A Tedious Chore of a Trip

I’m a fan of slasher flicks (as evidenced by all the various slasher movies I’ve reviewed for the site over the years). Slashers are great fun when they’re done right, and there’s a certain joy in finding some rare movie, some little heard of film that tickles the slasher funny bone just right. Once the original Halloween hit the slasher scene and proved the genre viable, an explosion of like-minded films followed, and a huge boom of these movies was the result. Trying to cover all of them would be impossible as there’s just too many, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to watch what I can and providing reviews of all the ones worth seeing.

Scream is not one of those. Let’s be clear, though, as we’re talking about the 1981 film named Scream, which has nothing to do with the 1996 film named Scream that launched the entire ScreamWhat started as a meta-commentary on slasher media became just another slasher series in its own right, the Scream series then reinvented itself as a meta-commentary on meta-commentary. franchise. The 1996 film is a smash success, one that’s required viewing for any fan of the genre. The 1981 film, by comparison, is an absolute dud, a turgid, tedious, awful affair that was rightly forgotten almost as soon as it came out. I found it floating around on Tubi (the repository for so many awful films that genre fans like myself could go and watch when we have nothing better to do), and the only reason I bothered with it was because it was a slasher film named “Scream” that I hadn’t heard of before. I know why I was here, but if I can ensure no one follows me down into the depths of this film then I feel like I’ve done everyone a great service.

Scream ‘81 follows a group of campers as they venture down the Rio Grande to a ghost town. They spend the night there, expecting to pick up and continue on their river rafting journey, only in the middle of the night one of their number is killed. His body is discovered soon after, hanging from the roof of a building, and this sends the entire group into a tizzy. What happened? Why did he die? Who killed him. These are all questions the group asks and they slowly begin to turn on each other. However, one death after another occurs that night, and the rights of the group begins to worry about who’s next.

In the morning, the group is greeted by two dirt bike riders. When the riders hear about the deaths, one of them elects to stay behind and lend his bike to one of the tour guides. He and the other rider drive off to get help while the rest of the campers huddle together for safety. And yet, one by one they’re still picked off as they go for supplies, or to take a leak, or just because they’re stupid. When a random drifter on a horse rides in, he tells a story of an old riverboat captain who supposedly haunts the hills of the town. Is this ghostly captain behind the murders, or is it one of the group, mortal and with a taste for blood?

Scream ‘81 is a terrible film, and that’s pretty clear from the outset. The pacing of this film is way off, with every scene dragging on far longer than it needs to. We get a lengthy opening scene of them rafting down the river, free of any real dialogue as well as any momentum. This sets the tone for the film as there are plenty of shots spent simply watching the people walk, move around, eat, drink, and do whatever else they’re going to do. This even continues once the bodies start dropping and the campers have to huddle together. Any time one of them goes off to do something, we take far longer than we need to watching them do their mundane tasks before anything “interesting” happens.

I put interesting in quotes because, frankly, nothing they do in this film is interesting. The actions of these people are tediously slow, with nothing actually done for necessity, and no action actually revealing anything interesting about the characters. Even once the murders begin, it’s hard to call anything on screen interesting because everything is filmed in the most ham-fisted and boring style possible. This is a film made to be a film but with the quality and pacing of a (bad) made-for-TV movie. It’s just wretched to watch.

I would put up with that at least if the kills were any good, but they aren’t. The film doesn’t know how to build suspense, failing to draw audiences in with tension or draw out scenes of horror or violence. Kills simply happen when the director wants, without any reasoning behind them. People wander in and out of zones where the killer is hiding, but why one person dies and another gets to live is never made clear. Motivation is lacking for the killer, and we never really get a sense of what’s going on. There’s no reason, no suspense, and no horror.

It doesn’t help that the kills are bland as can be. The film doesn’t actually show much of anything, making for one of the most bloodless slasher films I’ve yet watched. A scene will set up someone to die, the camera will cut to a weapon, and then the person will just be dead, laying on the ground in such a way that we don’t see wounds, or blood, or anything. Just a random person on the ground. It’s hard to even call these “kills”, even though they’re meant to be, because we don’t see enough to feel like a murder happened. Swinging weapons, and a person on the ground, does not a slasher make.

This is all because of the fact (spoilers for a forty-plus year old movie) that writer / director / producer Byron Quisenberry didn’t actually have a flesh-and-blood killer set for this film. That ghostly killer hinted at by the horse-riding drifter is actually the killer in this film but he never appears on film. He’s just a force, an invisible presence, something floating around, carrying weapons and killing people. It’s just as dumb as it sounds. Because there’s no physical killer, especially not one with a connection to the people he’s killing, the whole mystery falls flat. Nothing makes sense and it all ends like some old, wet fart for a movie that could never rise to the occasion.

Quisenberry is on the record stating that he wanted a film that plays out like an Agatha Christie novel, a movie where the people are dying one by one and they start questioning each other and doubting everything they know. I like the idea of that, the concept sounds cool for a slasher. The execution, though, is lacking. Quisenberry was a stunt coordinator with only two directing credits under his belt, this film and Hollywood, It’s a Dog’s Life. Neither one made any kind of mark, not even for his career, and it’s pretty clear that, while he might have been solid as a stuntman, he was an absolutely terrible director.

Reviews for Scream ‘81 were predictably unkind. My own experience watching this film forty years after it was released was mirrored by the reviewers of the time, almost all of whom were (entirely and fairly) unkind to the work. Even those that tried to be kind still couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it. It’s clear Quisenberry had a vision and really wanted to make a good movie. It’s also clear that he had absolutely no talent at it at all. This was a labor of love that didn’t work out and while I can appreciate what he wanted to make, the end result is as far removed from “good” as you can possibly get (without intruding onto “so horrible you can’t turn away” status, like Human Centipede). I count us all lucky that the Scream we all know and love is the one from 1996 and not this absolutely, mind-bogglingly awful affair. Better to let this film stay forgotten.