Killer's Moon
1978 · Directed by Alan Birkinshaw · UK
What film has LSD-induced, droog-like maniacs escaped from a mental institution on a murderous rampage believing they are in a collective dream, a hotel of stranded schoolgirls and a three-legged vengeful dog? Well, that is what Killer’s Moon delivers in spades.
By 1978 Alan Birkinshaw had moved on from TV commercials and sexploitation films. He was looking to take on Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren on the sleazy horror front, and with Killer’s Moon he provides something that sets it apart among his contemporaries. Once described as “the most tasteless film in British cinema history”, the plot has a group of stranded schoolgirls and teachers taking refuge in an out-of-season hotel in the Lake District. Meanwhile four escaped homicidal patients are encroaching on the hotel, leaving corpses and mutilated animals in their wake, one such animal being the three-legged dog. Under the illusion that they are in a collective dream state, by use of LSD and dream therapy, they believe they can do anything without consequence.
The cast includes Jane Hayden (sister of exploitation queen Linda), Alison Elliott (Home Before Midnight) and Jayne Lester, who had to satisfy the British Board of Film Censors (as it was then) that she was over 16 years old during the making of the film, due to a scene of sexual assault.
In 2001 Killer’s Moon was appraised as a film that “flaunts good taste and decency with crude bravado, remaining perversely entertaining.” Praise indeed for this mostly forgotten exploitation gem.
