are never showy or distracting.  Tension and foreboding are created through tighter compositions and marked pacing.  Even the wonderful opening of the film has a cool synth track to accompany its visuals.  The problems of Maya come with the plot and the characterization.  Avallone attempts to give his characters some depth by providing each a back story:  Sid has a broken heart; Laura has a secret boyfriend; and Jahaira suffers from unrequited love.  Enriching a character’s background intuitively should create sympathy in the viewer; however, along the way, nay from the beginning, Avallone forgot he was making a murder mystery (maybe even a supernatural one?).  While one character may have a broken heart, none have a motive.  The characters just float along with seemingly no real tie to the dramatic action.  Finally, while the practical special effects are good, the murders are not particularly interesting or original:  Maya has a murder via car evocative of John Carpenter’s Christine (1986); a murder in the bathtub evocative of a scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984); and corpse suspended to the ceiling by hooks, its imagery evocative of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987).  I do find quite a bit of entertainment in the cinema of this era, both from Italy and the United States and I am not saying that there is not a certain charm about Maya:  it is just that there is not enough to elevate its entertainment value above average and really nothing about it is memorable.

Aficionados of Italian cinema will recognize the voices of the English dubbers, used over and over throughout the years.  Actress Mirella D’Angelo, who plays Lisa, is recognizable from Dario Argento’s Tenebre (1982) as the victim who saw the killer’s face through the slash in her shirt.  From the credits, it appears that Maya was filmed in Venezuela and the imagery of the Mayan pyramid seemed genuine. A scene of a native exorcism ritual is a highlight (it has nothing to do seemingly with the plot by the way.)   It is powerful imagery, and Avallone sorely underutilized it.  Maya could have been a strong, atmospheric gem from Italy but instead it is a forgettable American knock-off.

It Follows (2014)

I was certain hype was going to kill this one for me.  After seeing the theatrical trailer (yet missing the theatrical release), it was littered with so many quotes from various horror-film review sites that It Follows (2014) was destined to fall short of its praise.  I am now a little shocked, after viewing the film On Demand via Amazon, that hype was not its killer.  It Follows is actually quite creative, compelling, and engaging during its entire runtime.

Jay Height (Maika Monroe) lives a quiet life in the Detroit suburbs with her mother and younger sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe).  Jay has recently begun to date handsome young man, Hugh (Jake Weary), and the two attend a movie theatre one evening.  They engage in light conversation, and Hugh points out to Jay a young woman in a yellow dress entering the theatre.  Jay says that she cannot see the person, and Hugh asks her again if she is certain.  Jay says that she is, and Hugh becomes fearful and hurriedly asks Jay to leave.  Despite his weird behavior, Jay has a second date with Hugh, a romantic lakeside rendezvous.  They eventually fuck in Hugh’s car, and while Jay is enjoying her post-loving elation, she is subdued by Hugh who drugs her and knocks her out.  Jay awakens to find herself tied to a wheelchair and the sounds of Hugh apologizing:  Hugh is being chased by a dauntless pursuer who is only hindered by the fact that he or she is walking (not running).  The pursuer, according to Hugh, can change form into anyone; and the only way to steer the pursuer is to sleep with someone, who then becomes the object of the pursuer.  If the pursuer catches his/her object, then it is certain death.  It is a shitty thing to do someone, and Hugh drops her at her home, telling her to just sleep with someone quickly and get the beast off of her back.  At her home, Jay finds Kelly and her two friends, Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and Yara (Olivia Luccardi).  These three have a little trouble believing the curse story but they deeply care about Jay and are willing to help her in her dilemma.

