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Scream
[Blu-ray 4K]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Dark Force Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (16th July 2023). |
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The Film
 A rafting tour along the Rio Grande stops at a ghost town and find themselves trapped there as a possibly supernatural presence starts picking them off one by one. That's really all there is to it. The film lacks the expected gore, sex, and nudity and its cast of characters is composed of believable-looking tourists rather than obnoxious teenagers who still manage to be mostly interchangeable despite displaying a diversity of dispositions including the crank (Superman II's Pepper Martin), his long-suffering wife (Going Berserk's Anne Bronston), her father (The Searchers' Hank Worden), a pair of bickering business partners (Green Acres' Alvy Moore and Zombies of Mora Tau's Gregg Palmer), fat comic relief Lou (Joe Allaine) and his bullying buddy Andy (Bob Macgonigal), a pair of potential final girls (Naked Campus' Julie Marine and Nancy St. Marie), and rugged guides (Big Jake's Ethan Wayne and Joseph Alvarado). There's a lot of standing around but there also seems to be a lack of coverage that renders most of the scenes in master shot and medium shot, with only a couple characters warranting a close-up; and there is a lot of added offscreen dialogue that seems to have been recorded later not because of the location conditions but because they did not script or improvise anything during the shoot. It appears as though the film will have a final boy rather than a final girl, but the sequences featuring the irritating Lou are played (unsuccessfully) for comedy rather than suspense. The film – helmed by veteran stunt man Byron Quisenberry (Enter the Devil) – genuinely does not seem to know whether it is a Ten Little Indians-esque slasher or a campfire ghost story; and, yet, it does manage to fitfully achieve an odd, detached atmosphere with its middle-of-nowhere location as a space trap that becomes almost surreal once a pair of bikers (Sudden Impact's John Nowak and Fury's Bobby Diamond) just show up – after we have been told that hiking out is impossible – and then Woody Strode (Once Upon a Time in the West) turns up on horseback to tell the survivors a story about the sea captain who founded the town. Although the film was released in 1981 and shot earlier, there is a somewhat The Shining-esque element in establishment of the killer as corporeal followed by a bookend coda of the film's only successfully atmospheric moment in the "the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker" pre-credits sequence. For the more seasoned horror viewer, Scream may be an interesting diversion coming as it did in the thick of the slasher cycle – it would not be surprising to learn that it was shot, or at least, started earlier like its ideal companion piece in the rafting body count film Savage Water.
Video
Originally titled "The Outing" – this title would prove more marketable later in the decade when distributors needed a new handle for the djinn slasher The Lamp (both films would retain their original titles in the U.K.) – Scream was given minor theatrical play in different regions by Aquarius Releasing and Cal-Com but gained most of its minor cult audience on VHS from Vestron as one of those titles that seemed to be gathering dust on every video store rental shelf. The film would not garner a digital release until 2010 from Media Blasters' Shriek Show line in a DVD that missed its manufacturing date but eventually found its way to retail, and the same anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen transfer was used a year later by Code Red as part of a "Maria's B-Movie Mayhem" double feature with Barn of the Naked Dead. In 2017, Code Red upgraded the film to Blu-ray with a new HD master that looked minutely sharper but also better-framed in those rare instances where there was some symmetry in the compositions; however, it was hard to come by since it was available directly from their site. In 2021, however, the film became more widely available as one of the Code Red titles distributed by Kino Lorber. Dark Force Entertainment's 2160p24 HEVC 1.85:1 widescreen UltraHD Blu-ray comes from a new 4K scan of the original 16mm camera negatives (the previous transfer came from the 35mm blow-up interpositive). On the commentary, Quisenberry reveals that the film was composed for 1.66:1 as a medium between TV cropping and 1.85:1 theatrical matting, and the new transfer reveals a sliver more picture on the right side and occasionally more on the top and bottom. Even without HDR, the new transfer may not blow the older ones out of the water but it does reveal more stable colors – particularly in scenes shot under more controlled lighting conditions like the opening prologue – a hair more texture in the wardrobe and the ghost town woodwork, as well as minute improvements in shadow detail (particularly during the night scenes where characters no longer steem to just pop out of flat shadows). Fans of the film will probably want to pick it up since it comes from a different film source than the DVDs and the Blu-ray, but it is not a substantial upgrade.
Audio
The sole audio option is an English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track, and it appears to be the same one used on the earlier transfers. There are some instances of damage but the track is clean enough for the listener to assess the patchwork mix of location dialogue and post-recorded dialogue in their uneven levels and varying background hiss. Foley effects during the suspense scenes are clean and forceful while the very early eighties television-esque score – indeed, composer Joseph Conlan spent the eighties going back and forth between exploitation like Kill Squad and television series like Airwolf – blankets over some of the rougher patches of the rest of the mix.
Extras
The back cover mentions the inclusion of the "Maria's "B" Movie Mayhem Mode" wraparounds and the theatrical trailer from the Code Red Blu-ray and Media Blasters DVD, but the only extra on the disc is the audio commentary by director Byron Quisenberry, moderated by Marc Edward Hueck and Code Red's Bill Olsen – the latter replacing filmmaker Scott Spiegel (Intruder) who participated on some other early Code Red commentaries but was a no-show for this one – who discusses his beginnings doing stuntwork in Texas before heading to Hollywood, his various stunt credits and filmmakers he has worked like L.Q. Jones (A Boy and His Dog) through which he met actors like Moore. He recalls getting the money together privately, the difficulty of getting Strode (who used to wrestle with Martin) who was a commodity at the time but decided to do the film because Quisenberry was a fan of John Wayne, getting the younger cast members from open casting calls, as well as working with Ethan Wayne here and later on Return of the Living Dead as stunt performers. He identifies cinematographer/co-producer Richard Pepin as the former half of eighties direct-to-video exploitation company PM Entertainment (Pepin-Merhi) on his first assignment. Quisenberry admits to not being a horror fan but wanting to direct a horror film; as such, he does not really engage with the moderators' promptings about film inspirations or similarities, or even Heuck's description of the film as "Waiting for Godot… to kill you."
Packaging
As mentioned above, the back cover has erroneous information about the extras.
Overall
For the more seasoned horror viewer, Scream may be an interesting diversion coming as it did in the thick of the slasher cycle while others may be surprised at a film with that title failing to deliver the most basic slasher elements.
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