Reviewer: Rhett Review Date: March 18, 2010 Released by: Media Blasters Release date: 02/16/2010 MSRP: $19.99 Region 0, NTSC Widescreen 1.78:1 | 16x9: Yes Progressive Scan 1981

It's hard to stand out in the slasher genre. Almost as quick as a fresh offering comes out, there are six imitators in its wake. Halloween hits and no holiday is unturned. Friday the 13th comes and camp grounds become ubiquitous. Scream bellows and soon every slasher has a post modern slant. It's a parasitic genre of sameness, but for many, myself included, it's the death scenes, the amateur personalities and the unkempt diversions between A and B that make the genre so interesting. Despite sharing a name with Craven's game changer, 1981’s Scream (or The Outing for those who'd rather have the film confused for a gay drama rather than a 90s slasher) has no trouble defining itself. It's one of a kind, that's for sure, and after an eternity's wait as the title, once a Code Red joint before they severed with Media Blasters, had been delayed for upwards of a year. It's here in my hands and I'm screaming with emotion. Is that out of incomprehensible pain or bad movie bliss? Well, maybe a bit of both.


The Story

Okay, I'm devoting a paragraph to the prologue. Misplaced, surely, from a Bergman film, we see a long dolly shot across a mantle. There we see an oil canvas of a ship battling the waves at sea. Dong. Dong. The clock chimes midnight. Three clay figures, one a butcher, one a baker, and one a candlestick maker. I know, you were thinking nightmare maker, right? Anyway, after juxtaposing shots of a clock and a toy face, we see that the baker and the candlestick maker are missing their heads. Dong. Dong. At this point you'd be forgiven for thinking this is an arthouse Puppet Master predecessor. Don't bother trying to make sense of it though, because sense and Scream go together only in alliteration.

Leaving the inexplicable mantle aside, we pickup with a group of backpackers taking to the Texas water for a weekend of tranquility. With no hillbillies or banjo players around, they raft to a quaint little ghost town atop a hill. "It must be over 100 years old" someone who must have been privy to the prologue pipes. It's a few cabins made from untreated wood - it's 30 years old, tops. Anyway, this isn't your typical troop of teens. It's a bunch of thirtysomethings and an amazing proportion of old men. So rather than do what those Crystal Lake teens do and party (and dance to Lion, who are we kidding?) they sleep. Seriously. They get to the shacks around mid day and next thing they are going to bed. No drinking, no drugs, no sex. This is the only slasher where even the killer can't even surmise a motive.

Still, the killing happens. But Scream is not your ordinary slasher, and these aren't your ordinary kills. The killer is never seen throughout. The coverage of deaths are done almost entirely on weapons, with the blades seemingly brandishing themselves. Is this just a clever way to conceal the killer? Nope. As we find out first through a sequence where the first person POV is able to turn off a boom box, there is some supernatural fooling afoot. When a grizzled man, Charlie Winters (John Ford vet Woody Strode, Keoma, Vigilante) trots in through the smoke with his horse and Rottweiler (hey, why not?), he gives us about the only exposition this film ever gets. Apparently there was a vicious sailor from ages ago whose spirit still lurks (somehow in rural Texas) and it apparently wants to wreak vengeance on a bunch of old, homely, boring campers. It kind of does, I guess, hurtling people in slow motion through various falls (the director was a stunt guy from the John Ford school) until eventually we go back to the Bergman-esque mantle for a closing bout of amazing pretention. Folks…I’ve only just scratched the surface.

