Killer's Moon, The Lunatics are Loose, Hide your Daughters..

A century ago, we confined our lunatics in asylums.  Today, they vote, drive cars, occupy the cubicle next to yours at work, and have more rights than you do.  In 1978's "Killer's Moon," four of these psychos undergo experimental treatment.  As a government bureaucrat opines, "why imprison them if you can cure them?"  The tyranny of good intentions, as usual, gets so many good people raped, tortured, and murdered....but at least we (as a society) can say we care.  This film is hard to watch, as the victims are chaste school girls of a very clean cut sort.  What will be done to them will make you squirm.

Four of the most psychopathic rapist/murderers are undergoing experimental dream therapy at a low security mental hospital.  This treatment is supposed to make them docile, but the four escape into the English countryside.  At the same time a bus carrying a schoolgirl choir breaks down.  Part 3 of the plot, a couple of campers are fooling around with a local vixen in a tent in the woods.  Enter our four psychopaths.  At first, they gang rape the vixen as she leaves the tent to head back to town.  The two campers, Pete (Anthony Forrest) and Mike (Tom Marshall) realize maniacs are loose.  The girl choir, two of their teachers and bus drivers find refuge in a hotel closed for the season.  The maniacs converge and deliver an ax to the bus drivers neck and invade the hotel.  After knifing the proprietress, they rape one of the schoolgirls.  Unfortunately, this girl won't be the only one raped.  

As Mike and Pete head to the hotel, they have rescue on their minds.  The killers believe they are dreaming and have no inhibitions.  Whatever this experimental therapy was supposed to do, it backfired big time.  As the girls come to the realization that these fiends will violate and kill them, they compose themselves and look for opportunities.  Displaying heroism they never knew they had, the choir girls fight back.  Unfortunately, not all of them will survive.  In one very difficult to watch scene, the most brutish one chases down a girl, rips off her pajamas, and while fondling her, strangles her to death.  I repeat, this is not an easy film to watch...but horrific in it's imagery.  

Will our choir girls, with the help of the good Samaritan campers, defeat the evil quartet?  If they do, will they be scarred for the rest of their existences?  This British slasher film will unnerve you.  In many of these slasher films, the victims usually display personality traits that betray our sympathies. Here, however, the girls are pure...making their demise horrific.  Perhaps slow at times, "Killer's Moon" (directed by Alan Birkinshaw) won't leave you smiling.  Available on Netflix...if you dare.