User Reviews

This is a below average movie that at best could have been an average thriller. The plot is confusing and has more holes than all the golf courses at Myrtle Beach. Britt Ekland is in a mental hospital relating her story to a psychiatrist about multiple murders on a boat.

Her story starts as the newly weds (her and John Phillip Law, both trying to play characters 20 years younger) decide to spend their honey moon on a boat with 2 of his ex Viet Nam comrades and their sexy girlfriends. There are flashbacks of some Viet Nam war action thrown in. There are a few murders at the hospital with some one investigating the murders.

Once on the boat people begin to get murdered one by one by what appears to be the ghost of a Viet Cong soldier. There are 2 people eventually left on the boat, Britt Ekland and a very sexy, spooky girlfriend of one of the other men. The 2 women left standing I suppose believe the other person is the murderer so Britt Ekland ends up killing her and that is the end of her story. The psychiatrist sort of says "well OK" walks away and hey its all over.

You can watch this movie straight through without missing a second and still feel as though you walked away from it several times for 5 minutes.

but I had to watch it as is. As is, it's awful. I can definitely buy that it was cut to pieces in the editing room, because the characters don't even get onto the boat until about 30 minutes in - the time before that being taken up by about three different, and inconsequential subplots that fail (in my opinion) to enhance the story one bit. And once they're on the boat, we get treated to the killer's ludicrous stalking about . . . seriously, you're on a small boat, why can't you 'hear' the crazy slasher coming? Once people start dropping dead, aren't you going to be a teensy bit more careful about everyone's comings and goings? And the 'Nam flashbacks are laughable. The peasants look like they're wearing day-glow rags, while the lush Southeast Asian forests are represented by someone's back forty.

To be fair, the cover art's impressive, although at least one of the screen caps on the back wasn't even in the movie.

If you judged every director on only the one title, then your DVD shelf would be a very lonely place. Coppola, Spielberg, Stone, hell even Scorsese - they have all made slight 'miscalculations' throughout their respective careers. Keeping that in mind though, the last film that I saw from Gary Graver was the abysmal 'slasher' Trick or Treats, which in all honesty made Plan 9 from Outer Space look intellectual. Taking that into account I must admit that I didn't expect much from Moon in Scorpio. But with notorious exploitation titan Fred Olen Ray on board as co-producer, there's no way of ever knowing exactly what to expect. In all honesty the bizarre casting decision of putting Britt Eckland's name above the title was more than enough to get my initial curiosities aroused.

Keeping things hackneyed, we begin with the oldest of all slasher clichés. Yep you guessed it; an unseen nut-nut makes a break from the least secure mental hospital imaginable, killing an unfortunate orderly on the way. Once outside the complex, the psycho makes short work of a cheery pharmaceutical salesman and then flees the scene in the dead guy's car. For some inexplicable reason, the head psychiatrist doesn't bother informing the Police that they have a murderous maniac on the loose. Instead he calls in Private Detective Richard Vargas who is described by one shrink as being, "Almost crazy enough to be a patient here himself." Next we fast-forward two weeks and Vargas is seen boarding an abandoned-looking boat that is adrift in the middle of the sea. Once on board he finds Linda (Britt Eckland) sprawled across the floor in a heap. Whilst attempting to wake her up, she stabs him in the stomach with a bizarre spear like device. The (unconvincingly) hysterical Linda is then dragged off of the boat by two orderlies who don't seem at all concerned by the fact that Vargas has just been fatally impaled on the huge spike.

A few days later, Linda is fit to be interviewed by the head psychiatrist and he asks her what exactly happened out in the middle of the sea. We soon learn that she had been on a honeymoon with her husband, two of his war buddies and their girlfriends. The plan was to sail too Acapulco and spend a couple of weeks lapping up the sun on the beaches. Unfortunately along with the suitcases and sangria, the gang had inadvertently brought along a maniacal killer who had his own reasons to want to be stranded in the ocean with the holidaymakers. For the rest of the runtime, we see through flashbacks exactly what happened aboard the cursed death ship. Just who was responsible for these viscous murders?

