Screaming Dead

This is a clever little horror flick and clearly underrated. It demonstrates the idea of split personality when the photographer Roger (Joseph Farrell) meets his 'alter ego' Rossiter (Kevin Shinnick). Whereas the photographer only arranges scenes with the girls that scare them, but don't actually hurt them, the devil in him breaks out and then takes the job to the extreme. Transformed into Rossiter, Roger may at last torture and kill.

Some reviews below give me the impression most people take movies much too literally, so I elaborate a bit of the transformation idea. Check out 1:00:47 when Roger discovers Rossiters machine. Fascinated, he pulls the lever and says "this is ingenious"! We shall see Rossiter stand at the machine later just like that. Check out 1:10:41 when a hand seems to reach out of Rogers brain (or rather: mind) and smashes him against the door so that he 'dissolves' into an unrecognizable pulp. But when in 1:16:00 Sam Rogan enters the room, there is no body on the floor. Roger has disappeared - he was replaced by Rossiter.

Roger was still full of excuses (his artistic purposes), fear and restrictions. His released inner demon knows nothing of this and just does what Roger may only have had (wishful or terrifying) fantasies about. The actually scary idea behind the movie is therefore that once you lose control, you'll never be the same again. If that involves covering Misty Mundae in red paint, it may however seem negotiable ;-)

Certainly, if the movie carried a specifically designed tone to make the viewer's heads explode it would've been worse. Actually, halfway through, I was praying for such a tone. I've never fast-fowarded through a nude scene before this movie, but the dialog voided out the excitement from the nudity.

Misty Mundae is an attractive woman; however, it takes more than beauty to save this movie. It would take all the best doctors in the east to save this movie and, even then, I doubt it could be anything more than something to separate channel 357 from 359.

Well, that was what was bad about the movie. What follows is what was good about the movie:

If you like bad, low budget, unintentionally funny films, seek no more. This is the movie for you.

It has nudity, some horror, and really bad acting. The special effects are embarrassing. For example, a nude woman receives a series of "cuts", and it looks like someone just squirted red paint on to her body. There is no cut of any kind. She's just being basted in tobasco sauce.

Yes, it's shlock. Shlocky shlock. Super shlocky shlock.

At best, you'll laugh. There were some scenes where I laughed out loud. Not because the film was funny, but because the film was so very bad.

At worst, you'll become bored and shut off the movie. There were a few times I was tempted to do so, but I waited out my boredom, and was rewarded with more terrible dialogue, needless nudity, ridiculous special effects, and filming mistakes. Hooray!

The film stars Misty Mundae. Having never heard of her before, I laughed when I saw her name in the credits. The moniker has "soft core porn star" written all over it. The bonus material to the DVD assures me she is a famous horror movie actress who has been in many magazine articles -- Fangoria, for example. And she has, they assure me, "star quality".

Well, no. She doesn't. Not really. But she is willing to take off all her clothes. She is sort of cute, I guess, if scrawny and small.

Rob Monkiewicz plays the male hero, Sam Rogan, and he's amazingly bad. He delivers is lines like he's delivering a pizza -- each sentence comes coated in Luke warm cheese, served in a cardboard box. More than once, his hamfisted lines made me giggle. He's supposed to play a muscle bound romantic, but comes across as a bouncer who occasionally "acts".

Now you know what you're in for -- bad, bad, bad, bad film. But so bad it can be entertaining. Get your friends together, get drunk, and maybe you'll enjoy the film. Watch for the scene where a crew member is accidentally filmed by the doorway. Laugh as the mike once again swings into the scene. Boggle at computer special effects that you would be embarrassed to use as a screen saver.

This, my friends, is a great, bad film.

I liked the acting and the directing in this film, but, alas, the script left a lot to be desired. First of all, do you really think that Neal would have as much clout, considering the subject matter of his photographs? I have my doubts that they would end up in all those prestigous galleries, if they did, I'm sure that feminists would picket them or they might be shut down by the authorities for indecency (Can you imagine if he tried to show in Cincinatti, for example?). I would say that if Rogan got fired for telling off Neal that he could take his ex-boss to court and press charges against both of them. After all, I'm sure that even New Jersey must have laws against this type of "art." As it is, the acting, photography and the directing was quite well done, especially considering this being a low budget film, but the script left my suspension of disbelief hanging there.

From the get go i could tell that this movie was going to be like Hell Asylum. It's amateurish with bad acting and cheapy crappy effects. The story is kind of good but of course was never pushed in the right direction. The characters kept saying how creepy and spooky the place was and that it was an old abandoned asylum or something. Abandoned? The place didn't have a spec of dust and it looked quite modern. Bare yes but old and abandoned it wasn't. Whoever scouted for a location for this movie sucked.

I'll briefly give the story. It's about a successful photographer who combines art with bondage and S&M. He's a real sleaze bag and rents a place so he can work on his art with 3 female models and his female assistant but are also joined by a big hulking ug ug kinda guy who works for an estate agency or something and has to oversee this guy for insurance purposes (it's kind of hazy). But needless to say there's an evil ghost in this place.

I watched this while having a few beers and i'm sorry but Screaming Dead is in a word 'dead' and no way could you ever say that this film is so bad it's good! It's so bad it's bad! Apart from a potentially good story gone to waste and nice looking women there's not much good about this movie. There's only one gore effect in it too. I'm giving it an extremely generous 3/10 for reasonable but wasted story, nice looking girls and one good gore effect.