This late period Ozsploitation slasher arrives on blu-ray courtesy of Severin in a spiffy new edition. The all-girls school Saint Elizabeth’s has a history of hooking up with both locals and horny, young gents from the nearby all-boys Winchester School. Amidst a rivalry between the Winchester boys and the local guys, students from both schools begin turning up dead in the nearby woods, killed by an eye-gouging maniac brandishing a barb wire noose. Meanwhile, the new head mistress of Saint Elizabeth’s, Mrs. Sheffield, is boning a student and her cuckolded sad sack husband, also a science teacher at the school, is seen obsessing over a female student named Mary and stabbing her yearbook photo with a knife. Totally normal behavior. Meanwhile our token final girl Mary is seen sharing a chaste kiss with a local hunk and a couple of St. Elizabeth students go snooping around in Mr. Sheffield’s science lab looking for a cheat sheet for the next day’s science test but stumble across something far more unsettling. This sets off a chain of events that cause the bodies to start piling up as the maniac’s madness is whipped into a frenzy!

Boy, I sure do love me a gonzo Ozsploitation flick and Bloodmoon definitely delivers. The first half plays out like a fairly straight forward slasher with some nicely gruesome kills and lots of teenage hijinks. A barb wire garrote is a pretty neat method of execution, so the film offers a good time showing the requisite horny teens being brutally murdered with it. Around the halfway point, Bloodmoon starts to shift its focus a bit. It starts giving the weird Sheffield couple more screen time and straight up reveals the killer fairly early for a slasher. At that point the plot is more about the small town ‘aw shucks’ sheriff trying to track down the killer. Leon Lyssek as Miles Sheffield is cast perfectly in the role of creepy loser and Christine Amor as his wife really relishes sticking it to him by getting her jollies with students. I enjoyed the hell out of both of these actors as they chewed up every scene they were in. The rest of the cast, including the sheriff, is fine but pretty disposable (sometimes literally). The movie also gains points for including a terrible glam metal band, Vice (“the one and only original hard rock band from Brisbane, Australia” according to their Facebook page BECAUSE THEY ARE STILL AROUND), playing at the school dance. Imagine if your school booked Twisted Sister or Whitesnake to play prom and you get an idea of how ridiculous this is. Plus there’s a random overly devout nun who wanders the hallways mumbling a lot but doing little else until she pops up with a jar of acid at a very convenient point in the plot. Oh and guess what? This movie has a FRIGHT BREAK! That’s right! That good ol’ William Castle gimmick that dares you to keep watching (“If you’re too chicken to stay and face the suspense and terror ahead, simply follow the yellow streak to ‘chicken’s corner’, where the price of admission will be refunded in full.”). Dang, this is a fun movie. Now I just wanna watch it again.

While Severin didn’t include any info as to what kind of source the transfer is pulled from, it looks pretty nice with a crisp, clean picture and little to no noticeable compression artifacts. Much of the film takes place at night and the blacks are represented well and not overly soft. The audio is captured as a nice clear mono track and gets the job done. We have a couple of extras included. One is basically an extended interview with actor Leon Lissek that plays as an audio commentary track. Since it is a pre-existing interview, it obviously doesn’t include any scene-specific comments, but it still has a lot of interesting info about Lissek’s involvement in the film and his career in general. Plus I appreciated that they had it playing during the film instead of just against a black screen as another recent audio interview extra I came across did. Also included on the disc is an interview with Christine Amor which is significantly shorter but still has some nice anecdotes. We also get the regular trailer and a trailer specifically calling out the Fright Break.

Bloodmoon is a great time. If you dig the horror scene of the late ’80s where filmmakers were starting to grow tired of the generic tropes and were taking their pictures in oddball or kooky directions, this Aussie romp will be right up your alley.