Scream is an amazing lark of a movie – so seemingly out of touch with the parameters of the horror genre, or hell, any genre. Director Byron Quisenberry claims he just wanted to make a horror movie despite never particularly liking them or having seen any of them. Makes sense to me. So we’ve got scenes that are on paper designed to be scary – a woman is chased through a ghost town at night, or a man is thrown by an evil force off a balcony, but instead of shooting it to scare, Quisenberry and his DP Richard Pepin (who’d go on to shoot the solid desert slasher Blood Frenzy) shoot it to alienate. The camera just sort of wanders around most of the time in these long, aimless tracking shots (Quisenberry explains how they had a dolly the entire production, and dammit, they were going to use it!) Again, you don’t see the deaths – instead, you’ll see a long tracking shot going from building to building at night and hear a scream. Or you track along wallboard for awhile before seeing an axe slowly taken off the wall. When a dolly moves you think it is going somewhere, but in Scream the only place it takes you is to restless insanity.

It’s not just the dolly shots that are drawn out, either. Every single shot in this film, and this is no word of a lie, has about 2 to 3 seconds of dead space before and after each take. I suppose we could argue Quisenberry was going for a Bresson-ian fourth wall technique, but no. Just no. The movie clocks in at shy of 83 minutes, but if you were to lop off every moment of dead space, the movie would probably only be 50 minutes. It’s way too drawn out, and don’t expect any of the R-rated trimmings to bolster this one up, either.

It’s actually kind of a wonder that Scream was ever financed or picked up for distribution in the first place. Let’s just do a little checklist here:

-The killer is never shown
-No gore, hell, no deaths even on screen!
-No nudity and certainly no sex
-Bodycount consists entirely of old, slovenly males
-The Final Girl Guy is a shlub who wears one of those three color ballcaps

It’s almost like some kind of feminist experiment, reducing each kill to phallic shots of weaponry and replacing your typical female victim with a man to illustrate the inherent chauvinistic masculinity of the genre. Given the film was originally called “The Outing” one could surmise further that this was Quisenberry’s way of peeling away the sexuality constructs of the genre, to “out” all that gay repression that Robin Wood wrote of so passionately. It’s sad, then, when Quisenberry reveals a total disinterest in the story and that the reality of the making was that he and a bunch of industry-pals were given 11-days on a Paramount back lot to just sort of piecemeal a movie together.

Now I’m probably totally wasting my time trying to deconstruct the logic of the film here, but let’s spend a moment on the story. Again, it’s been previously established that the killer is some sort of ghost given that it is able to move objects without any physical presence. Okay, but then how the hell is Charlie, and I guess this is a spoiler, but considering Quisenberry doesn’t even know what any event in his own film means I suppose there isn’t anything but conjecture to spoil – how is Charlie able to shoot the ghost with a shotgun and stop him from scything off the remainder of the backpackers?

Perhaps the bigger question, though, is why the hell everyone would stick around this ghost town if it’s clear there’s a killer loose. It’s not like this happens over one night – they’re there for a few days and even come in contact with some bikers (one of which is Ethan Wayne, son of John) and the man on the horse. Never once do they ever ask them, you know, if they could hitch a ride or leave. It’s like they know they are in a horror movie, and if they leave the ghost town, then the movie would be over. Considering how out there the prologue and epilogue are, though, I don’t think any of their actions would have ever mattered. Hell, maybe that’s the theme of the film – no matter what you do, it doesn’t matter, we are all preordained to suffering? Again, with an oddity like Scream, why not?

Scream is a one of a kind black sheep of the genre, comparable only to the Depression-era religious parable A Day of Judgment for straying so far from the standard slasher path. It’s not entertaining in the least bit, but it’s certainly amazing, inexplicable, unbelievable. How could something like this even exist? Scream is not inept like bad slashers like Satan’s Blade or Blood Massacre, it’s made with a level of technical proficiency by a number of people who are no strangers to the business. They are just strangers to making sense, apparently. Scream is the kind of marvel that you couldn’t possibly try to make. Like Troll 2 or Don’t Go in the Woods, it’s one of those life-of-their-own peculiarities that simply manifested out of the unlikely circumstances of production. Not really lightning in a bottle – maybe more like shit in a sack, but whatever it is, Scream is crazy and it’s something every slasher fan needs to endure if they ever want to be taken seriously as a film buff. See it, hate it, never forget it.


