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Movie Review: The Burning Moon
What’s the best horror movie tagline?
“In space, no one can hear you scream”? “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” “Be afraid, be very afraid”? “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth”? All good guesses, and we could spend this whole post listing these, but I’d like to give the honor to Intervision’s DVD release of German indie, The Burning Moon, which boasts:
Uncut. Uncensored. Unconscionable.
I’m not one-hundred-percent on the first two claims, but that last one is right on the money. While short on plot, character development, and logic, The Burning Moon has enough depravity to sate your sicko appetite. What it does, it does well. Okay, not that well, but still.
In the beginning, we meet Peter (director Olaf Ittenbach), a nogoodnik junkie who takes drugs in the middle of job interviews and gets into fights with his parents. Literally, he and his father exchange punches. After a hard day of doing nothing, then getting into a street brawl (settle down, the filmmakers are saving their resources for the gory money-shots later on) Peter comes home and to his chagrin is ordered by his parents to babysit his little sis. Why leave an elementary-school-age child in the hands of this irresponsible creepazoid? Was Casey Anthony booked?
Peter treats his sister to two bedtime stories. Turns out this is an anthology flick with Peter as a sort of drug-addled Crypt Keeper. The stories are what you would expect from a guy like Pete.
The first involves a girl, Julia, on a blind date. All is going well, the guy seems nice, but as luck would have it he’s Cliff Parker, an escaped mental patient behind a recent spate of murders. Julia escapes in one piece, which is one piece less than the hooker Cliff gets his hands on. Our heroine is awful blasé about the situation, choosing to relax, take a shower, brush her hair. She doesn’t alert the police or even her family until it’s too late.
Peter (director Olaf Ittenbach) brooding or something. It was a nightmare finding a COC-compliant screenshot.
To no one’s surprise but Julia’s, Mr. Blind Date tracks her down at which point the evening really goes south. Here comes the good stuff, the stuff that got people to buy tickets in the first place: the gore. It’s pretty good, especially an infamous moment involving an eyeball stuffed down a throat that employs a point-of-view shot that would make Sam Raimi proud. If you’re a gorefiend rest easy, the best is still to come.
Story two is the tale of that familiar villain, the pervert priest. He does differ from what you suspect. His interest lies with females of legal age. Whether they consent is of no concern to him. This sets up a pretty tedious series of scenes involving the priest’s disdainful dalliances. Another man is pegged for committing these killings which is understandable since all the men in town are mustachioed, paunchy, middle-aged guys with receding hairlines. After a time there are a lot of dirt naps being taken.
Things pick up and we find ourselves in the eternal torment of hell. Any semblance of narrative is thrown away so Ittenbach can get to doing what he does best, churning stomachs with images of unspeakable violence. Sure, hell looks suspiciously like an abandoned building and the flowing intestines like sausage links covered in Karo Syrup (Yum!), but the torture on display is realistic enough to evoke the darkest aspects of Christian theology. Suck on that, Dante Alighieri! At one point a guy is pulled in half so that all the icky bits inside fall out. I cringed when one poor sucker has a drill put through his clenched teeth. I’m cringing just from typing that sentence.
That’s pretty much it for The Burning Moon. Can’t really hate it. Obviously, this is project of love from a young man whose practical effects abilities are impressive, and his writing and directing abilities just the opposite. After making this movie back in 1992, Ittenbach has remained in the industry, directing such movies as Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead, a movie advertised as one of the goriest ever. He’s also done special effects for flicks like Uwe Boll’s BloodRayne (the movie is no good, but the effects are). His most lasting legacy is, of course, being alluded to in the music video for “Black Mold” by Detroit band S***f***er.
The DVD includes a 47-minute making-of doc. Watch it if you’re at all interested in the nitty-gritty (especially the nitty) of assembling sets, performing stunts, and creating special effects. The case has a reversible cover giving you a choice between the spunky and modern collage of revolting gore or the classy minimalism of a man ripped in half. The movie wasn’t widely available in the US before this release, so you have Intervision to thank (or blame) for rectifying that.
