SCREAM (1981)

 "HEY ANDY, IS THIS SOME KIND OF JOKE?" 

Oh, I could make all sorts of jokes about the 1981 slasher "SCREAM" but everybody else has already beaten me to it.  Yes, it IS the most boring slasher film ever made.  Yes, it is probably the most boring FILM ever made full stop.  Yes, the music for a so-called horror film sounds like something out of 1980's sitcom "GIMME A BREAK". 

Yes, there are some killings but they all seem to happen off screen.  Yes, even with the kills, it can still be accurately said that nothing at all happens.  Yes, there are incredibly long tracking shots/dolly shots which don't have any function and don't payoff in anything at all.  Yes, the entire cast spends the movie walking around and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and lying down and standing up.  Yes, even when the rare occurrence of something happening happens, it's pretty unclear what exactly just happened and it STILL feels like nothing happened.  Yes, this is Byron Quisenberry's only directorial effort and yes there's a damn good reason for that!  Yes, Pepper Martin appears in this film and yes he was the guy who beat the snot out of Clark Kent in the diner after he lost his superpowers in SUPERMAN II and yes he does nothing even close to an action scene here -- other than that scene where he paces and smokes a cigarette and tells a woman to stuff it. 

Yes, the great Woody Strode appears briefly in the film along with Hank Worden -- two famous members of John Ford's stock company who appeared in everything from SERGEANT RUTLEDGE to THE SEARCHERS to ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST to STAGECOACH to RED RIVER to THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.  And yes, there's no way in hell that they would appear in this movie other than the fact that John Wayne's son Ethan Wayne also stars in the picture and you CAN'T tell me they didn't do it as a favour!  Woody ambles into the ghost town at night on a horse, sits down with his dog and proceeds to give his "I was a sailor once" speech while smoking his pipe; honest to God it's the only time when the film fights for my attention and that's only because Woody Strode is speaking and he's freakin' awesome and could read the phone book and I'm all in.  A sea captain gave Woody a pocket watch the first time he sailed the 'Horn'; luckily Woody didn't have to store it in his butt for years.  And then he's gone.  Rides away.  All too soon.  Taking all our hopes for the movie with him!  Yes, all attempts at comedy are woefully unamusing (including the appearance of an overweight guy who supposedly is supposed to be funny BECAUSE he's "fat"!).  An attempt at a synopsis of the film would be to say that a group of uninteresting, personality-less people go on a nature hike/river-rafting/outdoorsy type of thing and end up in an Old West ghost town.  Once there, they don't do much of anything and an unseen killer kills them in unseen ways.  Without any attempt at suspense or fright involved.  Suffice it to say that, when the Brady Bunch went to an Old West ghost town it was MUCH scarier and when Mystery Incorporated drove the Mystery Machine into an Old West ghost town it had MUCH more action! 

Oh wait, there is ONE scene of terror -- at the very beginning of the film -- when the most gruesome figures on a mantelpiece are decapitated.  Again, off camera.  These porcelain (?) figurines are of a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker (which apparently was at one time the title of this film) and no, it doesn't make any real sense either.  As I said at the beginning, so many people have cast asparagus at this film that it's a little like shooting ducks in a barrel.  It's perhaps not fair to kick a film when it's flat on the canvas but SCREAM never at any point even tries to attempt to rise up from the canvas.  It just lays there.  Like a mackerel.