The fun begins when a young couple visit a friend at his family's avant- garde mountain aerie just outside of Aix. His dad, the Marquis Lorrain, presides over a circle of certifiable psychopaths and, like Brad & Janet in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, the pair get seduced by the rampant insanity. The sex & savagery (and there's a lot of it) is implied rather than shown which makes this cagey black comedy simultaneously understated and over-the-top, no mean feat.
Cadaverous character actor Daniel Emilfork (who looks like Nosferatu) stands out as the effeminate father who's delighted the "sadic de garrique" (the best my subtitles could do) might be a member of his demented family. The "sadic" is a homicidal maniac roaming the countryside and his MO is patterned on the Leopard Men of the Congo who used razor sharp claw-mitts (a la Freddy Krueger) to shred their victims. The Congo killers struck only at noon and midnight when their powers were supposedly at their peak and the literal English translation of MIDI MINUIT is "Noon Midnight" so I don't know where MOON & MIDNIGHT (the U.S. title) came from, although one character is warned to "never show your emotions in the moonlight". The resident femme fatale, Béatrice Arnac, looks a bit like Marisa Mell with a Louise Brooks bob and it's 1970 so there's pot-smoking, LSD, and young men in caftans, too.