In the stinky, festering kingdom of budgetless splatterfests, The Burning Moon stands above the dregs of the worst of Troma’s catalog, but it falls far short of the reigning royalty (largely made up of the best of Troma’s catalog). That might not dissuade you from seeing the movie. Anyone who sees The Burning Moon hoping for a coherent plot, incisive social commentary, cutting-edge filmmaking, convincing acting, witty dialogue, or any combination thereof needs to have their head checked. Though now that I think about it, anyone interested in this movie in the first place would be well served to be examined. If that’s you, pick up a copy of The Burning Moon on your way to the psychiatrist’s office. You’re guaranteed to like it! It’s Barf-a-rific! Now that’s a good tagline.
Published in Entertainment
According to the trivia section of IMDb:
I don’t know why they bother listing trivia anymore. Nothing’s going to top that.
“The night he came home.”
Isn’t Hell supposed to last for eternity? How can that be if it consists of actual events, such as getting a drill between clenched teeth? Unless that just keeps happening over and over, for eternity, eventually – maybe within hours or even minutes – there wouldn’t be any coherent parts left to torture.
Shades of Marathon Man.
There’s nothing saying the body can’t regenerate after it’s pulped. Hell plays by different rules.
Whenever my dentist (actually one of his assistants) offers to play a movie while they operate, I want to request Marathon Man as a joke, but I haven’t had the guts to do it.
Lol. I never even saw Marathon Man. I just read the Mad Magazine parody.
I nominate I Spit On Your Grave. It’s not a horror movie, but the tagline is:
“But no jury in America would ever convict her.”
Try the original Roger Corman version of Little Shop of Horrors, instead.
I have no interest in seeing the movie and never would have, but the review is great.
The ghost of Joe Bob Briggs appears to be trying to burst through Alien-like…
Maybe Joe Bobb can do that, once he’s dead.
Hah. Haven’t even read the Mad parody. The scene precedes the movie.
A comparison to Joe Bob is the highest of compliments. Thanks.
I don’t remember you being this exuberant when you were just @CatIII.
In my sci-fi story I have different hells, one for each person. It’s very Lewis and Augustine. Each hell is a small universe. The smaller ones are barely big enough to hold one sinner.
But it’s 3D space curved in 4D space. Like the 4D equivalent of a sphere. So in the smaller hells what’s right in front of your face is the back of your head.
The angel tour guide explains to the Chaplain that they get what they wanted: an entire universe made of nothing but them.
That sounds more like sci-fi to me. Years ago, I read a story by John Varley in which a man was being tortured for information, I think, by being killed in various ways while his thoughts were being recorded. Each time he died, he was cloned and the clone had all the previous memories transferred into it, so it remembered all of the previous deaths too.
I don’t remember why the information could not be extracted from the mental recordings, I guess it wasn’t able to be that detailed or something.
But it does sound like a pretty hellish existence.
Wait, really? Some of my old posts were pretty wild.
I’ve really come to love the German film industry these last few years. My initial introduction to it was “The Lives of Others” which I think is required viewing for any conservative/libertarian. It’s also the film that gave me an introduction to Martina Gedeck, who I consider to be the Meryl Streep of German films. From there I went to the Baader Meinhof Complex where I got my second dose of Gedeck. Great film. Next I took in Jew Suss: Rise and Fall. Das Boot the movie was great, Das Boot the TV series was even better. Babylon Berlin has a campy period piece vibe to it being set in Berlin between the wars, Liv Lisa Fries and Volker Bruch turn in admirable performances. Generation War takes you to the eastern front but also depicts the slow decay of the home front during the war. And of course, everyone should see Downfall and enjoy the original “Hitler finds out” scene from the movie.
The Baader Meinhof Complex was quite the ride. A glimpse into a piece of history I was unfamiliar with. I really need to get around to seeing The Lives of Others.
There was a tweet years ago along the lines of “Tonight I’m renting Downfall so I can finally see what Hitler was really saying.”
My own experience with German film is fairly limited. Only seen some of the classics (e.g. Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Werner Herzog films, and Run, Lola, Run.
Oh, and how could I forget, Violent S*** III. That’s a shot-on-video splatter flick similar to the one reviewed in the OP. It features a ninja doing a flying kick and getting sliced straight down the middle.
The Lives of Others gets more chilling with each passing year and each inch by inch intrusion into our privacy by the Big Tech/Big Intelligence combine. Couldn’t come more highly recommended by me. As a added bonus Counterpart is English language and set in Berlin with a mix of US and Berlin actors (Liv Lisa Fries is it). Also The Wall is a kooky spooky sci fi movie with Gedeck in a starring role.
Not quite as graphic, but: