This British slasher from 1978 follows a group of choir girls on a coach trip to the Lake District, just about the most English premise imaginable (short of sending them to a homophobic B&B).

Unfortunately for them, a gang of escaped lunatics (a common British problem in the last century) are on the rampage after being subjected to experiments involving LSD and told to follow their most violent impulses as though in a dream. But they’ve escaped from the hospital still convinced they’re in a shared dream, believing their actions to be of as little consequence as a Max Landis movie.

It’s an unexpectedly bonkers premise and a nice twist on the Lake District slasher sub-genre, though I’m not sure what it’s got to do with Killer’s Moon. Lucy in the Sky with Lakelands would be more appropriate. Matters are made stranger still by the killers being based on the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, talking like they’ve wandered in from a regional production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The film benefits from sardonic dialogue (“If we ever get out of this alive maybe we’ll both live to be wives and mothers.”) and surprisingly good cinematography, setting pure white clothes and bright red stains against the pretty rural scenery. Director Alan Birkinshaw is quoted as saying “we decided that the horror genre was more up market than a sex comedy,” giving the film that Carry On Massacring vibe you used to get from British genre flicks.

Killer’s Moon is an enticingly bizarre and enjoyably nasty New Wave horror flick which Matthew Sweet called “the most tasteless movie in British cinema history,” and if that doesn’t make you want to watch it I don’t know what will.