Scream Theater Double Feature – Volumes # 1 & 2

 

Picture: C-     Sound: C     Extras: D     Films: C- each

 

 

Continuing their new budget line of Cinema Pops feature films release, VCI Entertainment has issued the first two of what they hope will be a long series of B-movie double features called the Scream Theater Double Feature.  They are all bad films, but the first DVD offers films from the 1970s, while the second set comes from the late 1980s.  Though we are talking limited differences, the product from the 1970s on this level is always more interesting and believable than that beginning in the 1980s.

 

The first disc has Sisters Of Death (1978) and Scream Bloody Murder (1973), when such films were smarter and more fun.  They knew they were dumb and celebrated their cheapness as media was limited then and the audience could choose how seriously to take the events or not.  The camerawork is often better by default, as is the color, as the labs were more competitive, more numerous and the result was more color possibilities by default.  There was a great cycle of Horror and Thrillers led by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the many classics that followed.

 

The second disc offers The Last Slumber Party (1988) and Terror At Tenkiller  (1986), both hundredth-generation imitators of the tired post-Halloween reactionary slasher slice-and-dice cycle, which was already played out.  At this point, the look of bad hair bands, their worse music videos, and the 1980s XXX home video hardcore sex market as AIDS was arriving and they were still denying it.  If anything, these films are often just populist crap meant to degrade the audience, no matter how they are dressed up.  However, there are fans of these kinds of films, as some people just want to see bad genre films, so VCI is cashing in.

 

Sisters Of Death has a cult of girls finding a father of one of their own who was killed in a wacky ceremony wants to get revenge on them, who he blames for her death.  Scream Bloody Murder has a young boy who lost his hand go crazy and become a killer with a hook arm.  These films trivialized mental illness and physical disabilities in a way that was considered possible in the genre at the time, but a better educated public and more information on those subjects has negated some of that gray area.  The idiocy known as political correctness has targeted the rest of it.  That leaves the later films inexcusably reveling in a world of sewage, bankrupt of ideas, originality and any point.  A killer is simply on the loose in the later films and sexy girls, especially those who have sex, must die.  Yawn!

 

The films are all shown in 1.33 X 1 full frame images, but it is uncertain which ones are missing picture area and which are not.  The earlier ones may have been shot soft matte for 1.85 X 1 masking in drive-ins and theaters known for playing B films.  Nothing here is memorable, but despite bad editing, the earlier films offer some visual character the later films cannot match.  There are no extras, but what could anyone really say?

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo