Scream

First of all, this movie should only be seen by die hard slasher fans. And I mean, those who can stand almost 90 minutes of mediocrity, terrible cinematography, boring plot, and stupid characters. Yes, there is a "mysterious" killer but that isn't enough.

The plot deals with a bunch of teen rafters that get lost in a Ghost Town. You don't need to know more because before we can understand what's going on; the characters start to get killed one by one in off-screen scenes! So don't expect a serious slasher flick.

The locations weren't that bad, and actually, looked creepy at some points but the horrible cinematography ruins it all.

I found a VHS copy of this crap some time ago and I can only say that it serves for historic purposes only. Otherwise, I don't see the point of watching it.

I have to agree with the other reviews. And I LIKE bad horror. I especially get a kick out of bad 70's and 80's horror. I will take The Mutilator, Slaughterhouse Rock, or Don't Go In the House any day! Ever seen Inn of the Damned? Yeah, it's a piece of dung, but nowhere near as bad as this. This movie has no plot, little dialogue, awful pacing, just boring as hell. The whole movie is like a power-outage, all dark and lanterns, and NOT scary. I don't need things spoon-fed to me, but the movie does not explain anything! Where did any of the characters come from? Where is this set? Why is everyone a useless wuss... oh wait, I guess that applies to most horror. But seriously, I was eagerly awaiting all these folks to die just so it would be over. One of the most infuriatingly inane movies I have ever seen. Don't do it.

Scream (1981)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A group of people pay $100 each to take a raft down a river and spend the night at an old ghost town that was used during the gold rush. Pretty soon each of them is getting picked off so is the murdering someone from the group or an outsider?

There are two ways to look at low-budget filmmaking. You can praise it that sometimes the directors manage to make something special and they end up with a cult item on their hands. You can also bash it because the lack of money usually means there are going to be all sorts of problems with the production and the finished film. SCREAM was one of many slashers that were made after they started to make a ton of cash at the box office but sadly it's certainly not among the most memorable.

Going back to what I said, the biggest problem with SCREAM is the fact that it's obvious they didn't have enough money to do anything. I say that because all of the death scenes are either off screen or shot in a way that you really don't get to see any good stuff. The special effects are what made slashers so popular so when you're watching one without any good effects it almost seems pointless. Of course, gore wouldn't be needed if scares or some sort of tension was delivered instead but that doesn't happen either.

The performances certainly weren't the greatest but at the same time it was a nice group of characters and I thought they were entertaining. It's just too bad that there really wasn't anything around them. The mystery really isn't that interesting and in the end it's easy to see why SCREAM has pretty much been forgotten.

A low budget movie. Though this movie was released in 1982, it is definitely a very 1970's type movie.

'Scream', is supposed to be a thriller, but I didn't find it very thrilling. It lacked, in that the suspense lead-ups to the "scary parts" were exaggerated to a point where I lost interest, and the gory parts were very quick with minimal viewing. In my own personal opinion, if the viewers were given more clearly graphic scenes to wet their appetites, it might not have been such a bad or boring movie. Sorry, but I rate this movie from 1-10 as 1. "Awful".

Let's talk about wasted potential, shall we? Because Byron Quisenberry's "Scream" is one early '80s slasher that literally bulks with great potential and possibilities, yet it somehow ended up as one of the absolute worst genre films of the entire decade; - and that means quite a lot since we all know there was so much junk made in the eighties! Everything starts out promising, and the prologue sequences – with eerie and blood-soaked wooden marionettes of which the eyes spookily move – even had me wonder for a second that I encountered a genuine hidden horror gem. Subsequently, the setting and introduction of the characters are also very interesting. We meet a group of people on a rafting trip somewhere in Texas, and for once they're not horny teenagers on a camping trip or sorority sisters during a college initiation night, but fairly normal and middle-aged people. Unless I missed something, we never even find out what their connection is. Are they friends, colleagues or complete strangers that just individually signed up for a rafting trip? I think the latter, as I did the same thing once when I participated in a rafting trip on the Colorado River in the state of Utah. Anyway, night falls and the group sets up camp in a ghost town by the side of the river. You'd expect a tense and atmospheric slasher feast from here onwards, but this is where things start to go horribly wrong. There's a killer wandering about in the abandoned little town and the number of survivors quickly decreases, but as a viewer you actually haven't got the slightest idea what is going on. Everything is dark and blurry, the characters are unidentifiable and the murders either occur off-screen or in a dull and bloodless fashion. It's fairly obvious that the killer shouldn't be sought among the group members, but there's a lame attempt to link the murders to a kind of folklore myth about a vengeful sea captain. Or something like that, at least, I have to admit that I dozed off a couple of times already at this point in the movie. Fact remains that "Scream" has an intolerably slow pacing and severely lacks in the blood, gore and sleaze department. In the trivia section, there's a little anecdote that states: "Director Byron Quisenberry did not give his actors the ending to the script". Personally I think he didn't even have an ending for his script. In fact, he probably never even had a script to begin with