The most striking and obvious aspect about It Follows is how detached it feels:  while the photography is quite nice (by Mike Gioulakis) and the compositions interesting, they never feel intimate.  The use of music is judicious (by Disasterpeace) and is used in a mostly non-traditional manner for a horror film.  There is little substantive dialogue (screenplay is by director, David Robert Mitchell): while most of the dialogue is in service of the story, e.g. “Where to do want to go?” or “Do you need me to help you?”, a good portion of the dialogue is romantic:  Paul and Jay discuss each giving his/her first kiss to each other when they were children; Jay waxes poetic in her post-loving elation about what she thought dating would be like as a little girl; and finally, for example, Yara is reading The Idiot throughout It Follows and quotes several poetic passages to an often captive group of characters.  Initially, I thought It Follows was going to be River’s Edge Redux, detailing in fashion the sexual mores of suburban teenagers.  Not quite.  It is a little off-putting to watch, however, Jay have a second confrontation with Hugh and not display any anger towards him.  The only real emotions that these characters show is fear.  I think that director Mitchell was going for something a little more familiar:  the powerful disruption of an idyllic and quiet suburban life by encroaching urban dangers.  Yara tells a story, near the beginning of the third act (and again in romantic fashion), how her mother told her never to cross Eight Mile Road alone:  it is where the suburbs end and the city begins.  What dangers are ahead?  Pick one:  addiction, violence, STD, poverty, teenage pregnancy, absence of hope, etc.  Mitchell wraps these fears in allegorical fashion; makes the fear an irrational curse; and plays out the poetic proceedings in a horror film.  His technique of detachment is really mimicking the style of his pursuer, of whom little is known at the beginning and little is known at the conclusion.

Any horror-film fan will enjoy It Follows, at least for a single viewing, because it is different.  It is also well-done on all levels.  It Follows is not a great film but it is certainly well above average, and well above most horror films released today.

House of Blood (Chain Reaction) (2006)

House of Blood (Chain Reaction) (2006) is an English-language horror film made by Germans, filmed in Germany and Austria as a setting for the Pacific Northwest in the United States.  House of Blood was directed by the notable (or notorious) Olaf Ittenbach, written by Ittenbach and Thomas Reitmar, and the special effects were created by Ittenbach.

Dr. Douglas Madsen (veteran American character actor, Christopher Kriesa who appeared previously in Ittenbach’s Legion of the Dead (2001)) awakens the morning of the anniversary of his parents’ tragic death.  Along his route to work, his vehicle collides with a prisoner transport bus.  This collision causes an accident which allows the prisoners to free themselves.  The four convicts have a shootout with the guards and are victorious.  They assume the garb of the guards but during the battle, one of the prisoners, Spence (Luca Maric), gets a bullet wound to his arm.  The convicts drag Madsen out of his vehicle, and the de facto leader of the group, Arthur (Simon Newby), forces Madsen to tend to the wounds of Spence (who is Arthur’s younger brother).  Madsen argues that he needs better facilities to help the man, and the group suggest hiking north towards Canada (away from their prison in Seattle).  They move through a dense forest and encounter a thick fog bank.  They enter and exiting the fog, the group encounters an antique cottage (seemingly older than the American Colonial period).  A beautiful young woman (named Alice, portrayed by Martina Ittenbach) is letting blood from a sheep outside.  The convicts decide to siege upon the cottage’s inhabitants (of whom there are quite a few) and allow Madsen to attend to Spence.  The inhabitants of the cottage insist that the convicts leave, but the convicts persist in staying.  The group appears extraordinarily religious (Christian) and passive, initially, until they transform into vampire-like demons and whip some serious convict ass.  Madsen is the only survivor and escapes into the arms of a patrolling SWAT team…

The screenplay for House of Blood is interesting conceptually.  Ittenbach and Reitmar introduce the governing theme as reincarnation and structure the narrative in an elliptical fashion.  However, its execution is woefully done.  Ittenbach does not use his exposition in the first act effectively.  Most of the characters’ dialogue and action are devoted to bickering and repeating the same things.  How many times can the group of convicts decide to go north? A lot.  How many times can Arthur bitch at Madsen to heal his brother?  Too many.  The most detracting flaw is the dialogue of the cottage inhabitants-cum-demons:  they all suffer from Yoda-its, where they all begin their sentences with verbs with the additional annoyance of adding –eth to the end of them.  For example, “Knoweth, I do.  Leaveth, you now.”  This shit gets on your nerves pretty quickly.  Finally, the dialogue pads the length of the narrative which in turn kills the pacing of the film.  Kriesa and Martina Ittenbach give competent performances.  Wonderful actor, Jürgen Prochnow, is sorely underused as a police inspector who appears in few scenes in the same setting (an interrogation room).  The best performance is given by veteran character actor, Dan van Husen.  [There is an essential interview with him discussing his career on the Wild East DVD of Alive or Preferably Dead/Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.]  Van Husen plays Paul Anderson, another convict leader with a penchant for quoting literature and philosophy.  It is too much, here, to describe his role in the narrative.  By the time van Husen and crew appear in House of Blood, you either have to roll with this bit or shut the film off.