According to many reports that I've read over the web, Moon in Scorpio was continually re-edited by the distributors and was eventually released without any of the supernatural elements that had been originally intended from the script. The IMDb mentions a vampire and astrological plot points, which sounds intriguing, but couldn't be further from the contents of the version that was eventually released direct to video. The only available VHS print is typical slasher by the numbers fare, and contains no trace of the rumored paranormal ingredients. Perhaps one day a Director's Cut DVD will solve the riddle of the missing plot points. Unfortunately whether you can blame the edit-happy distributors or not, Scorpio is a lackadaisical entry that lacks suspense, creativity and effort from any of the big name cast members. Eckland was laughable as she struggled to look even slightly motivated, whilst hard man character actor William Smith was totally wasted in an undemanding role.

The film's structure is also totally inept. The flashback narration seems to run illogically beside what we are seeing on the screen and we are never given a credible conclusion as to the killer's motives. At a guess, I'd say that the maniac became a vampire post-death in the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. At one point in the runtime there's a slight hint as a character drinks her partner's blood after he accidentally cuts his finger whilst dicing carrots. There's also a sub-plot involving a link between the three male cast members, who fought in Vietnam together. But these few scenes, which amusingly look more like they were filmed in a park down the road from Gary Graver's house than anywhere near 'Nam, never amount to anything either. If you don't manage to work out the unseen killer's identity by the half hour mark then you shouldn't be watching anything that's not PG-13 rated. And the anemic showdown between the survivor and the killer couldn't have been any less entertaining if it were filmed in slow motion.

Perhaps one day we will be able to see what Graver really intended with Moon in Scorpio. But as it stands I'm afraid that there is very little to recommend. Don't bother hunting this one down.

Recently purchased this as part of the Slasher Classic's Collection releases & giving that I'm such a big fan of 80's slashers - I've honestly never heard of this & after viewing it, well its hardly a lost gem. In-fact quite the opposite.

The plot is a Vietnam vet with PTSD & his new wife are invited for their honeymoon aboard his friend's yacht along with 2 other couples to sail to a tropical island, but of course they don't make it as they are soon picked off one by one by mysterious gloved assailant with an unusual, pronged murder weapon.

Throughout the movie we get Britt Ekland narrating what happened (that's not a spoiler its literary at the start of the movie) & I hate when they do this as you already know she's going to survive, so that takes away any tension or suspense that the movie may have had. Not that this has any of that mind you as this was for the most part incredibly boring & very confusing at times with the way it skips back & forth between time-lines, along with the Nam flashbacks which didn't look authentic at all & come off as more amusing than anything, as well as the mis-match of bad acting on everyone's part with very clunky dialogue, even by Britt Ekland herself with her awful line readings & unable to show any sort of range or emotion, coming across as more hilarious than anything. All of the actors are like that in this, with some acting like they're in a different type of movie & some are just hamming it up for fun.

The cheapness of the production really shows here, with like I already said the War flashbacks which don't look real at all, even the uniforms were awful. Plus, none of this fits the aesthetic of the movie as none of it means anything by the end. The slasher elements don't really happen until the last 15/20 minutes of the film & they're not all that exciting with nobody making any noise when they die, as well as the mystery element doesn't work as its pretty much signposted throughout.

On the whole I'd say the movie's troubled production history is probably the most interesting aspect of this mess, as that original plot sounded way more interesting than this watered down mess.

Sometimes, Gary Graver was making movies with Orson Welles. Other times, he was making ultra low budget films that were originally about soldiers burning down a temple to a snake goddess and being hunted years later by a Vietnamese child all grown up. Instead, the producers wanted a slasher set on a yacht. And that's kind of what we got.

But man, what a cast! John Phillip Law? William Smith? Britt Ekland? Robert Quarry? Jillian Kesner from Firecracker and Raw Force? Any one of these actors will get me to watch a movie. All of them at the same time? Come on!

Shout out to Justin Decloux, who revealed on Letterboxd that the budget for this came from Fred Olen Ray bringing Commando Squad in under budget and Graver saying that he could make another movie with what was left. After Grave shot the film and made his cut, the producers hated it and asked Ray to reshoot it for $5,000, adding in the crazy weapon and bloodier kills. That same camera equipment for the extra scenes got co-opted to make Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and the movie ended - and that one - ended up being a big success.

Hey look - Britt Ekland starts this movie off in a straightjacket and it gets goofier from there. I can absolutely respect that. I also love that some actors in this are really trying to act (underline and bold that and make it very large in font size) while others are just trying to make a slasher.

That's me - I'd rather a movie be a mess with a troubled production history than good sometimes.