Image Quality

Bill Olsen reveals in the commentary that the film was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, which explains the myriad of grain present throughout. It doesn’t explain the major light leak on the left side of the frame, though, that effectively messes up the contrast and consistency of the entire image. The left third of the frame is graduated brighter than the rest of the image, and considering there are so many scenes that play out in near total darkness, the projection/print issue is a very distracting one throughout. There are also plenty of white specs littered throughout to further mar the transfer. It’s presented 1.85:1 as projected in theaters, but Quisenberry says he shot the film specifically for 1.66:1. Why, when he was aware it would be cropped, is yet another inexplicable element that contributes to the mythos of the film. The transfer has a lot of problems, but considering its elusive history, it’s nice to actually get it OAR, and with some pretty respectable color saturation. It’s out, and that’s what matters most.


Sound

The English mono mix included here, like the video, is far from reference quality. There is a lot of hiss and crackle to the track, sounding little better than grandma’s old LPs. Dialogue is flat, but audible. There aren’t any dropouts, and the score, which itself sounds like a broken record of a few short melodies, does come through with decent presence. Not the best, but again, it’s all there.

Supplemental Material

Of all the films I’ve ever wanted a commentary for, Scream was probably top of the list. Code Red, bless their hearts, came through with the unsurmisable – they were able to wrangle in the director to finally talk about this forgotten obscurity. Finally, the bookend sequences could finally be demystified. The weighty pretention finally given a focus. The riddle solved. Sadly, this commentary with Byron Quisenberry, Code Red brother Bill Olsen and moderator Marc Edward Hueck, doesn’t quite live up to the promise. Quisenberry turns out to be a dud of a speaker, mustering only single sentence responses to all the questions Olsen and Hueck throw at him. That’s not to say they don’t try their best to get him to talk – hell, at one point, almost out of exasperation, Hueck follows Quisenberry’s tangent and starts asking him what it was like to be a publicist for a baseball team. That’s when you know you’re grasping at straws. Other than knowing that the killer is a ghost, Quisenberry doesn’t really know anything else about the story. He just keeps falling back on the “we were going for the European thing” whenever questions about plot, continuity or sense come up. It’s too bad more sense couldn’t be made from the commentary, but you know what, it’s like I said, sometimes a cult movie just sort of makes itself.

Other extras include a trailer and a TV spot. The spot has an alternate take of the tripping-over-a-string-of-Dr. Pepper-cans shot seen in the film. Also included are a few other Media Blasters movie previews for Just Before Dawn, Evils of the Night, Cop Killers and Zombi 5: Killing Birds. The entire disc is done up as a sort of travel brochure with thematic menus that fit well with the film.


Final Thoughts

A true slasher oddity without any on-screen killer, no on-screen deaths and not even a single female victim, Scream definitely stands out from the pack. It’s slow, meandering and mostly nonsensical, with the most odd and out of place bookends any film has ever seen. Anyone of the sane designation should be bored silly by it, but slasher fans simply must see it as a sort of rite of passage. The video and sound are very weathered, but at the very least intact. The commentary with the director does little to explain any of the many peculiarities of the film, but it’s all done up in a nice package from Code Red and Media Blasters. It’s been a long wait, but finally the ship has sailed on one of slasher’s oddest vessels. Hopefully this isn’t the final voyage for Code Red or Media Blasters when it comes to vintage slasher output.

Tick tock tick tock. “Me and the captain we came here when they gave him nary another ship, they were cruel men, thems that run the ships, company men!” Ding. Ding. 1891.


Rating

. Movie - N/A Image Quality - C+ Sound - B- Supplements - B

Technical Info.

• Color
• Running time - 1 hour 23 minutes
• Unrated
• 1 Disc
• Chapter Stops
• English mono

Supplements

• Audio commentary with director Byron Quisenberry, moderator Marc Edward Hueck and Bill Olsen of Code Red
• Theatrical trailer
• TV spot
• Media Blasters trailers

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