Most would probably think that I am wasting my breath critiquing the screenplay (or acting or direction) of House of Blood.  Olaf Ittenbach currently holds a Tom Savini-like reverence by fans for his ability in crafting detailed, practical, and gory special effects.  In fact, like Savini, fans will see films solely armed with the knowledge that Ittenbach provided the special effects, regardless of the film’s director or actors.  The make-up upon the vampiric demons is particularly good.  The typical splatter effects, like shotgun head blasts and intestinal work, are present; however, the edits of such shots are quick, unlike some of his previous efforts, like in The Burning Moon and Premutos (both 1997).  It was either an artistic choice or a commercial edit.  [I watched House of Blood via the Region-one Lionsgate DVD.]  While the special effects are well done, House of Blood is not entertaining enough on the whole to merit seeing it for their inclusion.  Ittenbach- and German Splatter-fans will end up seeking this one out.  All others should avoid.

Ju-on: The Beginning of the End (Ju-on: Owari no hajimari) (2014)

Takashi Shimizu’s original V-cinema Ju-on (2000) has never been topped.  While the second Ju-on (2003) was entertaining, the best films to follow in the series were Ju-on: White Ghost and Black Ghost (2009), primarily because they were the most evocative of Shimizu’s original film.  Post Ju-on, interestingly, Shimizu went on to direct more metaphysical, Lynch-ian films like The Shock Labyrinth (Senritsu meikyû) (2009) and Tormented (Rabitto horȃ) (2011).  [His latest American film, 7500 (2014), appears to have a delayed release.]  In any case, I thought the Ju-on series was prime to die, but a new film has appeared from Japan, directed by Masayuki Ochiai and written by Ochiai and notable producer Takashige Ichise, entitled Ju-on: The Beginning of the End (Ju-on: Owari no hajimari) (2014).  At its heart, this new Ju-on is a remake of Shimizu’s original film.

Pretty young Yui (Nozomi Sasaki) has been promoted from substitute teacher to full-time teacher.  During her first class, she notices, from the previous teacher’s roll book, that a particular student, Toshio (Kai Kobayashi), has been absent for the past seven days.  Scared of overstepping her bounds, Yui consults the principal and believes a home visit to Toshio is in order.  Her principal reluctantly agrees and tells Yui that her predecessor has recently died.  With trepidation, Yui visits the home of Toshio and encounters only the young boy’s mother, Kayako Saeki (Misaki Saisho), who reveals that her son and husband are not at home.  Yui visits an upstairs room in the house and she notices a closet completely taped shut at its cracks (a la the red tape in Kairo (Pulse) (2001)).  The mother’s creepy behavior and the taped-up closet forces Yui to flee from the home.  She begins to suffer hallucinations while teaching and having extremely vivid nightmares.  Her boyfriend, Naoto (Shȏ Aoyagi), fears for the health and sanity of Yui and begins an investigation of the Saeki home and its mysterious history. 

Like the original Ju-on, Ju-on:  The Beginning of the End alternates between different periods in time, all involving doings at the Saeki home:  the opening scene of the film, rendered hand-held/”found footage” style, cryptically details the original event which may source the evil In the house; the second time period involves Yui and Naoto in the present; and finally, the last period detailed involves four high-school girls.  One of the girls’ sister is a real-estate agent and is having trouble renting the home, because of its haunted reputation.  Curious of this reputation, the girls visit the house, and each leaves the house to subsequently be overcome with paranoia and fear of a little ghost boy.  Quite a bit of time is devoted to episodes involving the high-school girls, and they are pretty weak, almost retreads of familiar J-cinema scare tactics.  It is extremely anti-climactic when it is revealed how this storyline relates to the present one involving Yui and Naoto.  Too much thought was put into this technique by Ochiai and Ichise.  Shimizu used this technique in the original Ju-on simply:  he showed three families occupying the house at different times with little exposition detailing when each occupied.  He used this technique for a disorienting effect and was highly successful.

There are a couple of creepy moments in Ju-on:  The Beginning of the End, but they are strongly outweighed by the myriad missed opportunities and boring, slow bits which had me grabbing for my smartphone.  The final act had a perfect set-up:  Yui was going to visit the Saeki home for the final time; and as she is standing at the gate, the front door slowly cracks open beckoning her.  The revelations of the final act, like most of the film, are anti-climactic.  The acting is average.  Ochiai’s direction is perfunctory.  His most interesting visual technique is shooting almost the entire film in natural light:  this is a bold palette to craft a supernatural horror film; and had he been successful, it would have been a rare feat.  It did not happen today.

