Death Screams (1982)

Death Screams (1982), part of the cycle of slasher movies that followed the success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), certainly gets off to a brisk start, with a pair of young lovers gorily murdered by an unseen assailant before even the opening titles have rolled.  Unfortunately, we then have to wait to virtually the end of the film before we get any more slasher action.  The rest of the intervening footage features the bland lives of a bunch of bland college age kids, (all played by actors who look to be at least in their thirties), in a bland small town, cross cut with the local sheriff's attempts to find the two missing young people we saw murdered before the titles.  Now, the fact that there is only one bizarre murder, (bow and arrow followed up with suffocation by plastic bag - on a fairground roundabout) and an offscreen slaying, between the opening and the climax, doesn't necessarily make for a bad slasher movie.  There are plenty of examples within the genre of successful movies with minimal murders.  So clearly, this sort of script structure can work. Provided, that is, that the film provides plenty of suspense and near misses in the intervals between murders, racking up the tension and building audience expectations.  Death Scream does have a few half-hearted attempts at suspense as the (still unseen - apart from their arm and machete) killer sort-of-stalks some of the girls around the town.  Which results only in a screen door being slashed.  Lots of details of small town life and relationships are established but, unfortunately, none of them are very interesting.  It can't even muster much in the way of sex and nudity, those other staples of the genre.  Ultimately, the film's early momentum is quickly dissipated, rapidly turning to tedium as we wait for something to happen.

The problem seems to lie with the choice of director.  While David Nelson already had an established directorial CV, mainly in TV, he had no track record when it came to slasher movies or even horror films in general.  Indeed, he was probably best known as an actor, having been, both in reality and on screen, one of 'Ozzie and Harriet's' sons in their long running TV show - he later directed numerous episodes of their later, seventies, show.  Which, perhaps, is why he seems more comfortable directing the small-town life and relationships scenes of Death Screams, which have the feel of a TV episode.  That said, the two main slasher sequences, which top and tail the film, are actually handled pretty well, with the finale seemingly trying to make up for the prior lack of slasher action by serving up a frenzied series of decapitations, slashings and dismemberments.  The final couple of minutes, however, border on farce, with the killer himself slashed with broken glass, before falling out a window and having his head, literally, blown off by the passing sheriff.  The script also somewhat short changes the audience with the reveal of the killer's identity, with an explanation for their motivation clumsily crammed into a brief flashback - we're given no real build up to the revelation, little in the way of clues as to their identity and an entirely underwhelming reveal.  Underwhelming is probably the best way of describing Death Screams overall.  It is too languidly paced to build up any tension, with production values at the level of a TV movie.  The characters are all interchangeable - it is extremely difficult to keep track of who is who, as they are all so poorly defined and poorly written, with utterly unmemorable dialogue that barely moves the plot along.  An overemphatic score tries to compensate for the film's inadequacies, but instead simply draws attention to them, being so completely at odds with what is happening on screen.  Not so much a bad movie, Death Screams simply lacks any impetus or sense of identity.