Screaming Dead

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.

A perverted photographer takes three models into a haunted mansion for his next big photo shoot. One thing leads to another and we see that this isn't your average photo shoot. The girls are locked in cellars and treated like prisoners, but soon the photographer realizes he's not the only perverted one in the house...

Gore could have saved this movie's final outcome. There were plenty of opportunities that left us feeling ripped off. There was a severed hand briefly, and a few horrible CGI cuttings. I don't understand why this company always uses lame CGI instead of putting their low budget into cheap "real" gore effects.

At least it stars Misty Mundae. This is the most redeeming value of the film.

The script was pretty weak, so that didn't help. Misty Mundae really isn't a bad actress...I think she has potential to do real horror if she ever wants to. Kevin G. Shinnick was the photographer -- he was also pretty good and understood his part pretty well. The other females were all typical bimboesque characters. None of them really had too many lines, and that was a good thing. Rob Monkiewicz played the cool guy trying to save all of the girls. He got on my nerves horribly throughout the entire movie. Not much to say -- typical shock-o-rama acting.

They're really learning how to make movies look pretty good without much of a budget. The film quality was great, the lighting was good, and the sets and props were great too. BUT this is shock-o-rama, therefore, there are horribly lame CGI effects instead of gore and bright red paint used as blood. The audio was pretty low and muffled as well. For every good aspect, there is also a bad one.

Final Thoughts: This was supposedly shock-o-rama's attempt at a real horror film. Though they are progressing nicely, butthis didn't cut it. Keep the actors, keep the directors, DUMP THE CGI EFFECTS. Get some nice "real" gore in here and we might get some really decent horror movies instead of this.

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:

SCREAMING DEAD is the story of a crazed photographer and his unsuspecting female subjects (aka: victims).

Filmed in an abandoned asylum, it has plenty of creepy atmosphere and dark places, including a hidden torture chamber.

Is it a masterwork of brilliant filmmaking? Um, no. However, it's fairly entertaining in its own schlock-tastic way. Plus, it has Misty Mundae in a semi-serious role, and a semi-scary ghoul at the end.

Recommended for followers of Director Brett Piper...

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.