Directed by Alan Birkinshaw
Written by Alan Birkinshaw
Starring:
- Anthony Forrest as Pete
- Tom Marshall as Mike
- Jane Hayden as Julie
- Alison Elliott as Sandy
- David Jackson as Mr. Trubshaw
Release Date: December 10, 1978
Rating: 
Two hoops had to be jumped through before Alan Birkinshaw’s grubby little slasher could score its X rating from the ever-uptight BBFC. First, the board wanted proof that every actress involved in the rape scenes was over sixteen. Then they demanded paperwork swearing that not a single furry extra got hurt during filming. Once those forms were shoved across the table, the movie—once heralded as “the most tasteless film in the history of British cinema”—finally got the stamp. Of course, the uproar around this lean, mean gutter-thriller was mostly pearl-clutching noise cooked up by moral watchdogs. It’s as nasty as any American exploitation flick from ’78, though for British sensibilities, this kind of grunge was practically a cultural meteor strike.
TV cameraman Alan Birkinshaw’s first crack at exploitation cinema lifts Pete Walker’s sleaze instincts, Kubrick’s ice-cold cynicism, and the foggy gothic residue of old-school British horror, then dumps them into the lo-fi gears of a backwoods slasher. Gone are the wink-wink innuendos and polite cutaways—Killer’s Moon is dead serious about being flat-out transgressive. With no motive beyond testing how far ’70s British exploitation could stretch before snapping, Birkinshaw redraws the lines of what the UK’s grindhouse underground could dare to do, or dare to show. But once you peel back all that bravado and bad-taste swagger, the movie underneath is surprisingly flimsy. It’s got the ratty visuals, the Clockwork-Orange-reject psychos, the sleaze and the splatter, but it never musters the punch needed to turn any of it into canon. The parade of exploitation goodies—mangled bodies, shiny blades, and enough exposed flesh to stock a whole drive-in season—lands with gusto, yet never fuses with Birkinshaw’s clunky, immobile direction. He seems so hell-bent on shock for shock’s sake that he forgets the momentum that should propel it.
The plot does grab you—at least by the lenient standards of ’70s slasher sludge—but it’s still a brew of familiar genre dregs. Four psychos bust out of a mental ward and start prowling after a group of girls unlucky enough to wander into the remote, jagged hills of northwest England. What looks like a bare-bones stalk-’n’-slash setup comes with a psychedelic snag: the maniacs are subjects in a warped experiment. They’ve been conditioned to think they’re dreaming, that everything around them is just a simulation where consequences don’t exist, and they dive right into their ugliest impulses—mostly straight-up killing and raping. It’s seriously twisted stuff.
With its nods to Alex DeLarge’s droogy violence and its flirtation with camp, Killer’s Moon comes off like another British sickie determined to jab at stuffy cultural manners. It works to a degree, though in a slow, airless way, missing the jolt an exploitation picture ought to brand into your conscience. The film’s X-rating is well deserved, but what actually plays out never fully lives up to the outrageous reputation it earned. Important as a relic of its moment, but that’s where its power mostly ends.
