Obscure slasher taking place in the treeless hills southeast of the Bay Area
A college girl from Berkely and her new beau (Laurie Walters and Joe Spano) take a trip for a picnic and wind up at a rundown spa resort. They meet the old biddy living there (Edna MacAfee), but something weird seems to be going on, possibly even sinister.
“Warlock Moon” (1973) starts out with bits reminiscent of “Night of the Living Dead” before eventually taking a path similar to “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” and "Necromancy," the latter with Pamela Franklin and Orson Welles, which was reissued as “The Witching” with extra (unneeded) sensationalistic footage in 1983. Tobe Hooper obviously borrowed from it for his “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” upping the ante in every department.
This is easily the least of these due to its sparse cast and tediously mundane happenings, not to mention the one-dimensional setting of the dilapidated spa resort. Yet there are enough highlights for those interested and it deserves credit as an early slasher before the craze kicked off five years later.
The working title was “Blood Spa” and it was released to TV & video as “Bloody Spa” in the USA & UK. While that’s certainly a fitting name, “Warlock Moon” isn’t exactly a misnomer, as some maintain. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie, as there are slight spoilers). To explain, certain characters are definitely involved in ritualistic sorcery, including at least one male; and a warlock is a man who practices sorcery, aka witchcraft. As for “Moon,” it’s obviously nighttime when this ritual is performed, so there’s certainly a moon in the sky (regardless of whether or not clouds cover it). 'Moon' in this context would simply refer to the dead of night (pun intended).
Likable Laurie Walters costarred in the amusingly risqué (but eye-rolling) “The Harrad Experiment” just before this and eventually went on to TV fame with Eight Is Enough from 1977-1981 (which I’ve never seen, but practically everyone has seen pics or clips from that show).
It runs 1 hour, 22 minutes, but there are several minutes of deleted scenes worth checking out on Youtube, particularly the cops pulling the couple over in the first act, which explains a couple of things later on. It was shot at the University of California in Berkeley, which is north of Oakland, and 37 miles southeast of there in Livermore (the spa resort), which is east of Dublin.
GRADE: C+
