Although I have not written down this tale before, some people are already aware of my journey with Night Screams, a title that I figured would be lost in the mists of time after I experienced it on VHS in my youth. A friend and I tented it from a local video store, when you could rent anything as long as you were a regular customer and the owner knew that you had the permission of a parent or guardian, and we settled down to watch it in the privacy of my room. It was, from memory, a film full of sex and death. But my mother didn’t want me to see too much of the sex. As the video recorder was in the living room, attached to my smaller TV by a lengthy cable pinned along the ceiling, my mother could keep an eye on what I was watching, and could do some fast-forward “censoring” in real time, to the crushing disappointment of my friend and I, who both felt old enough to enjoy some gratuitous nudity.
I always wondered about Night Screams, mainly curious to find out if it was as bad as I remembered. Because it wasn’t good, although the smattering of sex scenes might have helped. I didn’t expect to ever get to revisit it though. What strange and wonderful times we live in.
You have a typical slasher movie premise here. Some dangerous criminals are on the loose. A young man is about to have a party with some friends while his parents are out for the evening. Oh, and the young man has some issues of his own, making him just as much of a suspect as anyone else when the corpses start to pile up.
Directed by Allen Plone, making his debut feature (and, surprisingly, he helmed one or two more feature films after this) and written by Mitch Brian (who also did some more feature work after this) and Dillis L. Hart II (ahhhh, nothing else from them though), this is a late entry into the slasher sub-genre boom of the 1980s, not helped by the fact that it’s generally put together with very little competence. When the murders properly begin, they all take place within a mix of low lighting levels, clumsy framing, and unconvincing special effects. Are there one or two moments that rise above the awfulness? Yes, but that doesn’t mean they are any great shakes. They are just better than awful.
Speaking of awfulness, the cast don’t help much. Joseph Paul Manno is not a good lead, playing David, the young man who may have a dangerously short temper. Megan Wyss does a bit better as Joni, and I liked Janette Caldwell as Lisa, but nobody else is really worth mentioning. They’re not helped by a script that fails to let them have any decent characterization, and everyone is basically onscreen to up the bodycount.
As for the gratuitous nudity I sorely missed out on decades ago . . . there’s some, but not as much as I remember, and not enough to help make this easier to watch. The characters are shown once or twice watching some porn clips, allowing the film-makers to pad out the runtime slightly and potentially punctuate the dullness with some spice. It doesn’t work, but I can understand why my mother didn’t appreciate those clumsily-inserted moments.
There’s something more disheartening and disappointing about a very bad slasher movie. It shouldn’t be hard to deliver at least the familiar basics of the sub-genre. Although not the worst I have seen, considering the fact that it seemed to have enough of a budget to get some things right, this is a mess. Worst of all, it’s a mess that proves to be consistently dull from start to finish, despite the moments of sex and violence that the film-makers clearly thought would make it a hit with undemanding horror movie fans.
3/10
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