The Burning Moon (1997)

Studio: Intervision
Original Release: Feb. 26th, 1997
DVD Release: March 13th, 2012
Rating: Unrated!
Directed by Olaf Ittenbach
Review by Craig Sorensen

The Burning Moon is fucking weird.  That’s what I was hoping for when I got it to review but I was a little skeptical when I noticed it was made in 1997.  See, I’ve got a thing for shot-on-video horror.  I’ve had it ever since I picked up an old copy of Boarding House on VHS.  Suddenly this whole strange unseen world opened up before me.  These are the kind of things that I was looking for while digging through the dust covered walls of old video stores.  Movies that seem to exist outside all notions of good taste and style.  Movies that almost deliberately break the rules of ‘real filmmaking’.  By the mid 1980’s most genre filmmaking was already being co-opted by the studio system.  B movies were now getting A movie budgets and in the process losing all those idiosyncratic bits that shine through in a good low budget horror film.  That shit just ain’t allowed when that much money is on the line.  Of course if there’s no money involved then you can do what you want, regardless of whether it’s in ‘good taste’ or makes any ‘sense’.

And that brings us back to The Burning Moon.  It’s fucking weird.  The plot has no real point that I can find, other than as an excuse for director Olaf Ittenbach’s effects work.  The whole thing has a purposefully surrealistic feel, which most of the time I can’t stand (very few filmmakers can pull this off well).  The Burning Moon is so cheap though that it ends up being weird in ways that the filmmakers obviously didn’t intend, and that’s when things start to get interesting.  All the actors (I guess I should say non-actors as I believe everyone is an amateur) have a strange German white trash look.  This was shot in 1997 but everyone looks like they stepped out of 1987.  And all the dialog is dubbed.  So everyone is talking in German, which is funny to me to begin with, and then it looks slightly out of sync.  So the German actor’s lack of finesse and weird dubbing is enough to put things off center right off the bat.

Then you have this apeshit plot.  A punk kid tries to get a job, gets into a street fight (a fucking amazing one), then goes home and has to watch his little sister while his parents go out.  So obviously he shoots some heroin and tells his sister a couple of bed time stories about serial killers.  In the first story, a guy escapes from a mental institution because some idiot takes him off his meds to see what would happen (I guess).  Then, later (after he runs over a guy with a van and steals a car-one of my favorite scenes) he ends up going on a date with a girl.  When she finds out he’s a killer (it’s on the radio) she runs off and the killer follows.  Then he kills her family and she kills him and that’s the end.  In the second story, a priest is roaming the German countryside raping and killing.  Of course the townspeople suspect the slightly mentally handicapped farmer who lives alone.  Anyway, the priest kills a few more people in a satanic ritual of some kind and then shoots himself.  And then the townspeople hire this other guy to kill the mentally handicapped farmer.  He does and then before you can say Dark Night of the Scarecrow he comes back to life.  You would expect the farmer to get revenge but you would be wrong.  The hired killer goes to hell (I guess) and then gets ripped in half lengthwise.  After the end of the second story you find out that the kid killed his sister and then he goes outside and slits his wrist.  The End.

Intervision’s new DVD looks about as good as it could.  I believe that this was shot on 3/4 inch tape, which is a little bit better than VHS (1/2 inch).  It still looks like early/mid ‘80s video tape though.  It’s part of the films charm though and adds to the illicit appeal.  It takes me back to the good old days of tape trading.  The sound is not up to ‘modern’ standards either.  It works though.  The dubbed dialog and sound effects come through just fine though so I’m not complaining.  This isn’t the video you want to use when trying to convince your parents to get an HD monitor.  It is the video you want to put on at a party when all your friends are drunk.  There isn’t much in the way of extra features on the disc but there are a couple of things worth mentioning.  There is a vintage making of video included that has lots of behind the scenes footage and an original trailer.  Also included are trailers for The ABC’s of Love and Sex and The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer.