Review – Blood Moon

When you’re looking at a straight-to-video horror movie starring Tim Curry, Grace Jones and Leslie Ann Warren, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s going to be some cheap, exploitative crap. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when – in addition to the cheap, exploitative crap – the flick also featured a plot, characters and – wonder of wonders – a point. Sure, the theme here is familiar: the denizens of a traveling freak show square off against the “normals” (Todd Browning, anyone?). But there’s more to it than that. The protagonist’s genes have left her fur-covered, and thus she headlines the show as the Wolf Girl. Tormented by some of the locals who come to see the show, she befriends a loner from town who just happens to have an experimental depilatory drug he’d like to test. Trouble is, the more our heroine looks like everyone else, the more savage she becomes. Stir that in with the show’s exploration of sexual deviance and the plot’s eventual uncovering of the normals’ secret freakishness, and this tale’s a lot more thought-provoking than it appeared at first blush. I could have done without the animal research subplot (particularly the scene where the test rabbit gnaws itself to death), but the rest of it’s as entertaining as your average low-budget horror movie while at the same time going a lot farther toward keeping things interesting. Mildly amusing