Rating: *
Starring: Britt Ekland, John Phillip Law, William Smith
I remember the day I first saw Moon In Scorpio (1987). It was years ago and I was coming home from work, a storm just hit my country so it's heavy rain and strong winds throughout the afternoon. Foreboding, ain't it? As if the universe was giving me all of the signs to call it a day then and take a break. Sleep it off. Well, dear readers, if the idiot writing this review was a tad smarter then, he should've saw the fucking signs and doze off like the dead instead of wasting a perfectly fine evening being bored off his arse by this shipwreck of a movie.
Word around the grapevine says that this movie didn't start out as a slasher during its production and it was more of a Lovecraftian supernatural horror flick about soldiers in Vietnam encountering an evil snake goddess and something about a child hunting down the men years later in revenge. But the big wigs producing the movie got too involved and wanted it to be more stabby-stabby, so reshoots, rewrites and editing came in the way and butchered the entire thing into this incohesive travesty of plot holes, lousy directions and overcooked cheese, all under the cheap leftover budget of another film.
Told as a flashback narration by the only survivor of the eventual murder spree (which means we get to see and hear what's going on in the movie technically twice), Moon In Scorpio (1987) follows three Vietnam vets and their partners taking a yacht pleasure cruise, unaware that one of them just broken out of a mental asylum and has armed themselves with a knife and some weird spearhead weapon that would have been cooler in another slasher film. Insert Nam' flashbacks of the veterans fighting in the jungle and one of the gals in the boat spouting psuedo-Astrology about the moon being in Scorpio (which according to her meant that the cosmic force of vengeance is acting upon them or some shit like that), the yacht population soon starts to dwindle as our killer hunts them down one by one, sparking an intrigue of paranoia and distrust that's dulled down by the droll narration accompanying it and the hammy acting from its casts.
Any means of tension is dead on arrival given the lifeless pacing and paperthin story clashing horribly with the hodge-podge production behind the film, making Moon In Scorpio (1987) just unbearably tedious to follow from the start. The sheer ridiculousness of the plotting and its execution is more insulting than entertaining, so much so that not only was the identity of the killer damn obvious (not hard to figure out seeing there are only six of them aboard that fucking yacht), but the motive behind their murder spree also had shit to do with anything this movie was building on so there's little to no reason for the damn psycho to be there anyway, fucking up what little attempt remains on making the whodunnit angle interesting!
The only good thing about this movie is that its tone is so weird and over-the-top, those with the stomach for the odd (and/or just plain masochistic) could still find something entertaining out of this rancid mess. Moon in Scorpio (1987) is, without a doubt, tailor-made for their strange taste. For me, however, I'm better off abandoning this sinking ship of a war time trauma meets boat-set bodycounting and those who value their time and brain cells should consider doing the same.
Bodycount:
1 male knifed in the back
1 male knifed in the gut
1 male stabbed in the gut with a spearhead weapon
1 male shot (flashback)
1 male shot dead (flashback)
1 female shot (flashback)
1 male shot dead (flashback)
1 male shot (flashback)
1 female shot, left for dead (flashback)
1 male knifed, throat cut with a spearhead weapon
1 female knifed in back and hacked with a spearhead weapon, eye stabbed
1 male shot with a harpoon
1 male knifed in the back, throat cut with a spearhead weapon
1 male had his throat cut with a knife
1 female stabbed in the back with a spearhead weapon
Total: 15
No comments:
Post a Comment