Takashi Shimizu showed with the original Ju-on a talented and creative person making a film intuitively and far exceeding any audience expectations.  Ju-on:  The Beginning of the End shows commercial filmmakers adapting a formula around audience expectations and wholly missing the mark.  Incidentally, I watched Ju-on:  The Beginning of the End via the Malaysian release (which was English-friendly), and it had an extremely choppy frame rate for its picture.  I do not know if it is my DVD machine or a flawed disc.  So, in any case, buyer beware.

Seidan: Botandoro (Hellish Love) (1972)

Seidan: Botandoro (Hellish Love) (1972) is a pinku eiga, directed by Chusei Sone, and based upon a familiar tale.

Beautiful, yet sickly, Otsuyu (Setsuko Ogawa) and her handmaid, Omine (Hidemi Hara), are walking home in the rain.  Otsuyu stops to take a rest under a small shelter, and a handsome samurai named Shinzaburo (Hajime Tanimoto) gives the pair an umbrella to shield their walk home.  Otsuyu and Shinzaburo are smitten with each other, and Omine aids her mistress to bring the two together.  Otsuyu is the daughter of a wealthy but widowed samurai, and the head of the household, Oyone (Yoshie Kitsuda), is plotting to kill her master and his daughter in order to share his wealth with her lover.  Omine eventually brings the two lovers together, and they consummate their love.  Oyone takes the opportunity to tattle upon her mistress which forces the young couple’s confrontation with an enraged father.  Incensed that the meager samurai (he makes umbrellas for a living) has seduced his daughter under the roof of his home, he pulls his sword and strikes down his daughter.  Shinzaburo removes himself to his home, heartbroken, while Oyone is successful in killing both Omine and her master.  On August 13 [a Japanese holiday, Obon, where the living commemorate their dead ancestors], Otsuyu appears at Shinzaburo’s door for Shinzaburo to keep his promise: to consummate his eternal love for Otsuyu.

Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser write in Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, “Although a period film, director Sone’s fairytale stylings provided the movie a visionary charm which appealed to the college crowd.  Students embraced it as a cutting-edge movie, turning this venture into Nikkatsu’s first youth-oriented pinku eiga hit.  At the same time, Chusei Sone’s camerawork was hailed for its creativity by numerous tough critics.  The film won many industry awards and became a bonafide hit.”  (*) 

Indeed there is a true juvenile spirit to Hellish Love.   Ogawa and Tanimoto, who play the two lovers, are young and attractive and their courting reflects this:  when Omine is able to get Shinzaburo to visit, she is unable to get Otsuyu to leave her room:  Otsuyu covers herself with her blanket, afraid that the handsome samurai will not like her.  Likewise, brooding Shinzaburo sits alone in his workshop, afraid to go and visit the young beauty, because how can the daughter of a wealthy samurai ever be interested in a meager and lowly one?  Of course, adults are the ones who really fuck things up for the youngsters:  they are the plotters and schemers, like Oyone; the killers, like Otsuyu’s father; or meddlers, like the couple of dimwits who live next door to Shinzaburo.  The ending of Hellish Love would be a tragedy:  however, almost all of the adults in the film die from nefarious means; and in ironic fashion, the ending for the young couple actually elevates them above the rest.

Chusei Sone’s camerawork is stellar.  In Otsuyu and Shinzaburo’s fateful love scene, Sone composes the couple behind a dressing screen.  With a close-up, his camera focuses on the curled toes of Otsuyu in an ecstatic moment and pans quickly across the dressing screen to capture the look of pleasure in her face.  Sone’s eroticism is built primarily through tension: a glance or a naked shoulder captured takes upon a lot of weight.  [Indeed, when Otsuyu completely removes her kimono in her love scene with Shinzaburo, the two bodies are completely obscured by optical blurring.  Little nudity was shown possibly due to censorship.]  Most of the sets are austere.  The characters and their fetishes stand out:  Otsuyu’s combs and sashes and Shinzaburo’s sword and umbrellas.  The settings feel organic which makes Hellish Love focus more upon its characters, which in turn make the film much more intimate. 

Despite the fact that Hellish Love is a pinku eiga film, it hardly seems an exploitation film.  It is only an exploitation film, because it has more than one love scene and has nudity.  However, Sone’s eroticism, I believe, elevates Hellish Love above the exploitation elk and creates compelling cinema.  Hellish Love is no longer provocative today:  in fact, I would go so far to say that it is shy eroticism.  Sone’s direction and the performances by the actors give Hellish Love from me a high recommendation.

*  Vital Books, Inc.  Asian Cult Cinema Publications.  Miami, Florida.  1998: p.133.

Luna di sangue (Escape from Death) (1989)

Luna di sangue (Escape from Death) (1989) is another Italian film in the “Lucio Fulci presents” series, produced by Antonio Lucidi and Luigi Nannerini.  Luna was written by Enzo Milioni and Giovanni Simonelli and directed by Milioni.  Its primary attraction are the several notable actresses, such as Zora Kerova, Jessica Moore, Pamela Prati, and Annie Belle.  Please be advised that I viewed the film in the Italian language and am unable to comprehend it.  I figured this was going to be the only way to see Luna, as the Italian DVD is the only source with which I am familiar; and I doubt that this film ever had an English dub.  Therefore, I will sketch out what I can glean from the story, accurate representation or not.

Luna di sangue begins with the same murder that ends the film:  Larry Moffet (Alessandro Freyberger) is gunned down by a black-gloved assailant (whose identity is revealed in the final scene).  The action of the film begins when Ann Moffet (Barbara Blasko) views the corpse of a young man, recently murdered, in the horse stables of her property.  Dazed, she wanders to the front of the house where Mary (Kerova) is talking to Doctor Duvivier (Jacques Sernas).  Ann collapses, and the doctor tends to her.  Ann recovers slowly and becomes perturbed when Larry arrives at the house.  She apparently has no memory of him, despite pictures of herself and him strewn about the house.  Ann becomes distant from everyone.  At the end of the first act, Ann is brushing her teeth and maggots pour out of her toothpaste tube.  She crawls into her bedroom and dons her slippers one of which is filled with worms.  Too spooky.  During a later evening, she opens her bedroom door where she is greeting by a corpse with a bloody face.  Around the estate, other people are being murdered by a black-gloved killer.

As I have stated, the primary attraction of Luna di sangue are its actresses.  I have always thought that Zora Kerova is one of the most talented actresses to appear in Italian genre cinema; and perhaps ironically, she has appeared in some of the nastiest films to come from the genre:  La evase—Storie di sesso e di violenze (Escape from Women’ Prison) (1978), La ragazza del vagone letto (Terror Express) (1979), Anthropophagus (1980), Cannibal Ferox (1981), and finally, for example, Lo squartatore di New York (The New York Ripper) (1982).  Kerova appeared in other Lucidi/Nannerini productions of this period such as Quando Alice ruppe lo specchio (Touch of Death) (1988), Il fantasma di Sodoma (Sodoma’s Ghost) (1988), and Hansel e Gretel (1990) (The first two were directed by Lucio Fulci).  Kerova appears in the talkiest sequences in Luna, and I have no idea what the conversations were about.  She is very beautiful and gives a competent performance, but there is little for her to do here.  Jessica Moore plays Tania, a young mute woman who appears almost feral.  She will crawl on the floor and skitter away when asked to exit the room.  Moore is one of the sexiest actresses of Italian cinema of the 1980s.  She appeared in La monaca del peccato (Convent of Sinners) (1986); Eleven Days, Eleven Nights (1987); Non aver paura della zia Marta (The Murder Secret) (1988); Top Model (1988); Riflessi di luce (Reflections of Light) (1988); and finally, for example, Il fantasma di Sodoma (Sodoma’s Ghost) (1988).  In almost all of these films, Moore is typically cast in an erotic role, and in Luna, her role is not that different.  Her character, Tania, gets caught up in the murder-mystery plotline and she meets her death in the film’s nastiest gore sequence.  Pamela Prati appears in a couple of short scenes, unfortunately.  Annie Belle plays Brigitte in a small role:  her character is suspicious of Larry and she interjects herself into the mystery.  Her death scene appears on the cover of the Italian DVD.

Luna di sangue has short, nasty gore scenes; no tension; and a lot of conversation scenes.  Based upon the version that I have seen, I would be reticent to view an English version of the film.  I am really tempted to call Luna di sangue uninspired but a more apt description, often overused, is a missed opportunity.