Burl here! Yes, I’ve got a mystery slasher for
you today, a little-discussed cornelius out of Wichita, Kansas called Night Screams! Ha ha, and of course as a
little public service I like to place these pictures into very specific
categories so that the unwary watcher may become wary, or at least go into
their viewing with a surfeit of information in hand!
One thing I like to let the people know is
whether the movie in question contains any actual Special Makeup Effects in its
killings or not! Ha ha, many a slasher pic skimps on this critical ingredient,
relying instead on shots of poking knives and a few drops of stage blood! (The
only movie that gets away clean with this approach is Halloween! Ha ha, and Psycho
too, I suppose!)
Now, the funny thing is that Night Screams cheats a bit in this
regard, because it opens with a couple sitting on their couch and enjoying a
viewing of Graduation Day! We see a
couple of killings from that picture, and the movie’s surprise ending is
revealed, so fair warning if you haven’t seen Graduation Day! But it’s a sly way for Night Screams to fit a few more killings and a little extra tomato
paste into its running time!
It’s an apt way to open the picture too,
because Night Screams is very Graduation Day! The gang of
superannuated sports teens we meet here are on the foot-ball team, or are girlfriends
of the foot-ball team, and the action is centered on a big post-game party held
for all these jerks by foot-ball hero David! But David wants no part of his BMOC
status, though his bear of a dad revels in it by proxy, and we learn as the
picture goes on that, without his special medication David is prone to fits of
violence, and he’ll throw down a Cornish Hen flipout fit on his friends at the drop of a
hat! His ladyfriend meanwhile feels that she doesn’t fit in, and at the same
time all the girls are angling for a piece of David, who seems awfully Jersey
Shore for a guy stuck in Wichita!
David’s not the only red herring here, to
be sure! A religious maniac named Snake has broken out of Leavenworth, along
with a couple of his pals, and they’re hiding in David’s basement! At the
party, victims pile up: a fireplace poker through the sternum; a trouble light
dropped into a hot tub; a neck crushed with a pool cue; a head chopped with an
axe; a man’s face grilled alongside his own hamburger; and a few garden variety
pokings and stranglings! (Of these, only the face-grilling and accompanying
neck-poke required any substantial effort from the picture’s one-woman Special
Makeup Effects team!)
As so often, it’s the marginal details that
provide the most profound enjoyment! There is a pleasing entr’acte in which our
victims-to-be go out to the club, where they observe the gyrations of six
bespangled ladies called The Sweetheart Dancers! There’s a tubby jokester
character straight out of Friday the 13th part 3, but this particular tubby jokester, called Russell, is given less
to practical jokes and more to jarring bursts of bizarre behavior which the
movie stops cold to observe! Are these incidents meant to be funny, or are they
presented as evidence of incipient psychosis? Ha ha, the glory of Night Screams is that one simply cannot
be sure!
The picture is never very scary, of course, though
Snake demonstrates some admirably violent tendencies; and the solution to the
mystery makes remarkably little sense, even for a movie like this! (Ha ha, this
is yet another aspect it shares with Graduation
Day!) The regional players, who include some almost-familiar faces like Ron
Thomas from The Big Bet and Janette
Caldwell from Body Double, do a
competent enough job, and there are just enough flourishes of wit, bizarre
moments, and uber-80s aspects (oh those Sweetheart Dancers!) to make it all
worthwhile! I give Night Screams one
and a half Yoda impressions!
No comments:
Post a Comment