Innovative and powerful as his work was, Nekromantik director Jörg Buttgereit inadvertently spawned a pretty regrettable legacy in the form of shitty German gorehounds who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his extreme horror, unfortunately without any of the skill or intelligence needed to make their work anything more than a Germanic version of the shit ground out by trailer trash redneck filmmakers with video cameras in America. Bad enough it had to put up with spawning the idiot output of Violent Shit director Andreas Schnaas, but the long-suffering German film industry was also crapped on by Olaf Ittenbach, who has churned out a series of appalling garbage, of which The Burning Moon is an early (1992) example.

Now, if you are the sort of person who’s Eighties nostalgia extends not only to a belief that VHS was somehow a format we should miss but also that the shit being shot with the piss-poor cameras of the day somehow has a misty-eyed charm to it, then you might like this – especially if you think that empty-headed gore is just dandy. There certainly seems to be an incomprehensible popularity amongst the hipster end of the cult film market for tape - not only vintage releases, which at least makes sense from a collectors viewpoint, but for new stuff on cassette. And unless Intervision have released this as part of a bet to see just how lousy a piece of crap people will actually pay money for, I imagine that this bizarre VHS-nostalgia market is what they are aiming at. Or maybe they’ve figured that in the wake of Birdemic and The Room, there is a new audience out there for Bad Movies. Certainly, this has enough inadvertent humour from the bad dialogue, lousy fashions and ham-fisted plot turns to raise a few chuckles from easily pleased viewers. Not many though.

The film opens with a the adventures of a nihilistic junkie played by Oaf Ittenbach himself – a bad move, as he makes the average Michael Winner movie punk rocker look genuinely tough. Imagine a chubby Eighties German boy band member, clad in white T-shirt, stone-washed denim and with a rather camp earring, and you’ll get the picture. After we see him establish his hard-man qualities by failing a job interview and talking tough with his equally dubious looking mate (seriously – this film is like watching someone take every negative German fashion stereotype of the era and cram them all into one place), he is made to babysit his little sister. He decides to tell her two stories, which make up the bulk of the film.

The first, Julia’s Lover, is a clumsy, cliché-ridden slasher about a woman who finds that her date is in fact an escaped looney with a penchant for chopping off heads. The second, Purity, has a psycho priest killing villagers, who put the blame on a local oddball, eventually killing him. It’s a story that goes nowhere, but does include the only vaguely impressive moment of the film – a trip to Hell where bodies are mutilated in a variety of gory ways by cheap-ass rip offs of Hellraiser’s Cenobites. For a moment, the film actually takes on an intensity here, with the ultra-gore (mostly pretty unconvincing, but still pretty extreme) and howling madness. Had the whole film been able to match this, then we’d be looking at something special. But these ten minutes or so are very much the exception.

This film has bad acting, bad direction, generally shoddy effects and for the most part is nowhere near as splatter-laden as its reputation would suggest. Shot on VHS, it looks predictably horrible, with plenty of ghosting images and a softness throughout. Intervision have done their best with this, but as the saying goes, you can’t polish a turd…though they have given it one of the most ridiculously gross sleeves of all time, so that's something.

The Burning Moon obviously wants to be an intense experience, and it seems there are some people out there who have taken it as just that. But honestly, it’s just awful, and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, you really need to question their judgement on just about anything.

DAVID FLINT

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